I hope everyone is taking advantage of early voting if you have it. Don't wait till the last minute when you might be ill, or have car trouble, or bad weather. It's such a relief to have a vote "in the bank" for Obama ~ take the opportunity to give yourself some peace of mind and VOTE, America!
Obama is the first sitting President to vote early. :) Voters in swing states it will be the key to this election, so don't wait, vote now!
Most ordinary people think of election observers as people who come into third world countries to view elections to make sure the process is fair to all - like Jimmy Carter's UN group. In this country, the history of "Poll Watching" is much more dark, and was originally allowed by states that wanted to suppress the African American vote during the Jim Crow years after Reconstruction.
This year and true to form, the Republican Party wants to use Poll Watchers to intimidate voters in states like Ohio, where Secretary of State Husted is helping the cause by cutting out early voting on weeknights and weekends, prohibiting many minority voters from participating.
Rachel Maddow has done several great reports on "True the Vote," a group formed to allegedly combate "voter fraud" by placing watchers at polling places where they could signal officials if they saw something they thought was a "gotcha" moment.
To give you an idea of what True the Vote is all about, you have to see Their Official Website. It has nothing to do with wanting to make the process fair. It has everything to do with blocking voters from the polls.
Under "Latest News" here is just one article about Pennsylvania Voter ID filled with a sense of palpable disappointment that voters might actually get help in carrying out their right to vote:
The anti-ID crowd continues to have the wind taken out of its sails.
First, Pennsylvania plaintiff Viviette Applewhite gets a photo ID the day after the ACLU’s Voter ID challenge is shot down in court on grounds that the law disenfranchises no one. Now, PennDOT is rolling out its program to provide free voter identification cards to all Pennsylvania voters who can’t otherwise get a state photo ID
Yeah, that's a real bummer. It's too bad the State of Pennsylvania is helping more voters have a chance to vote. That spoils all the fun.
Here's the leader of True the Vote, Catherine Engelbrecht, speaking to her followers. She loves her some Voter ID Laws!!! Basically she is a vigilante bully who believes there is fraud where none actually exists, and she wants to make the process more difficult for everyone. She is an alarmist, and how dare she talk about "civil rights leaders" when some of them would roll in their graves at the thought of an all-white posse looking over an election. Her call for "Election Integrity" is a big dog whistle to the Tea Party because her goal is to favor the white vote over the minority vote.
But of course, there is still Ohio, with Tea Party sympathizer Jon Husted, the Secretary of State who is trying his best to do the one-man election body-block. Last week I posted this impassioned speech by State Senator Nina Turner on The Ed Show, expressing the outrage many feel towards Husted as he tries to rig the system against elderly and minority voters.
In a 15-page decision filed Aug. 27, Jonathan Allison concluded that Husted has the authority to remove Dennis Lieberman and Tom Ritchie Sr. from their posts.
“Furthermore, I believe the facts warrant removal and recommend that the secretary take such action,” Allison wrote.“It’s not justice when you already know the outcome of being put on trial,” he said. “A hearing examiner appointed by SOS Husted has agreed with his boss. This is not news.”
Husted spokesman Matt McClellan said the state’s chief elections official will make a decision Aug. 28 on whether to remove the two board members.
Lieberman and Ritchie were called to Columbus a week ago for a hearing in Husted’s office after they backed a motion to open Montgomery County’s early polls on weekends in the weeks before the Nov. 6 election, just days after Husted issued a directive ordering boards to adopt uniform weekday in-person early voting hours, with no Saturdays or Sundays.
. . . “We do not want to return to the long lines, the hours upon hours of waiting that took place in 2004 when J. Kenneth Blackwell was in Secretary Husted’s job,” Lieberman said. “Secretary Husted needs to follow Jennifer Brunner’s model in 2008 that led to a historic voter turnout and abandon Blackwell’s 2004 model that was a disaster and made Ohio a poster child for voter suppression.”
It turns out we have proof that Husted is all in cahoots with True the Vote - he was listed as a "featured speaker" for their Ohio State Summit Meeting, but after Rachel Maddow announced that on her show, he withdrew, to be replaced by Ohio State Senator Bill Seitz.
