How To Vote

The first time I voted in MA in 1988 I was surprised by the antiquated punch card machines. Previously in NY and PA I had used lever voting machines. In fact I probably would have been confused by the punch cards if the previous week's episode of LA Law hadn't included a segment teaching Benny how to vote with one. Yes, Benny taught me how to vote in MA.

Now there are all kinds of machines but they might not be the problem you face when trying to vote. With election day less than a week away, it's time to cover some of the basics about voting in these modern times.

FindLaw wrote: Eight Years After Bush v. Gore, Why is There Still So Much Election Litigation and What Does This Mean for Voter Confidence in the Electoral Process?

"We haven't made some important changes in election laws that should have been made soon after Florida 2000, and some of the post-2000 changes that were put into place have actually made things worse. Add to that some very heated partisan rhetoric about voter suppression and voter fraud, and we have the recipe for continued legal battles over election administration. These battles are troubling, as they undermine voter confidence in the process, and pose a small, but serious, risk of election meltdown in the case of a close election."

What follows has some interesting figures but I'm not sure about his brief suggestions. I don't know how a standardized federal ballot would help. It would only apply for president since even for congress each state would need it's own candidates listed. I would like to see easier registration and standardized voting systems.

So in spite of all the GOP hype about ACORN it's really not a voter fraud problem. Yes, they paid low wages to help get people registered and some of their employees decided to cheat by trying to register lots of fake names. The thing is, it's unlikely that Mickey Mouse will try to vote on November 4th, so it won't change the election and therefore isn't voter fraud.

But the Republicans aren't stopping with complaining about ACORN. In order to limit voter turnout, they are working to purge voters from registrations for technicalities like slight misspellings of names or addresses or the presence or absence of middle initials (which often are the result of typing mistakes). The problem is, people who have been registered for years might not know they were purged and come to the polls and not be allowed to vote. Daily Kos reported that 13 million voters have been purged.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast explain this extensively in Block the Vote. A lot of this is based on yet another law whose name is the opposite of what it does, in this case the Help America Vote Act (HAVA):

"But from the start, HAVA was corrupted by the involvement of Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, who worked to cram the bill with favors for his clients. (Both Abramoff and a primary author of HAVA, former Rep. Bob Ney, were imprisoned for their role in the conspiracy.) In practice, many of the "reforms" created by HAVA have actually made it harder for citizens to cast a ballot and have their vote counted. In case after case, Republican election officials at the local and state level have used the rules to give GOP candidates an edge on Election Day by creating new barriers to registration, purging legitimate names from voter rolls, challenging voters at the polls and discarding valid ballots."

"To justify this battery of new voting impediments, Republicans cite an alleged upsurge in voting fraud. Indeed, the U.S.-attorney scandal that resulted in the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales began when the White House fired federal prosecutors who resisted political pressure to drum up nonexistent cases of voting fraud against Democrats. "They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments that would scare these alleged hordes of illegal voters away," says David Iglesias, a U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was fired in December 2006. "We took over 100 complaints and investigated for almost two years — but I didn't find one prosecutable case of voter fraud in the entire state of New Mexico.""

Next Tuesday if someone tells you can't vote, what are you supposed to do? Use your cellphone to call 1-866-OUR-VOTE right from the polling site. They have trained volunteers ready to help. Don't accept a provisional ballot unless you have no other choice since they often aren't counted.

There's also Video the Vote. They have volunteers ready to go and video voting problems reported to them to document issues and raise awareness. They already have many videos including this demo of a WV voting machine that was malfunctioning even during the demo.