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Journal rdewald's Journal: 11/02/2004 - Protect the Vote 32

Journal by rdewald

Sadly, it looks like it is not going to be a question of *if* there are going to be efforts to disrupt a free and fair election in the USA on Tuesday, but rather *where.* It has already started. The same people who did this in 2000, they same folks who wanted to stop the vote counting and appoint a winner in 2000, the same people who, using your tax dollars (what's left of them anyway), to do this in 2002, again want to intimidate and interfere with the turn-out 11/02/2004. They're scared, which means they'll get desperate, which means they'll do anything.

What can you do? Well, vote and know your rights. I have prepared a pdf flyer that will print in landscape orientation with the phone number for the election protection coalition. Print it out, put it up at work, at school, at church, at the bus stop, in the window of your car, in the window at your home, in the window at your office, please. If one voter who is having a problem sees this and gets the problem handled so that they can vote, even on a provisional ballot, you've given someone a voice that might not have had one.

Here's the latest shenanigans that I can find, if you need to be convinced that printing out and putting up a flyer is worth the effort:

  • Hard to believe, but Jim Crow lives. For those of you young, fortunate and white enough to not know what Jim Crow means, this will help.
  • The Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights, an organization created by President Kennedy, reminds us that the history of voting shenanigans isn't confined to the 2000 election and the state of Florida.
  • Arizona public schools, the polling places, are using the Chechen tragedy as an excuse to illegally monitor voters at the polls, creating confusion and the mistaken impression that the school can require voters to sign-in or present ID to vote.
  • In Florida, operatives are going door to door to identify Kerry supporters and subsequently deceive them into thinking they have voted when they haven't.
  • Ken Blackwell, the state official in charge of the Ohio elections board, is also the chair of Bush Cheney '04 for the state. He's been trying to disenfranchise voters. So far, the court system has been thwarting him, but he's not deterred, there's still plenty of time.
  • The letters of intimidation are already going out to likely Kerry voters in Plainsville, near Cleveland. Here's a jpeg of the letter.
  • In black neighborhoods in Milwaukee, this flyer has been showing up. But, that's not enough, there's this plan, too.
  • The Minnesota Secretary of State tried unsuccessfully to prevent Native Americans from using tribal ID's to vote off the res. The ACLU intervened and got a TRO.

Another thing you can do is take your video camera with you to the polls. If you capture video of voter intimidation, upload it to Video Vote Vigil dot org. They claim to have procured enough server capacity and bandwidth to take a high volume of video clips on election day.

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11/02/2004 - Protect the Vote More

11/02/2004 - Protect the Vote

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  • It's just so patently absurd, that I can't help do anything but laugh one of those mirthless laughs that you get when the situation is so pathetically unreal that there's no other reaction in the gamut of human expression to use.... that "flyer" appearing in black neighborhoods is so horribly pathetic, it's not even spellchecked.

    It's ridiculous how far some people will go to "win". It really is....

  • That Milwaukee flyer is really, really bad. Who exactly is responsible for that?
    • We'll never know. My suspicion is it is some redneck idiot that doesn't have anything to do with any campaign or candidate. One of the problems with news coverage of this stuff is it give people ideas, but that's just something we have to accept. It is more important to get the truth out and help people who need it.

      I live in Harlem, I can tell you there aren't a lot of people in my hood that wouldn't immediately see through that flyer. It's just indicative of what people are willing to try to do. Prob
  • Read on Kos that one of the posters is going to be giving out cards with somebody's number (truevote?) along with the Halloween candy. Might be a plan.
  • Arizona public schools, the polling places, are using the Chechen tragedy as an excuse to illegally monitor voters at the polls, creating confusion and the mistaken impression that the school can require voters to sign-in or present ID to vote.

    So....I understand that perhaps Arizona law doesn't require ID's, but in general why is it that people are so dead set against having to present ID's? There's enough identity fraud in any typical bar section of town WITH ID's every Friday and Saturday, why does anyo

    • It's a slippery slope. It used to be that in order to vote in the South, if your skin was unacceptably dark, you had to recite the names of all 435 Representatives and the 100 Senators. If you got one wrong, or couldn't remember one, you couldn't vote.

      That's an extreme example, but the idea of local officials qualifying voters are the polls is a bit distasteful.

      I am deep in the bowels of the Democratic party. I participate at the local and national levels of the Kerry campaign. I know their strategies
      • It's a slippery slope. It used to be that in order to vote in the South, if your skin was unacceptably dark, you had to recite the names of all 435 Representatives and the 100 Senators. If you got one wrong, or couldn't remember one, you couldn't vote.

        It seems to me that if that's considered part of this slippery slope, that we've been slipping the other way for quite a long time. ;-)

        There has never been a whiff of any assertion that could remotely be interpreted as even winking assent to the notion that

      • That's an extreme example, but the idea of local officials qualifying voters are the polls is a bit distasteful.

        No one is "qualifying" anyone!! It is an ID. There is no grey area, no possible room for personal racism to enter the picture.

        "May I see some ID Mr. Smith before you get your ballot?"

        "Um yeah, here is my driver license."

        "OK, good. It says Mr. Smith. Here is your ballot. Thanks for voting"

        What the hell is wrong with that?

        Anything more has the inevitable effect of robbing some people, pe

        • "May I see some ID Mr. Smith before you get your beer?"

          "Um yeah, here is my driver license."

          "OK, good. It says Mr. Smith, age 21. Here is your beer. Enjoy the club."

          ...

          There are these things, called fake IDs; perhaps you've heard of them? Some states' are easy to make, some are harder. Every single one of them can be duped. If you're going to institute useless criteria to vote, just skip to the end and institute a Poll Tax, Vote Quiz, and roadblocks & body cavity searches for all non-white voters.

