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Posted on 11/04/2004 11:58:22 AM PST by Diddle E. Squat
Republicans in Michigan are breathing a sigh of relief today - and not only because President Bush won a second term, despite narrowly losing Michigan.
In Detroit, mostly white Republican poll watchers dispatched to monitor mostly-black city vote counting encountered uncomfortable, racially charged situations. Poll watchers overseeing absentee vote-counting at Cobo Center, for example, reported widespread fraud in the counting of ballots. The incident raised the specter of a politically dicey GOP lawsuit, a move now less urgent given Bush's national victory.
"Craziest thing I've ever seen," said one poll watcher. "They had 100 tables and just five poll watchers trying to monitor them. Every table had a pile of empty ballots. If the machine rejected a ballot, the workers would just take a fresh ballot, fill it in the way they thought the voter wanted (Detroit voted heavily for Kerry), and then put THAT ballot through the machine." The poll watcher also reported unsigned ballots being counted in the machines, a violation of absentee procedures.
Alarmed by this open fraud, the party brought in more poll watchers only to be confronted, according to a Detroit Free Press account, by a Kerry campaign lawyer "who arrived and began yelling at the 20-30 GOP lawyers." Policemen were called to restore order to the proceedings after which the additional Republican poll watchers were all escorted off the premises.
The Cobo vote fraud was the most serious incident in an evening that included a judge ruling for Republicans when poll watchers were cast out of other polling places. Democratic voters, in turn, complained that "they felt intimidated by a stranger watching them and wanting to check identification" according the Free Press account. All in all, an unsettling evening here in Southeast Michigan.
Without the fraud, we would have won Pennsylvania. In 2000 too!
I was thinking if you subtract the fraud, it was closer to a 70 - 75% win.
Why 2 years?
Gov. Granholm, is up for re-election then. Since she is a Dem and a beneficiary of this stuff, she is unlikely to do much, despite her formerly serving as the Michigan Attorney General. The current AG is Mike Cox, the first Republican to hold that office since Eisenhower was in the White House (or maybe still on Normandy). Cox ought to move before the 2006 elections to clean this up, but he'll have to be VERY CAREFUL so he doesn't give the demagogues on the issue a racial component to use against him and all the Republicans.
You know how it is, anytime a Republican tries to see that the voting rules are followed, he gets accused of trying to disenfranchise minorities...
In neither case should the ballot be "remade". Voter error, first of all, is the voter's fault; the voter was instructed on how to create a legal vote, and failed.
As for machine error, it is known in advance that these machines have some error rate. We consider this error rate acceptable, and voters are willing to live with that risk of error, otherwise we wouldn't have collectively decided to use the machines in the first place. (If we are unwilling to live with that error rate we ought to switch technologies; I suggest hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots.)
In close elections (i.e. Florida 2000) it may or may not be necessary to hand-count the ballots which were rejected due to machine error (not the ones rejected due to voter error however). But this wouldn't involve "re-making" ballots either; it would involve counting (or deciding they are non-votes e.g. if the chad is merely dimpled) the existing rejected ballots. In that case, a hanging chad for Kerry, with no other President chad missing, goes for Kerry, sure. But this would be done by hand, by the election board. Also, since machine-error rate is likely to be randomly distributed to voters for either candidate, *fully* recounting rejected ballots is usually not called for. Only if some *partial* hand recount (or "canvass") shows a huge bias one way or the other, or if the race is extremely tight, can it make sense (depending on the state's election laws).
I just can't think of any justifiable reason to ever "re-make" a ballot under normal conditions.
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I tried to show my id, the poll worker would not even touch it, much less look at it.
The problem is that after a big win like this we all become complacent and forget until 2008....We need to be all over this and encourage our legislators to do something so this doesn't happen again..For one thing, we should outlaw those outside groups coming and registering people. I went to S or State and it wasn't hard at all...But I didn't show ID when voting and could have gone to another county and voted on a provisional ballot. Right? And in a close race, I would have had 2 votes...Maybe I'm wrong, they would have cross checked unless I used a non voters name...Endless fraud...
I worked at the precincts and verified the ballot boxes at city hall for over ten years in Michigan. You can get absentee ballots wrinkled in the mail, torn, etc. Things can happen. It was maybe three or four per thousand - but it is re-made per the instructions from the city clerk.
"This story could have been written in 2000. The exact same thing happened."
Do we have capable, energetic lawyers willing to learn from this and get something done to prevent this in the future?
Seriously, though, all you had to do was provide a name and make sure you knew your address. When I began to vote, years and years ago, many times I was not only asked for an ID, but perhaps a way to "prove it" by having a gas, electric, phone bill, or some other means. (Showing your checkbook with your name/address on checks was not good enough). Also (and I can't remember how they checked this) you couldn't register unless you were resident at your current address for at least 6 months, and then, when you went to register, you again had to provide "proof" of your residence, such as the bills that I mentioned above. Times have changed, but I believe this is one thing they should bring back.
We had no problem, whatsoever, of showing our IDs to prove who we were.
The Democrat was a Spanish-speaking hispanic.
There should have been black watchers and challengers in these precincts and it is something we need to work on for the next election.
I'm not sure what you mean by "if needed," but as I understand it, they don't count military and absentee ballots if they can't possibly make a difference to the electoral vote, i.e, if one candidate won by 10,000 votes and military and absentee ballots totalled 8,000, there's no way they'd change the outcome. So they don't get counted.
We only had one bad experience and it was 2 ancient Republicans who insisted on voting even though they are registered in CA. They came in with a man who had called a lawyer and said that they had to allow them to vote. Very unpleasant.
Kerry stole Michigan. Or to put it bluntly. Jackie Curry and others stole Michigan.
I heard Jesse Jackson talking about this - he was shocked that the republicans would send in white people to monitor black voting .. say what ..??
Everything he said is contrary to everything he preaches. The guy is so racist .. I was stunned .. I shouldn't have been, but I was.
Amen!
Add to it a 24-hour voting timeframe where everyone finishes at the same time...so the east coast can't influence the west coast, and nobody can complain about being disenfranchised because they had to work, or couldn't make it to the polls.
Eastern Time: Monday 8pm to Tuesday 8pm.
Pacific Time: Monday 5pm to Tuesday 5pm.
Etc.
Oh...and abolish motor-voter laws, since you don't have to be a citizen to get a drivers license.
Institute a national voter registration database, so that you cannot possibly be registered in two places (Florida and New York, for example).
And, get Secretaries of State that can compile accurate voter rolls so that "provisional" votes are not needed.
There's a lot of problems with their city government, but their clerk and poll workers are not one of them. They ran a good ship there and did their jobs well. All I did there really was report votes. There was one other GOP challenger at one precinct I was at. There was one democrat challenger at one and two at another. They all were just local residents there and not NAACP or Union goons. We got along just fine, and neither of us were causing a rutkus.
We all got along just fine. The dems were mostly doing last minute GOTV efforts to those who haven't voted yet. There were 6 challenges, but I didn't have to make them. The poll workers did it on their own.
I did hear that there were BIG problems in Detroit and Flint. I'll find out more tonight at the GOP meeting.
The election inspectors followed the "two corner" rule. If there was a 'hanging chad', they showed the head election supervisor for a 2nd opinion, then showd me and the dem challenger for third opinions while we watched to make sure the vote totals matched.
We got our butts kicked in EL like normal, but it was legit.
GOOD JOB!!! & THANK YOU!!! Have you heard "Electric ladyland" the album by Jimi Hendrix - one of my favs...
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