Democracy and Elections

Covering election theft, voting rights, money and politics, and political reform.

UPDATED: GOP Sheriff in SW Ohio Shadows New Voters
Posted by Steven Rosenfeld on October 10, 2008 at 10:33 AM.

Update:

Voting rights advocates won an important battle in southern Ohio on Friday after a team of lawyers informed a local sheriff and county prosecutor that their attempt to interview new student voters about their voter registration credentials was "unlawful intimidation" under the Voting Rights Act and National Voter Registration Act.

"Recently, the Greene County Sheriff, Gene Fischer, made a public records request of the Greene County Board of Elections for new voter registration forms filed between September 30, 2008 and October 6, 2008," Greene County Prosecutor Stephen K. Haller said in a statement issued Friday. "This morning I learned that Sheriff Fischer has withdrawn his request for public records of new voter registrations."

Fischer, a Republican, told reporters in Ohio that he was launching an investigation into concerns about college students who took advantage of a week-long window in Ohio this fall where they could register to vote and then submit an in-person absentee ballot.

"If the information and quotations attributed to you and your representatives in this article are correct, you have launched this investigation without any evidence or credible allegation that any such voter has voted illegally," said the election protection coalition letter. "Your investigation instead appears to be based merely on unsubstantiated 'concerns' expressed in telephone calls by members of the public who appear to object to registration and voting by students in the community, unaccompanied by any specific allegation of actual fraud or other illegal conduct committed by any specific voter."

The letters, signed by the ACLU Voting Rights Project, ACLU of Ohio, Demos, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Project Vote and several Ohio law school professors, said the Greene County officials' investigation violated the "unlawful intimidation" clause of the Voting Rights Act and a similar provision in the National Voter Registration Act that prohibits anyone from interfering with legal voting.

For decades, law enforcement officers with partisan affiliations have used the power of their office to intimidate voters who they believe are likely to vote for candidates from an opposing party. This voter suppression tactic, whose roots date back to the pre-segregation era South, apparently has surfaced in southwestern Ohio. Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, writing for FreePress.org, offer this report.

The usual drumbeat claiming massive voter fraud has become ceaseless at Fox "News" and other right wing media mouthpieces.

As expected, the assault centers in Ohio, which once again could decide the presidency, but has manifested throughout the nation:

1) A Republican sheriff in Greene County, Ohio, has demanded social security and other records from 302 local voters whose ballots he apparently wants to negate. Sheriff Gene Fischer has requested registration cards and address forms for all Greene County residents who voted in a special session established in Ohio allowing new voters to register and vote on the same day. The process was challenged in court by the GOP. The Ohio Supreme Court turned down that challenge, and allowed the same-day voting to proceed. But now Fischer claims telephone calls complaining about the potential for voter fraud have prompted him to go after the information.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

GOP Backs Off Montana Voter Challenges
Posted by Steven Rosenfeld on October 8, 2008 at 3:03 PM.

The Montana Republican Party, which just last week notified local election officials in a handful largely Democratic counties that it intended to challenge the registrations of nearly 6,000 voters, has withdrawn that action.

According to press reports from the big sky state, the Montana Republican Party announced on Tuesday it would no longer pursue the challenges, which potentially would have forced targeted individuals to produce additional documentation of their legal address when voting.

The Montana GOP had selected individuals who were likely Democratic voters in university towns and on Native American reservations, local political analysts said. Reaction from election officials and editorial writers was uniformly negative, saying the threatened challenges were a ruse to discourage likely Democrats from voting.

Versions of this tactic are playing out across the country as GOP officials, either party leaders or office holders, are seeking to verify the validity of new voter registrations by saying they must match information for these same individuals in other government databases, such drivers' licenses or Social Security numbers. These demands come against a backdrop of reports saying Democrats have been more successful than Republicans in registering new voters in 2008.

Most notably, in Wisconsin, the Attorney General, a Republican, is pushing his state's election officials to screen registrations with the Social Security database. This past Monday, the Social Security Administration issued a press release asking six states -- Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, Nevada and Ohio -- to "review their procedures" to ensure voters were not mistakenly removed from voter rolls before the November election.

The problem with this name matching standard is two-fold: some government databases, notably Social Security records, are known to have errors -- which could result in legal voter registrations being rejected through no fault of the voter. Second, data-entry errors, such as typos involving people's names, can also lead to rejected voter registrations. Here, too, voters often have little recourse to correct mistakes by public agencies or government contractors who prepare and manage these databases.

