We may as well talk about this issue now because there are things afoot, again, intended to affect voter turnout.

GOP Already at Work to Keep Obama Voters From the Polls

GOP-backed election laws in many states pose barriers to Obama's supporters.

Barack Obama's winning coalition in Iowa drew on new voters, students, minorities and poor people, according to polls and other snapshots of Iowa's Jan. 3 caucuses.


The new voters, particularly college students, defied former President Bill Clinton, his candidate wife Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Des Moines Register columnist David Yepsen, [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. to vote because, while legal, they apparently were not Iowan enough. Needless to say, these Obama supporters did not take heed.

But if Obama -- or any Democrat -- is going to repeat his higher-than-expected turnout in other states, their supporters may have to surmount significant new voting rights barriers as the campaign moves through the primaries and into the fall election.


That is because the new voters, young people, minorities and the poor who turned out for Obama in Iowa are the very voters targeted by numerous Republican-led "ballot security" laws that have been adopted across the country since 2004. While some of these laws have been overturned, they include tough new voter ID requirements, restrictions on registering voters and even penalties for helping people with absentee ballots.

"Any mobile population are the ones that are most affected by election laws," said David Rosenfeld, national program director for Student Public Interest Research Groups, which tracks student voting. "The most mobile populations are young people and poor people."


Student voting is a good example. The real barrier to student voting in 2008 is not admonitions from the Clintons. It is a patchwork of state laws, according to Rosenfeld, that discourage student voting. Arizona, for instance, rejects out-of-state driver's licenses as an acceptable voter ID.

The same is true in Indiana. New Hampshire requires students to register at local government offices. Virginia allows local election officials to decide if a dormitory qualifies as a "domicile." Some do, Rosenfeld said, and some do not. New Mexico restricts the number of voter registration forms one person may carry at a time. And Texas has new penalties for "improperly" helping people with absentee ballots.


Many of these laws -- particularly the voter ID laws and restrictions on registration drives -- have come into effect since the last presidential election. State legislatures, usually with Republican majorities, adopted the measures to combat "voter fraud," or what the GOP has said is people impersonating other voters for partisan benefit. What's notable about these laws is they affect an entire state electorate, while the problems provoking their adoption almost always concern a handful of individuals. That disparity has led many voting rights advocates to say these laws are meant to discourage Democratic voters.


Next week, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to one of the most strident of these laws, Indiana's photo ID requirement for voters. The case is seen as being the most important election law case since the court's decision awarding the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, because it either will codify a new generation of restrictive election laws or open up the voting process.

The stakes in the Indiana case are enormous for 2008. Voter registration groups like Project Vote, which seeks to register low-income people and will be working in 20 states this year, cite academic studies finding that if minorities voted as frequently as whites, 7.5 million more people would be voting for president next November.

Whether it is harder or easier for those people to vote, just as whether or not there is a candidate who motivates them, will be a major factor in selecting the next president. Indeed, as Obama's Iowa caucuses victory showed, a relatively open process and an inspirational candidate defied expectations with both turnout and the makeup of the electorate.
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[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link.

So while there is attention to supposed 'voter fraud' there seems to be little attention to Election Fraud..something that HAS happened in our country..

Yes,there was ample evidence of election fraud which was completely ignored . There has been little to no provable VOTER fraud except perhaps Ann the man Coulter ,

The most outrageous fact was the media suddenly saying that the exit polls were WRONG . We should remember that we called for new Elections in the Ukraine because the results differed from the Exit Polls . Of course the people in the Ukraine took to the streets in protest, unlike here where even the candidate who was robbed refused to fight the theft of Ohio . Something I will never understand.

The thing that disturbs me is that there is such a blatant conflict of interest when the person in charge of the election process is involved as the chairperson of one the candidates.

The next trick to watch out for is California's replacing the current winner take all system of selecting electors with a so called Fair Vote which would determine allocation based on Congressional Districts . This would ensure at least 40 Republican electors even if the Dems were to win .

