Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Crock the vote

I had to share this amazing story from Indiana where state police raided a voter registration organization (for no good reason) making it likely that tens of thousands of newly registered voters, mostly black, will not be able to vote. Where is the Justice Department?

Even if they were able to vote, there's no guarantee their votes will be counted. This great Counterpunch article points out that in some cases Trump is right
So why is it so hard for liberals to accept the idea that US elections are undemocratic? Sure, it’s rather easy for liberals to proclaim from the mountaintops their opposition to discriminatory practices such as voter ID laws because those laws target primarily people of color who mostly vote Democrat. It has little to do with a concern for the truth and for the validity of elections, but is rather about anger that the other team is not playing fair.

But when it comes to doubting the entire electoral system and the results of any given election, liberals don’t want to hear that. They don’t want to discuss it. They certainly don’t want to debate it openly and honestly. Why?

And Truthout tells the sad story of voters forced to cast provisional ballots"In the 2012 election, some 2.7 million voters cast provisional ballots, about a quarter of which were disallowed. According to the Election Administration Commission, the top reasons provisional ballots are rejected nationwide are that voters aren't registered (38 percent) or vote at the wrong site (25 percent). But the likelihood that a ballot gets tossed for a particular reason can vary sharply from state to state: In Texas, 15 percent of provisional ballots were rejected for being cast in the incorrect place; in Ohio, it was 28 percent; in Indiana, it was 45 percent."

Thankfully, in Wisconsin our Republican election officials are all over the letter of the law. Witness a Green Bay city clerk who refused early voting places for UW-Green Bay students (whose spring primary voting experiences were not so great because of long lines and limited resources). Her reasoning - students are more likely to vote for Democrats.
But privately Teske gave a different reason for opposing an early-voting site at UW–Green Bay, writing that student voting would benefit the Democratic Party. “UWGB is a polling location for students and residents on Election Day but I feel by asking for this to be the site for early voting is encouraging the students to vote more than benefiting the city as a whole,” she wrote on August 26 in an e-mail to David Buerger, counsel at the Wisconsin Ethics Commission.
In another close call in Republican anti-voter Wisconsin, thousands of Wisconsin absentee ballots will be counted after all. Earlier this fall, in light of a new law requiring absentee ballots to contain witness addresses, there were questions over what exactly makes up a witness address. The Commission was set to disqualify absentee ballots where witnesses had not included zip codes, for example. "A new Wisconsin law states absentee ballots missing a witness address don't count. The law doesn't say how much address information is needed, however. State Elections Commission staff told local clerks earlier this month that they can't fill in missing elements without voter consent."

Remember - you have until Friday, October 28 (at 5 p.m. in city of La Crosse) to vote absentee in person, avoiding crowds and lines. More details at myvote.wi.gov.



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