Gender Auditors: Will California Ban Same-Sex Marriage?
Posted by ZP Heller, Brave New Films on October 8, 2008 at 2:38 PM.

The Governator giveth, the Governator taketh away?  Possibly, if Californians vote no on Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that would "eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry." 

I've been impressed with California's progressive leadership on issues like same-sex marriage.  It would be a major step in the wrong direction if Prop 8 passes, which is why Rick Jacobs and the Courage Campaign have put together this satirical piece, "Gender Auditors."

Take action on this issue at the Courage Campaign's site. 

AlterNet is a nonprofit organization and does not make political endorsements. The opinions expressed by its writers are their own.

Wisconsin Attorney General Sued To Stop Voter Purge
Posted by Campaign Legal Center on October 7, 2008 at 12:18 PM.

The Campaign Legal Center, joined by a number of other public interest and civil rights organizations, today sought to enter a case involving an attempt by the Wisconsin Attorney General to misapply the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to purge state voter rolls.

"The Attorney General's suit is legally flawed and ignores both the letter and the spirit of the Help America Vote Act," said J. Gerald Hebert, Director of Litigation for the Campaign Legal Center. "If the Wisconsin Attorney General's lawsuit is successful, thousands of Wisconsin voters will be disenfranchised turning the Help America Vote Act into the 'Strip Americans of the Right to Vote Act.'"

Joining the Legal Center in the filing of a motion to participate as amici curiae and a proposed brief in Van Hollen v. Wisconsin Government Accountability Board were the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin Education Fund, the Voting Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin Foundation, Inc., Fair Elections Wisconsin and Daniel P. Tokaji (the "amici").

The Van Hollen litigation was brought by the Wisconsin Attorney General in the Circuit Court of Dane County and raises important issues regarding the application of the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, 42 U.S.C. §15301 et seq. ("HAVA"), to the State of Wisconsin. In filing the motion to participate, the amici advised the Court that because the Wisconsin Attorney General's interpretation of HAVA was legally flawed, the complaint fails to state a claim upon which relief may be granted. The motion and brief also advised the court that the amici believed it was helpful to place the Attorney General's construction of HAVA in a national context, because such a context would show how his interpretation of HAVA was significantly at odds with the understanding of HAVA adopted by many other states.

"It is ironic that Wisconsin's top law enforcement officer would seek relief from the courts that actually would violate federal law", said Hebert. "There is nothing in the law that requires the disenfranchisement of persons simply because their name in the voter registration database does not perfectly match some other data base." Hebert cited typographical errors, clerical mistakes, use of hyphenated names, and changes in maiden and married names as the main cause of any computer mismatches.

"It makes little sense to strip Americans of the right to vote based on an unsuccessful effort to match voter information with another government data base, especially when federal law not only does not require it but even prohibits it," Hebert said. "The Attorney General's suit, if successful, would result in the needless and unfair disenfranchisement of thousands of registered voters on the eve of Election Day for something as simple as having registered to vote using a middle initial instead of one's full middle name as it may appear on a driver's license."

The motion and accompanying brief provided background information concerning the practice of computer matching to explain why HAVA generally does not link voter eligibility to the successful matching of registration records with records contained in other databases. Finally, the brief identifies concerns as to whether granting the relief requested by the Attorney General could significantly interfere with the conduct of the November 4, 2008 election in Wisconsin.

To read the brief, click here.

Independent Exit Pollsters in Swing States Seek Volunteers
Posted by Steven Freeman on October 7, 2008 at 2:32 AM.

Editor's note: this effort is seeking volunteers to help with polling voters on November 4.

On Tuesday November 4, 2008, Election Integrity, together with Election Defense Alliance and The Warren Poll, will be conducting its third Election Verification Exit Poll (EVEP).

Most of you reading this message are well aware of precipitous trends in America, and also that a key reason for why we're on the edge is the corruption of our electoral processes. But most Americans, and even many of you, still have no idea of the extent to which they are corrupted. Despite rude awakenings in several recent Novembers, the relentless fictions propounded by both major political parties, the media and other purported guardians of the system has lulled America back to into a stupor. As a nation, we continue to view the spectacle of electoral politics from the grandstands where we cheer, root or boo while gorging on nutritionless calories. If all goes according to plan, we'll enjoy the show and then go to sleep entertained and addle-brained assuming all is, if not well, then at least as it must be.