This is being placed on the Primary ballot in hopes that with a low turnout it will win . Note that this is the same way the Republicans removed Grey Davis by recall. (Grey Davis was a political victim of the Enron energy scam) It should be further noted that they are NOT suggesting this type of arrangement for ANY other state such as Florida .

I don't know if they managed to get enough signatures to get the initiative on the ballot . I do know there were stories of the signature gatherers bribing the Homeless to sign the petition as they emerged from Shelters .

Now that my friends IS Voter Fraud.

There is a theory that the Attorney scandal was really about voter/election fraud..Rove and his cohorts busily packing the ballot box..it will come out in the end.

I have some hope that with a lot of oversight at the voting places, ridding ourselves of the Diebold machines and making necessary changes we just might be able to have an honest election again. That's hope, not certainty.

KJ

Starting a little early crying foul aren't we KJ? I mean let's let the general election take place before you start accusing shall we?


j-mac

__________________
"IT HAS been seen that the dangers incident to a representative democracy are of two kinds: danger of a low grade of intelligence in the representative body, and in the popular opinion which controls it; and danger of class legislation on the part of the numerical majority, these being all composed of the same class."

John Stuart Mill

KJ, did you write this entire article or did it appear somewhere else?

Our system is compromised....We need to address this NOW before the elections.

Can You Count on Voting Machines?


Jane Platten gestured, bleary-eyed, into the secure room filled with voting machines. It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 7, and she had been working for 22 hours straight. “I guess we’ve seen how technology can affect an election,” she said. The electronic voting machines in Cleveland were causing trouble again.

For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the Board of Elections office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. About 200,000 voters had trooped out on the first Tuesday in November for the lightly attended local elections, tapping their choices onto the county’s 5,729 touch-screen voting machines. The elections staff had collected electronic copies of the votes on memory cards and taken them to the main office, where dozens of workers inside a secure, glass-encased room fed them into the “GEMS server,” a gleaming silver [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. desktop computer that tallies the votes.


Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes. Cuyahoga County technicians clustered around the computer, debating what to do. A young, business-suited employee from Diebold — the company that makes the voting machines used in Cuyahoga — peered into the screen and pecked at the keyboard. No one could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It started working — until an hour later, when it crashed a second time. Again, they rebooted. By the wee hours, the server mystery still hadn’t been solved.


Worse was yet to come. When the votes were finally tallied the next day, 10 races were so close that they needed to be recounted. But when Platten went to retrieve paper copies of each vote — generated by the Diebold machines as they worked — she discovered that so many printers had jammed that 20 percent of the machines involved in the recounted races lacked paper copies of some of the votes. They weren’t lost, technically speaking; Platten could hit “print” and a machine would generate a replacement copy. But she had no way of proving that these replacements were, indeed, what the voters had voted. She could only hope the machines had worked correctly.


As the primaries start in New Hampshire this week and roll on through the next few months, the erratic behavior of voting technology will once again find itself under a microscope. In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices “flip” from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish. (In the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 — even though he’s pretty sure he voted for himself.) Most famously, in the November 2006 Congressional election in Sarasota, Fla., touch-screen machines recorded an 18,000-person “undervote” for a race decided by fewer than 400 votes.


The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government. One by one, states are renouncing the use of touch-screen voting machines. California and Florida decided to get rid of their electronic voting machines last spring, and last month, Colorado decertified about half of its touch-screen devices. Also last month, Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, released a report in the wake of the Cuyahoga crashes arguing that touch-screens “may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.” She was so worried she is now forcing Cuyahoga to scrap its touch-screen machines and go back to paper-based voting — before the Ohio primary, scheduled for March 4. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat of Florida, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, have even sponsored a bill that would ban the use of touch-screen machines across the country by 2012.


It’s difficult to say how often votes have genuinely gone astray. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. who has examined voting-machine systems for more than 25 years, estimates that about 10 percent of the touch-screen machines “fail” in each election. “In general, those failures result in the loss of zero or one vote,” he told me. “But they’re very disturbing to the public.”


