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By November 4, it's estimated that nearly one-third of the American electorate will have cast their votes, between mail-in absentee balloting and states that allow early voting in person, according to the Pew Center on the States. However, early reports cast doubt that early voting rules will head off the kinds of problems that led to charges of voter suppression during the 2000 and 2004 election. Here's just a few of the problems that are being reported around the country.
Here's Marcia Wade's report for Blackenterprise.com on problems in Florida:
At the West Delray Beach Library in Palm Beach County, elderly
people complained about standing up for an hour or more in the sun and
younger ones complained that voting protocol exposed their ballots,
making the process less private, according to the Huffington Post.
“Lines are a sign of a healthy democracy, and certainly our
democracy is healthy today,” said Florida Secretary of State Kurt
Browning to the Associated Press.
Paulette at Let Us Talk, warns about "early voting trickery," such as this example from West Virginia:
Some voters in Jackson County, West Virginia have had a hard time voting for candidates they want to win. Virginia
Matheney and Calvin Thomas said touch-screen machines in the county
clerk’s office in Ripley kept switching their votes from Democratic to
Republican candidates...
These problems come on top of legal wrangling in several states over ballot integrity issues. BlogHer CE Jill Zimon has been tracking lawsuits filed by Republican officials there seeking to compel the Secretary of State to examine thousands of allegedly suspect new voter registration records. The Secretary of Stat, Jennifer Brunner, says that local election boards can do the checks.
BlogHer community member Myrna the Minx charges Republicans with actively seeking to suppress votes:
The list of Republican voter suppression efforts is LONG. That’s what
makes their hysterical outrage over a few bad apples who fraudulently
registered Mickey Mouse and Tony Romo while working for ACORN utterly
laughable.
Nation magazine editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel reports that charges of possible voter suppression are pouring in:
...The National Campaign for Fair Elections' hotline (866.OUR.VOTE /
866.687.8683) is already receiving roughly a thousand calls a day;
while the majority of these are requests for information, some concern
problems with registration. The New York Times reports that tens of thousands of voters may have been illegally purged from the rolls in swing states....
Megan at Jezebel, cites articles in Mother Jones and Rolling Stone article that blame the Help America Vote Act of 2002. She also offers tips to "try to make sure that your vote is counted."
In September, BlogHer CE Laina Dawes noted that Jack and Jill Politics have set up a Voter Suppression wiki, a non-partisan forum where bloggers can track any instances of voter suppression during the upcoming 2008 Election." Their Incident Tracker is worth a gander.
What are you hearing about early voting and voter suppression charges in your neck of the woods?