          • "If you're going to do something that I can argue has no impact on your ability to vote, then go ahead and do things that do have that impact."

            Huh?

          • So you argue that an ineffective measure is as bad as physical body searches? Your use of reductio-ad absurdum does not fit this case.

            Do you consider any measure that can reduce the amount of voter fraud, a good thing? Or will you only consider a measure that will eliminate all voter fraud, and anything short of that is not acceptable as an intermediate step?

            jason
      • I am deep in the bowels of the Republican party. I participate at the local and national levels of the Bush campaign. I know their strategies, I know their fears, I know what they plan to do on Monday. There has never been a whiff of any assertion that could remotely be interpreted as even winking assent to the notion that doing anything other than giving each citizen one opportunity to cast one vote is desirable. If genuine voter fraud is attempted and anyone at the RNC or BC04 were to know of it, the pros
        • You know what, Pudge? I think it's likely I don't have a problem with you (other than you can't argue a point without resorting to personal attack, I wish you could just accept that people don't have to agree with you to be telling the truth as they see it). I know well that there are legions of good people in the GOP. There are the people in the trenches just like you and I, on the phone banks, licking stamps and sealing envelopes, with whom I have no problem other than I think that government has a dif
          • you can't argue a point without resorting to personal attack

            If you spout bullshit, I am gonna call bullshit. If you think saying you are "full of it" is a personal attack, well, that sucks, I guess. I think your nonsensical claim that the GOP doesn't want every vote to be counted is worse than a personal attack, as it is falsely impugning your opponent, deceiving people into voting against them.

            My feeling is that a significant number of these good folks who generally vote Republican are not planning t
            • Since you entirely ignored my effort to connect, I'll just answer the last of your polemic with a fact.

              Remember the web site that Cheney asked people to go to to check his relationship with Halliburton? Well, the one he meant?

              The NRA Lies [factcheck.org]. It's not the first time, either.
              • Since you entirely ignored my effort to connect, I'll just answer the last of your polemic with a fact.

                A fact would be nice, yes.

                I do not connect by being nice, I connect by having a reasonable discussion, and you were being exceptionally unreasonable. It's more than a bit specious for you to claim the high road while you make entirely unsubstantiated claims about the Bush campaign and say I always make personal attacks.

                Remember the web site that Cheney asked people to go to to check his relationship

  • I'm being repressed! Come see the violence inherent in the system! Violence inherent in the system!

    Meh. Considering that claiming voter intimidation is part of the democratic party's agenda [drudgereport.com] for the election, even if none exists, forgive me for not getting overly upset.

    • Thanks for the linkage.

      This page, which I've never seen, is pretty typical media-handling tactics these days, which is sad. It's something which I don't get involved in at all, and an activity which I think KE04 has badly stumbled multiple times during the campaign. This is why I want people like Terry McAuliffe out of politics. The only time I was in a room with him I crossed to the other side to avoid having to shake hands with him.

      In any case, there's nothing here that directs anyone to interfere wi

      • I guess my point was, keep in mind when you hear the stories of voter intimidation and other evil acts by the republicans that it's very possible that it is the democratic party spin machine at work. I'm not saying that it's something unique to the democrats, nor that all cases are false. Just something to keep in mind.

        From the articles you posted, with letters and bulletins etc, it seems to me that it's about on par with this. Voters weren't prohibited with force from voting, they were fed lies in an att

      • That's wrong, but it doesn't disenfranchise any voters

        I would consider myself disenfranchised if my votes (and everyone at my polling place) were eliminated because somone with a richer PAC or 527 sued to have my votes eliminated. That would be some pretty friggin big disenfranchisement.

        jason
  • Arizona public schools, the polling places, are using the Chechen tragedy as an excuse to illegally monitor voters at the polls, creating confusion and the mistaken impression that the school can require voters to sign-in or present ID to vote.

    Why is showing an ID at a school a bad thing? Anyone that visits a school should have to show ID. Period. It doesn't matter if you are voting or not. You are visiting a place where many children a kept, and not checking ID's, in my opinion, is a failure. I woul
    • It amazing to me. It's called "Freedom," Rob. People who are willing to sacrifice freedom for security usually end up with neither. Read the constitution and the declaration of independence. These are the things I believe in.

      By the way, you'll note, if you do this, that there is no right to vote in the constitution, yet I hear GOP lawyers ranting all the time that all they want to protect is the "constitutionally-protected right to vote." Of course, if they had paid more attention in law school they w
  • Puh-leeze.

    Give it a rest.

    In Ohio efforts were being made to remove 35,000 voters from the roles because the registration cards were returned as undeliverable. That means that the people don't live there any more which means that it's illegal for them to vote based on that information.

    I find it amazing that enforcing the laws is suddenly considered vote suppression.

    Of course you can point to all the proven allegations from Florida of 2000 to show have evil those Republicans are, can't you?

    Or can you?
    • Some number of those pieces of mail from the RNC were returned because people refused delivery, because they had solicited nothing and wanted nothing from the RNC. It's a straw man, put up by a desperate soon-to-be second-time loser running for national office.
    • Please don't be blinded by the fact that all these examples are partisan. Our nation isn't perfect. People do exist who think the ends justify the means and that preventing some people from voting is justifiable if their candidate of choice gets elected. The real point to get here is not that Republicans are evil and Democrats repressed. It is that voter fraud and suppression are occurring -- and the only way to deal with it is to make sure you personally vote. If you don't have to deal with any of thi
  • If you can convince someone they have voted when they haven't, that would lead me to think they are not intelligent enough to be involved in the election anyway. It doesn't speak well of a candidate to show that people who would decide to vote for him are not intelligent enough to realize they haven't already voted.

    Don't think Democrats aren't doing things like this as well. But, of course I'd say that, I'm "the enemy".

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