Voting On Earth-- If You're A Democrat

Commander Edward Michael Fincke and Flight Engineer and Science Officer Greg Chamitoff may be orbiting the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour onboard the International Space Station some 220 miles above the planet, but they will voting in Tuesday's election. By means of a secure electronic ballot uplinked by NASA's Mission Control Center their choices will be transmitted to Houston by secret e-mail and officially recorded.

That virtuoso display of American space technology, accomplished (believe it or not) by our very own government, makes the state of our voting franchise all the more disgraceful and depressing.



Beyond the obvious fact that those ESS machines were made on the absolute cheap, it appears that either a) the software errors were result of sloppy programming, or b) these pathetic machines have been strategically placed and designed to malfunction.

Voter Suppression in the good-old-USA is as old as the Republican Party. Funny thing-- seeing that originally it was Republicans whose votes were not being counted.

Between 1866 and 1869, Congress enacted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, guaranteeing blacks' civil rights and giving black men the right to vote.

The Republicans had for the first time enshrined in American law the principle that the rights of citizens could not be abridged because of race. And they led directly to the creation of new governments in the South elected by blacks as well as white - America's first experiment in interracial democracy.

Lincoln's assassination saw his Democratic successor, President Johnson, pardon the Southern Confederates who immediately tried to abridge the rights of the Republican Freedmen. Ironically, it would be another Democratic President named Johnson, who restored those denied civil rights and in doing so renewed the urge to repress the black vote.

After the 1964 Voting Rights Act saw whites and blacks switch parties the Old South's (anti)-Democratic tactics were soon copied by Republicans up north. As Sherry F. Colb, Professor and Judge Frederick B. Lacey Scholar at Rutgers Law School-Newark explains:

The reason for the intimidation is plain: According to the NAACP report, in the last few decades, "African American voters have [become more] been loyal to the Democratic Party, resulting in the prevalence of Republican efforts to suppress minority turnout."

In 1981's "model" effort, the Republican National Committee and the New Jersey Republican State Committee engaged in "widespread challenging of individual voters and an Election Day presence at African American and Latino precincts featuring armed guards and dire warnings of criminal penalties for voting offenses."

When not relying on mis-tabulation and overt intimidation, Republicans have turned to using the Federal government's recent HAVA rules to suppress the vote in minority districts.

Right now in Florida over 12,000 voters statewide are being forced to cast provisional ballots because of discrepancies between their registration forms and driver license numbers or Social Security numbers in government databases. Unsurprisingly, the list includes a disproportionate number of African-Americans, Hispanics, and voters in Democratic strongholds in South Florida. Here is what Time magazine had to say about Ohio and the proposed "No Match No Vote law."

Our now famous, "Joe the plumber" is not registered to vote. The man known to his mother as Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, is inscribed in Ohio's Lucas County registration records as "Worzelbacher," a problem of penmanship more than anything else. "You can't read his signature to tell if it is an o or a u," explains Linda Howe, the local elections director.

Such mistakes riddle the nation's voting rolls, but they did not matter much before computers digitized records. The misspelled Joes of America still got their ballots. But after the voting debacle in 2000, Congress required each state to create a single voter database, which could then be matched with other data, such as driver's licenses, to detect false registrations, dead people and those who have moved or become "inactive." In the marble halls of Congress, this sounded like a great idea — solve old problems with new technology. But in the hands of sometimes inept or partisan state officials, the database matches have become a practical nightmare that experts fear could disenfranchise thousands.

Ohio's Secretary of State does not think that voters should lose their rights because of clerical errors but the Bush Justice Department has just filed suit to purge 200,000 new Ohio voters.

Elsewhere the purges remain old-fashioned. A county official in Georgia removed 700 people from voter lists, purportedly for being felons, even though many had never received so much as a parking ticket. Another Georgia voter purge, which seeks to remove illegal immigrants from the rolls, has been challenged by voting-rights groups that say legal voters have been intimidated by repeated requests to prove their citizenship. Back in Mississippi last March, an election official wrongly purged 10,000 people from the voting rolls — including in an ironic twist a Republican congressional candidate — while using her home computer. (After that the names were restored in time for the primary.)

When all else fails, the easiest Republican ploy is simply to under-provide machines in Democratic precincts and then reduce the number of voting hours as they recently did in Florida. Sure enough, just like in 2000 and 2004 the lines are appalling long, even for those who show up bright and early:



To Governor Crist's credit he has ordered the hours of voting to be extended earning the ire of his Republican brethren, but surely citizens in a country that boasts of being the world's "oldest and greatest democracy" should be able to vote in a safe and timely fashion without being launched into outer space.

Here's How We Help:

1. If you know anyone in Florida who registered to vote this year, check the list of rejected voter registrations to see if their name is on the list. If you are one of those wonderful souls who has volunteered to register voters in Florida, you might want to check the list for the names of any people you registered whose names you might remember.

2. If a person's name is on the list, they need to contact their County Supervisor of Elections Office to determine the problem and rectify it immediately. (You'll find a list of Florida's election offices here). Sometimes the problem is as simple as a misplaced number written down on the form or an error in one of the government databases (imagine that!). Voters need to show the elections office proof of the correct information, preferably a driver's license or a state-issued ID or Social Security card. Often the problem can be resolved via fax or e-mail.

3. If a person is on this list and resolves the problem before Election Day, I would encourage that person to vote early if at all possible, and not wait until Nov. 4, just to make sure there are no lingering problems. Here's a list of Florida's early voting sites.

4. Common Cause is running phone banks to contact all 12,185 people on the no-match list. If you want to volunteer to help, e-mail DCressman (at) Commoncause.org