Troops missing out on the vote?

Kudos to the McCain campaign for noticing that some areas in Virginia didn’t send out their absentee ballots to the US troops overseas in time for them to vote.

Considering that the troops donated more to Obama than McCain, I’m not sure that’ll help McCain, but you never know.

Newest voter caging: Signature didn’t match!

Seriously – this is how desperate people are to deny others the vote? One Mr. Kinsley of Seattle almost didnt’ get to vote because his signature didn’t match what was on the voter rolls. Of course, the fact that Mr. Kinsley has Parkinson’s disease that causes muscles shakes has *nothing* to do with it.

Now it’s just getting stupid. Well, stupider.

Boehner: Wah, my trumped up voter fraud charges are ignored!

I love how people can’t tell the difference between voter registration fraud, voter fraud, and voter caging.

Voter Registration Fraud: When you fill out a voting registration form for someone that doesn’t exist, or to purposely change information (like registering someone that’s a Democrat as a Republican).
Voter Fraud: When you vote without having the legal right to do so, or vote multiple times in one election under names that are not your own.
Voter Caging: When you rig voter eligibility requirements so that valid voters have to either go through extra unnecessary steps, or are prevented from voting at all.

John Boehner (R-Ohio) is complaining about a recent decision by the Justice Department not to investigate accusations of voter registration fraud – a call made by the Bush administration, and rejected by the Justice department because of lack of evidence of widespread, systematic voter registration fraud.

Now Boehner’s got his panties in a knot because charges that so far have proven unfounded, because voter caging efforts in Ohio are failing and people are actually being given the right to vote, and because Boehner’s realizing that this time, vote suppression efforts aren’t working.

Yeah, sorry about that.

Bitch.

People fighting voter caging

Four years ago, people were just sitting on their hands while long lines dominated the elections, people were purged from voter rolls, and electronic voting machines shut down.

This time, though, people are fighting back and demanding their vote back. You have poll workers in Florida who are refusing to issue provisional ballots for voters who have their voting rights challenged, and instead let them vote. The state of Florida had required that if a registered voter is flagged as a problem – perhaps there’s a typo on their application, or their address is off by a single digit, then that voter would have to be given a provisional ballot, then told to prove their elegability to vote by faxing the proper documents to the election register’s office.

Instead, voting poll workers are simply allowing these people to vote, because they know that putting an extra onus on voters is inconvienient, and provisional ballots are less likely to be counted.

Then you have Ohio. Originally, up to 200,000 voters in Ohio could have their right to vote stricken based on Republican challenges. However, the Supreme Court ruled that no one could challenge a voter’s right to vote except for the Ohio voting office. So what did the Bush administration do? Tell the Justice Department to look into it. Good news: the Justice Department is telling the Bush administration to fuck off, because they’re not going to do their dirty work in voter caging.

In Pennsylvania, the state voting office had decided to only allow paper ballots if 100% of the electronic voting machines failed. So if you have a 4 hour line outside, and just 1 working electronic voting machine – too bad, you have to sit and wait. Now a PA judge has ruled that if so much as 50% of electronic voting machines fail, then paper ballots must be used.

Personally, I’m hoping there’s a lot of people “accidentally” spilling coffee onto those voting machines. Not that I’d encourage vandalism, mind you.

Across every state, voters are fighting now to make sure their votes can be heard. Now, it’s just up to people to go vote.

PA court 50% thing

Surprise – voter caging rules may mean vets can’t vote

When some states (like my own Florida) announced they were going to discard voter registration ballots that didn’t meet certain requirements – like not having any typos, or needing a photo ID, it seems that they forgot to see if it would keep our overseas troops from being able to vote:

A part of the problem is that each state has its own rules for absentee voting, and those rules can change in the middle of an election season.

In Virginia, for example, the federal write-in ballot required a witness’ signature and address. That proved confusing for soldiers overseas because there was no box provided for a witness address.

Rokey Suleman, the Fairfax County registrar, initially said he would have to discard 63 votes because voters neglected to provide a witness address.

Are you kidding me? The people who are dying to defend their fellow citizens might be able to vote because some asshat decided to make it harder to vote?

Today’s voter fraud watch – fake voting notices

I believe there is a special place in Hell (if it exists) for liars. If I recall, Dante placed lying as a lower, more painful level of Hell than most others, and I don’t blame him.

Which is why I think that people who send out fake voting notices to send people to the wrong place, the wrong time, or even the wrong date can have the level of Hell that is full of nothing but paper cuts and lemon juice.

What kind of a person does that? What, you think your ideas are so weak and pathetic, you can’t win an honest election – so you have to cheat? Take people off of the voter roles because they’ve been foreclosed upon, or because there was a typo in their application, or because their name is “similar” to a convicted felons? You can’t win honestly, so you have to lie about when and where voting is in the hopes that only the “right kind of people” actually get to vote?

Is there any shame left in the hearts of people that would do that?

Wait – if you’re “likely to vote” for Obama, your vote shouldn’t count?

What the hell kind of explanation is this:

“This office has received notification from the state of Georgia indicating that you are not a citizen of the United States and therefore, not eligible to vote,” a letter from the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections said.
But Berry is a U.S. citizen, born in Boston, Massachusetts. She has a passport and a birth certificate to prove it.
The letter, which was dated October 2, gave her a week from the time it was dated to prove her citizenship. There was a problem, though — the letter was postmarked October 9.

Wait – let me get this straight. You’re sent a “if you don’t reply to this letter in one week you won’t get to vote” – and the letter is sent a week after its dated?

WTF? It’s like they’re not even bothering to appear competent in ripping away your right to vote.

You want absentee ballots? Whoops.

Sequoia voting systems forgot to mail out some 11,000 absensee ballots to voters.

Even worse, Sequoia originally lied and said “Oh, sure – we mailed them out” when originally asked.

Hm. Yeah.

Those electronic voting machines? Hacked.

This is the most horrifying thing regarding voting I’ve seen yet. A hacker admitting that it’s not only possible to hack electronic voting machines, but that a program was written with the power to hack voting machines without being traced – and the Ohio election may have been hacked after all.

How awful do you have to be to want to shut down voter booths?

Another sign of Horrible Awful People (HALs) – lawyers for the GOP in Indiana are trying to get early voting sites because of fear of voter fraud.

This, even though:

• You have to have an official photo ID to vote.
• The only polling booths that are targeted are in predominately African-American neighborhoods.
• And there’s no evidence of voter fraud – just their suspicion there may be.

Here’s probably the worst part:

LaSota assured the judge that the elections board staff ensures voters are registered and don’t vote more than once.

When Kavadias-Schneider asked, “What of those who have already voted?” R. Lawrence Steele, a GOP lawyer, replied, “Maybe those votes should be discarded.”

Wait – so if people showed up to the early voting booths, and the judge decided to just shut them down – the GOP lawyer wanted the votes to be just thrown away?

Luckily, the judge has denied the request, and will allow the nearly 300,000 registered voters to vote after all.

In the meantime, the GOP lawyers who filed the lawsuit are still HALs.