Indeed, in a more sanguine political environment, this level of error might be considered acceptable. But in today’s highly partisan and divided country, elections can be decided by unusually slim margins — and are often bitterly contested. The mistrust of touch-screen machines is thus equal parts technological and ideological. “A tiny number of votes can have a huge impact, so machines are part of the era of sweaty palms,” says Doug Chapin, the director of [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. , a nonpartisan group that monitors voting reform. Critics have spent years fretting over corruption and the specter of partisan hackers throwing an election. But the real problem may simply be inherent in the nature of computers: they can be precise but also capricious, prone to malfunctions we simply can’t anticipate.


During this year’s presidential primaries, roughly one-third of all votes will be cast on touch-screen machines. (New Hampshire voters are not in this group; they will vote on paper ballots, some of which are counted in optical scanners.) The same ratio is expected to hold when Americans choose their president in the fall. It is a very large chunk of the electorate. So what scares election observers is this: What happens if the next presidential election is extremely close and decided by a handful of votes cast on machines that crashed? Will voters accept a presidency decided by ballots that weren’t backed up on paper and existed only on a computer drive? And what if they don’t?


“The issue for me is the unknown,” Platten told me when we first spoke on the phone, back in October. “There’s always the unknown factor. Something — something — happens every election.”

NEW VOTING TECHNOLOGIES tend to emerge out of crises of confidence.


We change systems only rarely and in response to a public anxiety that electoral results can no longer be trusted. America voted on paper in the 19th century, until ballot-box stuffing — and inept poll workers who lost bags of votes — led many to abandon that system. Some elections officials next adopted lever machines, which record each vote mechanically. But lever machines have problems of their own, not least that they make meaningful recounts impossible because they do not preserve each individual vote. Beginning in the 1960s they were widely replaced by punch-card systems, in which voters knock holes in ballots, and the ballots can be stored for a recount. Punch cards worked for decades without controversy.


Until, of course, the electoral fiasco of 2000. During the Florida recount in the Bush-Gore election, it became clear that punch cards had a potentially tragic flaw: “hanging chads.” Thousands of voters failed to punch a hole clean through the ballot, turning the recount into a torturous argument over “voter intent.” On top of that, many voters confused by the infamous “butterfly ballot” seem to have mistakenly picked the wrong candidate. Given Bush’s microscopic margin of victory — he was ahead by only a few hundred votes statewide — the chads produced the brutal, monthlong legal brawl over how and whether the recounts should be conducted.


The 2000 election illustrated the cardinal rule of voting systems: if they produce ambiguous results, they are doomed to suspicion. The election is never settled in the mind of the public. To this date, many Gore supporters refuse to accept the legitimacy of [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. ’s presidency; and by ultimately deciding the 2000 presidential election, the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link. was pilloried for appearing overly partisan.


Many worried that another similar trauma would do irreparable harm to the electoral system. So in 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which gave incentives to replace punch-card machines and lever machines and authorized $3.9 billion for states to buy new technology, among other things. At the time, the four main vendors of voting machines — Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and Hart — were aggressively marketing their new touch-screen machines. Computers seemed like the perfect answer to the hanging chad. Touch-screen machines would be clear and legible, unlike the nightmarishly unreadable “butterfly ballot.” The results could be tabulated very quickly after the polls closed. And best of all, the vote totals would be conclusive, since the votes would be stored in crisp digital memory. (Touch-screen machines were also promoted as a way to allow the blind or paralyzed to vote, via audio prompts and puff tubes. This became a powerful incentive, because, at the behest of groups representing the disabled, HAVA required each poll station to have at least one “accessible” machine.)


HAVA offered no assistance or guidelines as to what type of machine to buy, and local elections officials did not have many resources to investigate the choices; indeed, theirs are some of most neglected and understaffed offices around, because who pays attention to electoral technology between campaigns? As touch-screen vendors lobbied elections boards, the machines took on an air of inevitability. For elections directors terrified of presiding over “the next Florida,” the cool digital precision of touch-screens seemed like the perfect antidote.
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[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This Truck Forum Link.