But although the system is corrupt on every flank, an overwhelming majority of Americans still believe deeply in democracy and understand how election integrity underpins our rights and our future. By exposing corrupted processes and participating politically as opposed to simply spectating, we may yet assert influence and gain some control over the destiny of our country. Indeed, despite a battle of no money versus billions, we are making a difference. The term "election integrity" has entered the lexicon. Since December 2004, hundreds of groups loosely known as the election integrity movement have formed. We likely had a material impact in 2006 when, for the first time in many election cycles, fraud may well have been restrained. In states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and California where our groups have been most active - egregious past results have not been repeated and/or proponents of election reform have won.

EVEPs hold perhaps the greatest promise for impact of any technique. The Bush administration has testified that they helped fund exit polls abroad because it is one of the only ways to expose large-scale fraud. Indeed, discrepancies between exit polls and the official results have been used to successfully overturn election results in Serbia, Peru, the Republic of Georgia and, in November 2004, Ukraine.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Voter Suppression Battle In Northwest Indiana
Posted by Josh Kalven, Progress Illinois on October 5, 2008 at 4:47 PM.

It appears that Lake County, IN may be the latest arena in the GOP's effort to suppress the vote in swing states

First some basics. Under Indiana election law, early voting can only take place in a county clerk's main office. This clearly could be problematic in areas where the county seat is far in distance from the most heavily populated parts of the county. Therefore, the law gives each board of elections the authority to approve early voting centers elsewhere in their county.

Lake County's geography provides the perfect argument for these "satellite" polling places. The county seat, Crown Point, is the 7th most populous city in the county (pop. 24,000) and centrally located. Meanwhile, three of the four biggest municipalities -- Gary (pop. 96,000), Hammond (pop. 77,000), and East Chicago (pop. 30,000) are all located at the northern edge of the county, along Lake Michigan. Together, these towns hold more than 40 percent of the county's residents. Moreover, Gary and Hammond are the fifth and sixth largest cities in the state.

It's in the city clerk's offices in these three towns that the Democratic members of the Lake County Board of Elections wanted to open up satellite voting centers. After all, it's about an hour roundtrip drive to Crown Point from any of them.

But on September 24, the two Republican members of the elections board voted against doing so. Their explanation is that Lake County Democratic chairman Rudy Clay made an agreement early in the year with GOP chairman John Corley to allow satellite voting during the state's presidential primary, but not during the general election.

Why wouldn't the Republicans want residents of these three cities to have easier access to early voting in the weeks leading up to this historic election? Because they're heavily minority, heavily low-income, and heavily Democratic.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Live from Main Street: Protecting the Vote
Posted by Laura Flanders on October 1, 2008 at 2:01 AM.

Editor's note: Part one of 'Live from Main Street's virtual townhall on voting rights in Ohio is posted on the right. Part two can be found at the end of this article.

Voter registration deadlines are just over a week away in many states. Polls open in just over a month. In an election that could well be decided by new voters, voter registration efforts are in overdrive. But signing people up might be the easy part: after that, there's voting. As the last two elections have shown, just showing up at the polls isn't a guarantee of a smooth ride to the ballot box.

In 2000 and 2004, all across the country, thousands of voters were removed from the rolls, without their knowledge, in official purges of voter lists. On Election Day in 2004, boxes of registrations remained unprocessed in at least two cities we know about -- Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio. On the radio that election night, I received calls from Columbus voters who had stood for hours in line because of a shortage of voting machines in the inner city, even as, in nearby wealthy suburbs, voters were able to cast their votes in a matter of minutes. As one caller put it, "Jim Crow isn't dead."

Election protection and voting rights should be central to any conversation about the '08 vote. But a lot of tough questions are getting lost in horse-race coverage. And many voters are wondering -- again -- if their vote will be counted. In contrast to most advanced democracies, the right to vote isn't conveyed automatically with citizenship or coming of age in the United States. Voters have to prove themselves and there are no end to the challenges, from felon disenfranchisement laws to monolingual ballots and a myriad of ever-changing rules which differ from election to election and district to district. Come voting day, voters rely on minimally-trained poll-workers overseeing a myriad of voting systems. Disturbing doubts remain about the security of electronic voting and the privately-owned technology many districts rely on to tally votes.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Watch Live: Laura Flanders Interviews Steven Rosenfeld About Protecting the Vote
Posted by Laura Flanders, GRITtv on October 1, 2008 at 1:48 AM.

Streaming live on Oct 1, 2008: Noon EST, 9 am PST

GRIT TV's Laura Flanders interviews AlterNet Democracy & Elections reporter Steven Rosenfeld about election protection, voter registration efforts and the campaign groundwar at the grassroots.

