Topic: Election 2008-Disaster Waiting to Happen | |
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Edited by
Quikstepper
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Mon 10/06/08 05:53 PM
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With judges ruling against laws that stop this kind of thing...voter fraud will be ripe in this year's election...DELIBERATELY!
Election 2008: The Disaster That’s Waiting to Happen Monday, October 6, 2008 7:39 PM By: Dave Eberhart With Election Day fast approaching, Republicans inside the Beltway and across the nation are bracing for massive vote-fraud allegations and a tangle of legal disputes in key swing states. Electoral officials may be facing a “perfect storm” that could throw the election outcome into a legal morass. One of their biggest headaches: The swelling ranks of voters with new addresses due to recent foreclosure proceedings. There are currently over 2 million foreclosure proceedings pending in the United States, according to the Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac organization. Key states such as Ohio and Florida have been especially hard hit. The prospect of a tsunami of voters with outdated addresses showing up at polling places has election officials worried. “It’s a big potential concern,” Daniel Tokaji, an Ohio State law professor and election expert, tells Newsmax. Also, officials’ ability to detect fraudulent absentee ballots from those who recently moved has never been tested as it will be this November. Several other factors raise the specter of massive balloting snafus and widespread allegations of voter fraud: The extraordinary number of newly registered voters, especially those enlisted by organizations such as ACORN with a reputation for bogus registrations. Republican Sens. John Danforth of Missouri and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, who are running the McCain-Palin 2008 Honest and Open Election Committee, say that on Election Day some polling places are kept open longer, to intentionally favor one candidate. Danforth and Rudman also point out that in Ohio in the last election, voter registrations exceeded the number of voting-age people in four counties. Could this happen again? they ask. In Nevada, nearly 1,000 felons were registered illegally in 2004. In Wisconsin, Milwaukee election officials recently turned in 32 more voter registration workers to the district attorney’s office for possible prosecution, bringing the total cases pending to 39. The Ohio secretary of state is, in effect, disenfranchising voter who relied on printed applications for absentee ballots, claiming they shouldn’t get a ballot because all of the appropriate boxes were not checked. “So we are concerned that a lot of people who want to vote absentee in Ohio are not going to be able to do so,” Danforth said. There is a growing shortage of volunteer poll workers as that group ages: In March 2002, an unprecedented number of poll workers didn’t report for work in Los Angeles County. Almost 125 precincts opened late, and one didn’t open at all. Fund also reports on a ticking time bomb: Since 2000, elections offices in upwards of 70 percent to 75 percent of the nation have changed voting equipment. Kim Brace of Election Data Services warns: “Every time you make a change, it has the potential of causing problems.” Inevitably, the biggest problems occur the first time the new equipment is used, she said. A recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that 40 percent of Americans believe there is either significant vote fraud or active suppression of people who want to vote. At a time of heightened security and mundane rules that require citizens to show ID to travel and even rent a video, only half the states require some form of documentation to vote. Another major concern this year is provisional balloting, which allows voters not on the rolls to complete a ballot that will later count if they turn out to be eligible to vote. Although close to 2 million provisional ballots were cast in the 2004 presidential election, several states have since clarified how the provisional ballots work, and have begun to publicize their availability. John Fund, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal’s Web site and the paper’s daily “Political Diary” and author of the recently revised and updated book, , tells Newsmax that “there will be many more than 2 million provisional ballots this year, driven in part by hordes of new voters just showing up and demanding one.” He warns: “A tug of war over provisional ballots may be inevitable in key states where the margin of victory is no greater than the number of provisional ballots cast. Both campaigns would once again send squadrons of lawyers to any closely contested state to watch and argue as every single provisional ballot in the state is reviewed and a determination is made as to whether it should be counted. Results could once again be delayed for weeks after Election Day.” Ohio State’s Tokaji contends that most voter fraud allegations are exaggerated in order to justify the suppression of voter turnout. But he agrees that if the election is close, provisional ballots will probably be a source of major legal disputes. “I do think there’s a real risk that in a state with a close election and a lot of provision ballots this could turn into the 2008 version of Bush-Gore. You could have a major fight over whether and how ballots should be counted, only this time it would be over provisional ballots rather than punch-cards,” he says. http://www.newsmax.com/headlines/election_voter_fraud/2008/10/06/137898.html |
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Edited by
mnhiker
on
Mon 10/06/08 06:46 PM
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