Hullabaloo

Thursday, October 23, 2008

 
They Don't Want You To Vote

by dday

Josh Marshall found this gem from a news item about the early voting sites in the heavily African-American Lake County in Indiana:

CROWN POINT, Ind. (AP) — A judge weighing whether to close down early voting sites in Lake County’s Democratic strongholds questioned local officials about the absentee voting process during visits to the disputed sites.

Lake County Superior Court Judge Diane Kavadias-Schneider toured the Gary, Hammond and East Chicago satellite voting sites Monday and heard hours of testimony and arguments on whether they are legal and fair.

Republicans want to shut down the centers in the largely Democratic county on the grounds that they will increase the likelihood of vote fraud in the Nov. 4 election.

Kavadias-Schneider, who was appointed a special judge in the case by the Indiana Supreme Court, questioned county elections board director Sally LaSota on Monday about the process of early voting and safeguards against vote fraud.

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.”

And well, there you have it. For decades this has essentially been the Republican strategy, since they can't run the country the way they'd like with all these pesky voters running around. From 1980 when Paul Weyrich famously said "I don't want everybody to vote...our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up, as the voting populace goes down, right up until today.

So this is, ultimately, why the right is making ACORN famous, calling for defunding and investigations and the like. It's to cover their real agenda of trying to disenfranchise voters. It's been the GOP ground game for a long time. And every time you think you've got it tamped down, it rises up somewhere else. Particularly slippery this year has been the "lose your house, lose your vote" effort to use foreclosure lists to challenge voters. Even after it was revealed and part of a lawsuit in Michigan, where the GOP was forced to surrender its effort, it has popped back up around the country. This is in Volusia County, Florida:

Thanks to a new law passed by the Florida Legislature, she explained, groups interested in challenging voters now may do so up to 30 days before an election.

Once a voter's right to cast a ballot is challenged, McFall's office must attempt to notify the voter, and must flag the voter's name in the statewide database.

If the problem can't be straightened out at the supervisor's office before Election Day, the challenged voter will be required to vote a provisional ballot, then visit the Elections Office within 48 hours after the election to disprove the allegations of the challenge.

"One party, that we know of, is going to challenge every voter that's being foreclosed on," McFall said.

Foreclosure-related caging is just the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately, they don't want you to vote.


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dday 10/23/2008 08:00:00 AM |