KJ

KJ, you should be making it clear what are YOUR comments and what is someone else's material.

No I put the link in for the article..

KJ

I thought I did...I'll see if I can highlight and make it more clear...there is a link under the article with ~snip~ where it's clipped usually...up until now it hasn't been a problem...these are longer than what I usually post, maybe that's the problem you're having.

I edited to make it easier for you.

KJ

Now Jane, forgive me. But a couple of articles from liberal sourcing, not even considering the election fraud that stems from the Demo side of the isle is hardly objective. If there is true suspicion lets by all means investigate, but for God's sake, try and find this in something other than the hack liberal site "alternet"......That site is for conspiracy nutjobs.


j-mac

__________________
"IT HAS been seen that the dangers incident to a representative democracy are of two kinds: danger of a low grade of intelligence in the representative body, and in the popular opinion which controls it; and danger of class legislation on the part of the numerical majority, these being all composed of the same class."

John Stuart Mill

1) Voter ID...even if you don't have a drivers license...a state issued ID with a picture on it should suffice. This cuts down on the "Grave yard" ballot that supposedly got JFK elected in Illinois. Likewise...having bipartisan oversight with concern to ID matching and a requirement of actually having your voter registration with you cuts down a lot of problems. In Texas at my local polling place..(The school down the road) You hand your ID and voter registration to the workers. One verifies your registration and ID to ensure the names match and it's really you...Looks at your picture ID. It's then passed to the second person at the table who does the same thing...then you're checked off the list of registered voters. You then proceed into the voting area. This also cut's down on the multiple voting so prevalent in some places. You also have to vote at your designated polling place...not just anywhere you choose that might be more convenient.

If you don't pass the scrutiny of the polling workers...you don't get to vote. This could be from a lack of ID or voter registration card.

It's kinda simple here...effective too. If you're not prepared, you just don't get to vote.

2) For students in an out of state school...Absentee voting is the way to go. Works for service men and women that aren't stationed in their home state. Nuff said.

3) Help with voting????? Does this mean someone else has to fill out the forms or read it to them??? It should be a requirement to be able to at least read the ballot before voting if that's the case...likewise to be able to fill out the forms.

Having someone "Help" with voting is opening a huge door for possible voting fraud. That's the idea of voting in an election. Your vote is yours and yours alone. It's supposed to be a secret ballot. Getting help with it kinda negates the process now doesn't it????

Exit polls aren't an effective way to predict the outcome of an election. They should be done away with and when ALL the results are totalled...we should be informed of who won...NOT BEFORE. If that means waiting till the next day or even the day after...so be it.

Newspukes...shouldn't be anywhere close to an election for the same reason as above. What they say on national TV or radio could have an impact on voter turnout in a different time zone.

As far as ballot confusion we've heard of in the past few elections(hanging chads and butterfly ballots)...I will say that if a voter isn't smart enough to figure out who is on the ballot or isn't smart enough to read the entire ballot before voting and mark it properly...maybe their vote should be invalid. Likewise if they're unable or unwilling to ensure they've done it correctly the first time, maybe their vote should be invalid as well.

Ask questions first so as to ensure there's no problem after the fact.

After the fact is too late...your vote has already been cast. There's no taking it back.

__________________
Big Red



Freedom wasn't won with a registered gun.

Red those are good poits. The ID thing is great. But I can almost tell you what she will come back with. It will supress the poor vote. Some poor people don't have ID. Now I always thought that was a poor arguement. In my district all I have to do is walk in and give them my name. They don't check my ID. That has always bothered me. I don't even have a voter registration card and never have. Now as far as students. She will argue that they are residents of the district that they attend school in so they shouldn't have to vote absentee. As far as being able to read. She will come back with something about the old Jim Crow laws in the south. Again part of suppressing the poor minority vote. Personally I think one should have to pass a civics test to prove they know what they are doing. But that would be suppressing the ignorant vote.