As Maddow reported, when True the Vote started in Harris County, Texas, the mainly white watchers showed up in African American precincts and intimidated registered voters. The group understood that they were intimidating people - but they seem to think that's okay. Hello Jim Crow!
Harris County, the biggest county in the state, is where a Tea Party group called the King Street Patriots launched an anti-voter fraud initiative called “True the Vote,” which recruited poll watchers and amped up fears over groups like the community organizing group ACORN.
Chad Dunn, a lawyer who is representing the Texas Democratic Party, told TPMMuckraker a number of witnesses have been interviewed by Civil Rights Division lawyers already. “We’ve gotten a number of reports — quite a few out of the Houston area — that poll watchers, King Street Patriot training poll watchers, are following a voter after they’ve checked them out and stand right behind them,” Dunn said. There’s at least a dozen reports that they could confirm with witnesses, he said. “Interestingly, it’s all in the polling places in Hispanic and African-American areas,” he added.
Terry O’Rourke, the first assistant in the Harris County Attorney’s office, told TPMMuckraker that there have been allegations of poll watchers talking to voters, which they are not allowed to do, as well as hovering over voters as they are waiting to vote. He said the complaints came from Kashmere Gardens, Moody Park, Sunnyside and other predominantly minority neighborhoods of the county.
Catherine Engelbrecht is the founder of both the King Street Patriots and True the Vote, in that order, and only months apart. Name and IRS status appear to be all that differentiates the two groups. The former, a 501c4, is a Tea Party group that lobbies for conservative issues, chiefly election reform; the latter is a 501c3 that takes a hands-on approach to making sure election reform is implemented—Dr. Jekyl and Dr. Jekyler.
The 2008 ACORN “scandal,” where ACORN was found with thousands of falsified voter registration forms, is partially what inspired Engelbrecht to form the King Street Patriots. Even though no fraudulent votes were cast, Engelbrecht’s King Street Patriots lionized the ACORN tale and used it as a mobilizing tool to recruit hundreds of volunteers for 2009 Election Day poll watching, mostly in black and Latino districts. . . .
. . . Only a handful of fraud cases were tried after the election, and none led to full convictions. Still, the King Street Patriots spun off as “True the Vote” and came out again for the 2010 elections—bulkier with more recruits, again at black and Latino polling places. A local Houston newscast noticed the bulge in poll observers and reported, “As the number of poll watchers have increased, so have the number of complaints.” A video True the Vote circulated at the time contained doctored photos of black people falsely pictured as advocating for voter fraud.
True the Vote’s lawyer Kelly Shackelford, of the Christian rightwing organization Liberty Institute, explained away the intimidation complaints this way: “Poll watchers show up for the first time and [the poll watchers are] a different color than them and they just don’t like that.”
"This is nothing more than uniform voter suppression, make no mistake about it. Ohio and four other states, Ed, have extremely cut early voting hours. And get this - in Ohio and Florida, they cut Sundays. We know exactly who their targets are. And again, in Cuyahoga County, African Americans make up 26% of the registered voters. But during 2008, early in-person voting, they made up 56% of the vote."
"How dare we forget how we got over in this country. How African Americans had to dodge the barks and bites of dogs, how they had to leap over grandfather clauses, and literacy tests, and poll taxes. And here we are in the 21st century with the elections officer who is supposed to adhere morally and legally to expanding the vote, but here he is suppressing the vote."
"And I'm going to tell you something, Ed, if you are poor, working class, middle class, elderly, African American, Hispanic, or a woman, you are SOL (sh** out of luck) when it comes to Republicans. They are making it very clear that they don't care - they are here to oppress, suppress, and they don't care how they steal the vote."
. . . [Governor Kasich] is MIA (missing-in-action) when it comes to this voting issue, and it's a shame.
. . . "If you extrapolate out the date from 2008, with the hours that have been eliminated unilaterally by the Sec. of State, about 200,000 Ohioans will be impacted by that. And if we remember, Governor Kasich beat Governor Strickland by about a 2% margin. Every vote counts and no one should suppress the vote.
And as far as I'm concerned, I don't care if people carry the title of Secretary of State or not - if you are a policy maker in the State of Ohio, if you are someone who cares about fairness and justice, it is all of our responsibility to stand up and tell the truth. And the truth of the matter is, it is Republicans who are suppressing the vote. And oh, by the way, over 180 bills were introduced in states across this country by GOP-led Legislatures. And I wonder why.