Video below:

Live from Main Street Ohio: Will Your Vote Count?
Posted by Laura Flanders, GRITtv on September 30, 2008 at 1:55 PM.

Editor's note: This is part one of a two part series. Watch for the second half of this virtual Town Hall, along with an op-ed by Laura Flanders, here tomorrow.

Ohio Supreme Courts Rejects GOP Early Voting Challenge
Posted by Steven Rosenfeld on September 29, 2008 at 10:46 AM.

The Ohio Supreme Court just issued a ruling that should help early voting efforts in this Midwestern battleground state -- including those by the Obama campaign.

Last week, the Ohio Republican Party sued Ohio's Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, because she directed boards of election allow people who register to vote between Oct 1st and Oct 5th to then follow up and vote. The Republicans argued that new voters should wait 30 days before receiving a ballot.

The suit was very important to Democrats, because they see this five-day early voting window as a way to register new voters and then have them vote for Obama. There are numerous planned efforts to bring thousands of voters to early voting centers starting Tuesday.

The Ohio Supreme Court, which denied the Ohio GOP's request for a writ of mandamus, said:

"We hold that respondent, secretary of state, correctly instructed boards of elections that an otherwise qualified citizen must be registered to vote for 30 days as of the date of the election at which the citizen offers to vote in order to be a qualified elector entitled to apply for and vote an absentee ballot at the election, and the citizen need not be registered for 30 days before applying for, receiving, or completing an absentee ballot for the election. Therefore, because relators cannot establish either a clear legal right to the requested extraordinary relief or a clear legal duty on the part of the secretary of state to provide it, we deny the writ."

McCain Brittle, Grumpy; But Controlled Debate
Posted by Jane Hamsher, Firedoglake on September 27, 2008 at 4:17 AM.

McCain controlled the debate tonight. He came off as a brittle, grumpy, mean-spirited old coot, but on the economy -- which should have been Obama's strong suit -- McCain managed to divert the conversation to tax cuts and kept Obama off the kitchen table issues where he excels. McCain was allowed to paint himself as a crusader for reform, and no mention was made of the Keating 5 -- though Obama did manage to tie him to voting for all of Bush's budgets. (McCain's only rejoinder was to refer to himself repeatedly as "no Miss Congeniality." Huh?)

But the biggest problem for me was that McCain had a grab bag of adjectives he consistently used to characterize Obama -- "naive, inexperienced" -- and every time he repeated them, it was like money in the bank. He worked them in at every opportunity, and their cumulative effect wore into Obama as the evening went on. Obama missed the opportunity to do the same and characterize McCain as brittle, rash, impulsive and out-of-touch. His critiques were all over the place, and his failure to tie them together into a coherent narrative about McCain meant that he never really grazed the old buzzard.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Dems say Alabama SOS Won't Share New Voter Rolls
Posted by Steven Rosenfeld on September 25, 2008 at 3:00 PM.

Alabama Secretary of State, Beth Chapman, a Republican, is refusing to give the Alabama Democratic Party a copy of the state's updated voter lists unless the Democrats pay $28,000, the Associated Press reported.

Chapman said her office is only required to provide the lists free of charge once a year and already did so during the 2008 primary election.

In response, state Democratic Party Chairman Joe Turnham said Democrats will file a lawsuit by Friday to get the lists. Chapman told the AP that "partisanship" was not a factor in her decision; however Turnham suggested that her actions could be intended to "stifle voter turnout."

Updated voter rolls are the basis of numerous campaign and election activities, from contacting voter rolls to redrawing precinct boundaries. Not providing the lists to a major party is tantamount to tilting the electoral playing field to the other party's advantage.

Perhaps more ominously, Turner also said this week that some county election officials have not been able to process a surge in new voter registration applications.

"This is serious. This is a political emergency," Turnham told the Birmingham News. "It's September and many have not received voter registration cards telling them their polling place."

Turnham called on Chapman to provide additional workers in counties that are experiencing problems such as Jefferson, Montgomery, Lee, Wilcox and Autauga.

"She is the chief election officer in Alabama and is responsible for all these offices and is supposed to be a champion of finding voter fraud, but the great voter fraud here, ladies and gentleman, is the fact that a state political party and tens of thousands of voters that are now registering to vote or attempting to vote are potentially having their right ... stifled by the chief elections officer," Turnham told the paper.

Chapman said she had not heard about this problem.

