My vote will count. I live in Minnesota, we have optical scan and have never had any reports (well not until this week) of any hanky panky that I’m aware of. This week some right wing organization was calling Democratic voters purporting to be from the Secretary of State’s office raising concerns about their registrations. But I’m not worried about that, Minnesota has gone blue every year since ‘72, our Secretary of State is a Democrat and our Republican governor has national aspirations so he wouldn’t be caught dead interfering with the process.
Now I have to put to bed a couple arguments made here by Sueanne Tremendous who is intelligent, but blissfully unaware of the fact that the national US Presidential election in 2000 was stolen. And before you come back with “was not”, please do me a favor and read just the first chapter of a book called “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” by investigative journalist Greg Palast. I won’t dwell on it, but he explains how, in an election that was decided by 200 votes, Republicans managed to invalidate the voter registrations of nearly 200,000 people, overwhelmingly Democrats, resulting in a net of 157,000 Democrat votes lost. They did so by having the Governor (Bush’s brother) and his state campaign manager Katherine Harris (the Secretary of State of Florida) contract with a company called Choice Point Technologies. Choice Point was hired to help “clean up” the voter rolls, namely by removing felons from those rolls, which was 100% legal under Florida law at the time. There were however a few aspects of this purge which were not legal, and this is not a partisan issue…anyone interested in Democracy should be up in arms about this. But instead we were all sold on the idea that it was all about Butterfly Ballots and hanging chads, which I’m happy to report if they are your major concern, Kurt Browning, current SOS of Florida has guaranteed there will not be a single butterfly ballot or hanging chad, as Florida has moved to the aforementioned optical scan system, which is the most reliable voter system I’m aware of.
At any rate, what was illegal about the way the list of registered voters was matched to the list of felons was in how it was done. First and foremost they asked Choice Point to create a matching program that would find a match and remove from the voter rolls anyone who shared the first 2 letters of their first or last names on both lists. So, if John Jackson was a convicted felon, not only did everyone named John Jackson, or Jon Jackson get removed from the roles, so did the Joe Jacksons, the Joe Jacobsons…you get the idea. The next problem was that “somehow” a list of felons in Texas was provided to Choice Point (even though it was commissioned by Florida which had no jurisdiction to use state records from any other state), and Choice Point used those names anyway….how they happened to get the list of Texas felons is a mystery even to their then governor George W. Bush. And the final real problem was that the rolls were only purged in the counties which voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in previous elections (like 80–90% support), there simply were no ‘felons’ removed via Choice Point’s purge in overwhelmingly Republican counties or counties where the vote was evenly split. All of this is documented and proven by Palast. He even had a CD-ROM with the purge spreadsheet, which he brought to the Secretary of State’s office to speak with one of the men in charge of carrying out the purge. Palast had a film crew with him, which caught this official on tape claiming there was no truth to Palast’s story, UNTIL Palast produced the CD-ROM, at which point this official got up out of his chair and ran full bore to an office, inside of which he barricaded himself until security removed Palast and his film crew from the premises. So, don’t tell me an election “can’t” be stolen in America.
And I dispute one other tenet here, that “it happens on both sides”. Well in most things, I agree with this assessment, but it’s hard to buy this argument when it relates to depressing voter turnout when every single story I’ve ever read about trying to keep people from voting has been an example of someone trying to keep Democrats from voting. We’ve already seen in early voting
- Electronic voting machines flipping votes from Obama to McCain in West Virginia and the poll workers being unable to do anything about it
– Calls being placed in Spanish to Democrats in New Mexico telling Hispanic voters that they can register their votes right now over the phone so they don’t have to go in on election day
– Attempts by Republicans in Ohio to get hold of lists of mismatched voters (prior to state efforts to resolve the discrepancies)...there seems to be no logical reason a partisan organization would need or be entitled to this information
– The aforementioned calls placed in Minnesota to alert Democrats that there might be a problem with their registrations
– A letter issued with the Seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia, informing voters that if they were Republicans or Independents supporting Republican candidates, they should vote on Tuesday November 4, but due to overflows at the polls, if they were Democrats or people supporting Democratic candidates, they should vote on November 5.
– Efforts to challenge all 1.3 million voters newly registered by ACORN by demonizing ACORN for doing what they are SUPPOSED to be doing, by identifying faulty ballots BEFORE they were sent to the state (which is what is required by law)
I could go on, but instead, I’ll direct your attention here
But take heart. Obama is simply too far ahead in too many states to lose. Basically it boils down to the fact that there are about 15 states that Obama could win, he is ahead in more of them than he is behind, and essentially if he wins any one or two of them, he wins the election, period. McCain conversely needs to win all 15 of them….and though they may be able to cheat in one state or two, there’s just no way McCain can pull this off. Essentially something major would have to happen (i.e. a terrorist attack) to completely move the race in McCain’s direction by about 6 points (in 5 days). There simply is no historical precedent for something like this, so yes, ANYTHING can happen, but no matter how much cheating goes on, this year at least I’ll agree with Sueanne that it’s not going to make enough of a difference.
I actually expect it to be around 400 electoral votes for Obama, I think where the polls are wrong, they will be undercounting Obama’s support significantly. I’ll know I’m right when Georgia turns blue.
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