chess online
| From | Message | ||
|---|---|---|---|
|
 how the right hopes to winVoter Harassment, Circa 2012 This is how voter intimidation worked in 1966: White teenagers in Americus, Ga., harassed black citizens in line to vote, and the police refused to intervene. Black plantation workers in Mississippi had to vote in plantation stores, overseen by their bosses. Black voters in Choctaw County, Ala., had to hand their ballots directly to white election officials for inspection. This is how it works today: In an ostensible hunt for voter fraud, a Tea Party group, True the Vote, descends on a largely minority precinct and combs the registration records for the slightest misspelling or address error. It uses this information to challenge voters at the polls, and though almost every challenge is baseless, the arguments and delays frustrate those in line and reduce turnout. The thing that’s different from the days of overt discrimination is the phony pretext of combating voter fraud. Voter identity fraud is all but nonexistent, but the assertion that it might exist is used as an excuse to reduce the political rights of minorities, the poor, students, older Americans and other groups that tend to vote Democratic. In The Times on Monday, Stephanie Saul described how the plan works. True the Vote grew out of a Tea Party group in Texas, the King Street Patriots, with the assistance of Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by the Koch brothers that works to elect conservative Republicans. It has developed its own software to check voter registration lists against driver’s license and property records. Those kinds of database matches are notoriously unreliable because names and addresses are often slightly different in various databases, but the group uses this technique to challenge more voters. In 2009 and 2010, for example, the group focused on the Houston Congressional district represented by Sheila Jackson Lee, a black Democrat. After poring over the records for five months, True the Vote came up with a list of 500 names it considered suspicious and challenged them with election authorities. Officials put these voters on “suspense,” requiring additional proof of address, but in most cases voters had simply changed addresses. That didn’t stop the group from sending dozens of white “poll watchers” to precincts in the district during the 2010 elections, deliberately creating friction with black voters. On the day of the recall election of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, the group used inaccurate lists to slow down student voting at Lawrence University in Appleton with intrusive identity checks. Three election “observers,” including one from True the Vote, were so disruptive that a clerk gave them two warnings, but the ploy was effective: many students gave up waiting in line and didn’t vote. True the Vote, now active in 30 states, hopes to train hundreds of thousands of poll watchers to make the experience of voting like “driving and seeing the police following you,” as one of the group’s leaders put it. (Not surprisingly, the group is also active in the voter ID movement, with similar goals.) These activities “present a real danger to the fair administration of elections and to the fundamental freedom to vote,” as a recent report by Common Cause and Demos put it. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits intimidation or interference in the act of voting, but the penalties are fairly light. Many states have tougher laws, but they won’t work unless law enforcement officials use them to crack down on the illegal activities — handed down from Jim Crow days — of True the Vote and similar groups. |
||
|
It turns |
||
|
which is where |
||
|
LOL?? |
||
|
i am laughing |
||
|
Jeff |
||
|
bias stinky, you are so unaware of your on bias it's not even funny. |
||
|
|
||
|
Jeff |
||
|
|
||
|
Chaz |
||
|
Nevertheless, this does point out how a compromise on this issue might be managed, especially post-election in order to take the politics out of this particular process. I believe both Dems and Reps could agree to this. |
||
|
dmaestro 22-Sep-12, 11:24 |
|
||
|
Chaz |
||
|
|
||
|
dmaestro 23-Sep-12, 22:21 |
GOP Plan to Block 10 Million Hispanics ========================================== Voting laws may disenfranchise 10 million Hispanic U.S. citizens: study By Patricia Zengerle | Reuters WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New voting laws in 23 of the 50 states could keep more than 10 million Hispanic U.S. citizens from registering and voting, a new study said on Sunday, a number so large it could affect the outcome of the November 6 election. The Latino community accounts for more than 10 percent of eligible voters nationally. But the share in some states is high enough that keeping Hispanic voters away from the polls could shift some hard-fought states from support for Democratic President Barack Obama and help his Republican rival, Mitt Romney. The new laws include purges of people suspected of not being citizens in 16 states that unfairly target Latinos, the civil rights group Advancement Project said in the study to be formally released on Monday. Laws in effect in one state and pending in two others require proof of citizenship for voter registration. That imposes onerous and sometimes expensive documentation requirements on voters, especially targeting naturalized American citizens, many of whom are Latino, the liberal group said. Nine states have passed restrictive photo identification laws that impose costs in time and money for millions of Latinos who are citizens but do not yet have the required identification, it said. Republican-led state legislatures have passed most of the new laws since the party won sweeping victories in state and local elections in 2010. They say the laws are meant to prevent voter fraud; critics say they are designed to reduce turnout among groups that typically back Democrats. Decades of study have found virtually no use of false identification in U.S. elections or voting by non-citizens. Activists say the bigger problem in the United States, where most elections see turnout of well under 60 percent, is that eligible Americans do not bother to vote. Nationwide, polls show Obama leading Romney among Hispanic voters by 70 percent to 30 percent or more, and winning that voting bloc by a large margin is seen as an important key to Obama winning re-election. The Hispanic vote could be crucial in some of the battleground states where the election is especially close, such as Nevada, Colorado and Florida. For example, in Florida, 27 percent of eligible voters are Hispanic. With polls showing Obama's re-election race against Romney very tight in the state, a smaller turnout by Hispanic groups that favor Obama could tilt the vote toward the Republican. (Editing by Christopher Wilson) |
||
|
dmaestro 25-Sep-12, 04:49 |
========================================= Poll: 0 percent of blacks for Mitt Romney By MACKENZIE WEINGER | 8/22/12 President Barack Obama continues to beat Mitt Romney among African American voters with a staggering 94 percent to 0 percent lead, according to a poll released Tuesday. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll — which gives Obama and Vice President Joe Biden a small lead over Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan — shows Obama has a massive lead over his Republican rival in the key political base of African-American voters, NBCNews.com reported. Obama also beats Romney among Latinos, voters under 35 and women, while Romney does better than Obama with whites, rural voters and seniors. The poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters Aug. 16-20. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. Read more: www.politico.com |
Log in 