"We are about solving problems, not talking about them," Chapman said. "If the Democrat Party knows of these problems, they need to notify us. They have not and they are the ones doing voters a disservice."

With political rhetoric, don't expect these issues to be resolved soon. As both sides know, limiting who can and cannot vote has everything to do with who wins on Election Day.

Nothing Else Matters if We Don't Have Fair Elections
Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville on September 24, 2008 at 11:51 AM.

A month ago, Spudsy issued a reminder about the importance of ensuring that the upcoming election is fair. Today, I read this:

With 41 days to go before the presidential election, election officials and political operatives in [heavily populated Palm Beach County, Florida] — famous for overvotes, undervotes, butterfly ballots and hanging chads — are worried about a repeat performance of the chaos that clouded the outcome of the 2000 presidential race.

…"We have seen problems in Palm Beach County already in the primary," said Ben Wilcox, executive director of Common Cause Florida, a watchdog group. "I think potentially we could have major problems in Florida again."

It's not like they didn't try to fix things after the electoral meltdown that sent the 2000 election all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

The punch cards are gone. Security cameras monitor all activity in every county election office. Random spot-checks review each ballot in 2 percent of all precincts.

But the "improved" system may not be much better than the old one.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Ohio to Allow Minor Parties to Observe Vote Count in November
Posted by Steven Rosenfeld on September 17, 2008 at 2:28 PM.

Minor political parties will have the same rights as Democrats and Republicans to be polling place observers and to monitor the vote count at Ohio's 88 county Boards of Election on November 4th, under a new policy announced Wednesday by Ohio's Secretary of State, Democrat Jennifer Brunner.

"Yes, that is true," said Kevin Kidder, media relations coordinator for Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner. "Minor parties have been granted the same rights as major parties."

The new policy, which was part of a settlement in a lawsuit brought by the Green Party over access to the 2008 ballot for its presidential candidate, former Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney, will enable the Ohio Green Party to station election protection observers at precincts and at county tabulation centers, said the party's Ohio attorney, Robert Fitrakis of Columbus.

"Minor parties will now have the right of major parties to allow us to be observers in every polling place, inside boards of elections, inside counting rooms," Fitrakis said. "I have been negotiating this to settle a suit to put McKinney on the ballot … I argued we should have all the rights of the (major parties in the) existing (Ohio) statute until the Legislature writes a new statute."

Fitrakis said election protection activists who helped to document 2004's election problems are still politically active and were willing to help the Green Party to observe voting and vote tabulation on Nov. 4 -- particularly in counties where the official 2004 results contained problematic vote totals, such as more than 10,000 people voting to re-elect the president and voting in favor of gay marriage in the state's Bible Belt. Those and other official but politically implausible vote counts have been cited by election integrity activists who question the president's 2004 margin of victory in the state.

In 2004, the Green and Libertarian Parties paid for a recount of Ohio's presidential election, claiming there was voter suppression in the state's cities and fraudulent vote counts in rural areas, most notably in three southeastern counties near Cincinnati. In one of those counties, Warren County, local officials declared a "homeland security" emergency and banned the public and media from observing vote counts. A sizeable portion of George W. Bush's victory margin came from these counties.

VA Voter Suppression Continues
Posted by Steven Rosenfeld on September 15, 2008 at 12:41 PM.

Just because victory is declared in Washington does not make it so.

One week ago, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced a new policy to allow voter registration drives on VA campuses, responding to pressure by lawmakers and the media that the VA was suppressing the vote of wounded former soldiers. That new policy was greeted with 'mission accomplished' press statements by members of Congress who have been pushing the VA to change its policy for several years.

But on Monday, as the Senate Rules and Administration Committee held a hearing in Washington on a bill to ensure veterans living at VA facilities could be helped with voter registration, a legal motion was being filed in federal court in California alleging the VA was still blocking efforts to register voters in time for the 2008 presidential election.

Following last week's announcement of VA's new voter registration policy, a VA facility in San Francisco blocked a non-profit group, Veterans for Peace, from registering voters, the legal motion said. The filing said the VA was seeking to require Veterans for Peace members to go through the process of screening VA volunteers, a process that would delay registration efforts. In contrast, the VA does not require screening for most other visitors.

"The VA has disenfranchised veterans and interfered with the freedom of political parties and nonpartisan groups to associate with their members and with other citizens who reside on VA campuses," the motion said. "This Court should prohibit further interference with voter registration at any VA campus for the imminent federal election."

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »