From Jim Gilliam's blog archives
Tired: Tort Reform ... Wired: Electoral Tort Reform

September 27, 2004 11:22 PM

AP has a list of potential voting problems in battleground states. The heat is turning up on voting shenanigans popping up all over the country:

Florida (27): Voter intimidation of blacks, and a new felon purge list remarkably devoid of hispanics (80% of Cubans vote R).

Ohio (20): Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell issued a directive requiring people to show up at the right polling place. Democrats have sued. And a battle is brewing over whether the state will notify felons on parole of their right to vote.

Lousiana (9): Broken and late voting machines during the gay marriage referendum prevented roughly 11% of people from voting.

California (55): Counties are struggling with e-voting machines all over the state -- none of which will print paper receipts this election. Meanwhile, the guy in charge of the elections, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, is embroiled in numerous scandals with the spectre of impeachment looming near.

Colorado (9): A referendum on the Nov. 2nd ballot would divvy up the state's 9 electoral votes based on the popular vote, instead of the standard winner-takes-all. If this passes, and the election is tight, this would become a likely legal battleground.

South Carolina (8): Lawsuits are flying as a result of widespread voter fraud in the June 8th Democratic State Senate primary.

Arizona (10): A local Fox affiliate intimidated college kids registering to vote claiming they would face jail time because they were only temporary residents, but Arizona law requires someone live in the state for only 29 days before voting.

And Bev Harris at Black Box Voting demonstrated that even a chimp could erase a Diebold voting machine audit trail.

I'm sure there are many more.

More from the archive in Corruption, Elections.

Tired: Tort Reform ... Wired: Electoral Tort Reform (09.27.2004)

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Read the 3 comments.

raging red:

The most notable addition to the list is that Ohio's Secretary of State has rejected thousands of voter registration cards because the paper is not of the correct weight. He waited until just days before the registration deadline to take this action.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/27/112229/106

It appears that this violates the Federal Voting Rights Act, which prohibits denying the right to vote for immaterial errors in registration forms.

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_09_26_atrios_archive.html#109632246737177814

Tue Sep 28 2004 3:33 AM


dhermesc:

Surprised by the balance in your reporting.

Splitting the Colorado electorial votes is an attempt to give Kerry 3 or 4 electorial votes. The democrats there are well aware that this measure would have given Gore the 2000 election and that Bush is going to take Colorado in 2004.

Sounds like Ohio needs to find a new Sec of State.

Tue Sep 28 2004 6:48 AM


Anonymous:

This is rich, claiming election fraud before the election even occurs. With the likes of James Carter's revisionist view being applied while attempting to secure a place in history books as opposed to the hardest question in Trivial Pursuit, we will eventually find that he actually won the 1980 election. Proof to be faxed from a Kinkos in Texas and soon to be announced on CBS.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report on the 2000 Presidential election in Florida that found no evidence of voter intimidation, no evidence of voter harassment, and no evidence of intentional or systematic disenfranchisement of black voters.

Somehow the same commission found that blacks where nearly ten time as likely to make mistakes and spoil their ballot as whites, which is incredible statistic to arrive at considering the ballot doesn't list race. The commission also found that in 24 of the 25 Florida counties with the highest ballot toss rate, the county election supervisor was a Democrat. In the 25th county, the election supervisor was an Independent.

The Miami Herald found that whites were twice as likely to be incorrectly placed on the much maligned and quoted felon purge list as black.

Wed Sep 29 2004 9:01 AM


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