Could it be because President Barack Obama is an African American? I wonder.
This story keeps getting worse. I'm losing sleep over it because the whole thing is diabolical and shouldn't be happening in the United States.
The Voter ID Law was upheld yesterday by a Republican judge who saw no harm in disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of voters. The next thing to do is appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court which is deadlocked 3-3, Dem against Republicans. Time is of the essence, but there just seems to be no answer.
Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania Judge Robert Simpson issued an order on Wednesday saying there was no constitutional reason to stop the law from taking effect. In his opinion, however, he wrote that he had "sympathy" for the witnesses.
The coalition, however, seeks to appeal the law in the State Supreme Court, requesting that the court hear the case on an expedited basis because the election is less than three months away.
The ACLU of Pennsylvania, the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, the Advancement Project and the law firm of Arnold & Porter filed the appeal jointly.
"The fight in this case could go on after the election. Judge Simpson's ruling was on the request for a preliminary injunction. There could still be a hearing for a final injunction," said the ACLU of Pennsylvania in a statement.
On the same day as that ruling - no coincide - the State of Penn decided to drop a plan to allow online absentee voter registration.
A spokesman for the Department of State said county elections officials told the agency that implementing the new online initiatives as well as voter ID requirements was too much to handle less than three months before the election.
*sigh* I've lived half a century and I just can't believe this is happening in every presidential election.
According to Politico, there are fewer "undecided" voters than there used to be, which is fine with me. I always hated those focus groups of undecideds on CNN, people who apparently knew nothing about the candidates, had never read the news, never listened to any speeches or debates, and yet were touted as the "deciders" of every election. To me, an "undecided voter" is a classic oxymoron, and I always thought it was a great insult to the United States that choosing a leader of the free world would come down to the least likely people to know anything much about the candidates.
While I understand the possible idealism behind their indecision, or even the sense of power they might feel for being the focus of the media, elections are real, not hypothetical, and we have years to get ready and pick a candidate before November. In this information age with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and 24-hour news online, there's just no excuse for waiting till the last minute.
Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, a centrist Democrat in office who has morphed into a happy warrior for the president as co-chairman of his campaign, said there aren’t many undecided voters for Obama or Romney to persuade.
“Whether or not some of those who have made up their minds are willing to be persuaded otherwise, I don’t know,” said Strickland said. “There are relatively few people, percentage wise, that are undecided at this point.” Gallup’s daily tracking poll shows the number of undecided voters hovering between 6 percent and 8 percent — compared with 11 percent at this point in 2008. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll put the percentage of undecided voters at 3 percent, down from 12 percent in late July 2008. A Pew survey found 5 percent didn’t know who they’d vote for, half of the number at this point in 2008.
Rachel Maddow did a good show on this topic in which she pointed out that because there are fewer undecided voters, we are further along in the campaigns than in years past. Candidates are more interested in shoring up the base than trying to snag new voters.
Labor day is supposed to be where people start to make up their minds and
pay attention to the campaign. And maybe that used to be true. That is no
longer true.
In the latest polling on the presidential race, whether or not you like how
your favorite candidate is looking in the polling, probably the most
telling, the most noble being picture thing about the polls right now is
that almost nobody is undecided. There`s only a teeny, teeny, teeny
portion of the electorate that has yet to make up its mind between
President Obama and Mitt Romney.
And yes, that teeny, teeny, teeny tiny slice of the population will be
fought over like the last piece of kibble at community puppy feeding time,
but there`s just not much there. There`s just not that many people who are
likely to vote in November who do not yet know who they are going to vote
for.
So that turns old ideas about campaigning on their head. By and large,
here to the election is no longer about persuading people who don`t
know how they`re going to vote. The campaigns are still trying to persuade
people to their side, but mostly they`re trying to get people who they
already know or already on their side to actually prove it, to register to
vote, to get out and vote, and to do both of those things in a way that
makes sure their vote is counted.
We`re already at that part of the campaign. And it`s not -- it`s true, not
just for the candidates themselves, but also for the activist groups and
the interest groups and funders who are increasingly now doing what the
political parties used to do.
Nobody is waiting until Labor Day. Everybody has hit their stride already.
We are in primetime right now.
