Other Voting and Election Day Issues

Other Voting and Election Day Issues

Not everyone should vote

If You're Too Incompetent or Lazy to Get ID, We're Better Off If You Don't Vote. Liberals have dug up some 93-year-old codger in Pennsylvania who's too lazy or incompetent to get ID so she can vote and they're demanding we leave the election in that state wide open to fraud in order to cater to her.

Repeal the 26th Amendment!. Adopted in 1971 at the tail end of the Worst Generation's anti-war protests, the argument for allowing children to vote was that 18-year-olds could drink and be conscripted into the military, so they ought to be allowed to vote. But 18-year-olds aren't allowed to drink anymore. We no longer have a draft. In fact, while repealing the 26th Amendment, we ought to add a separate right to vote for members of the military, irrespective of age. As we have learned from ObamaCare, young people are not considered adults until age 26, at which point they are finally forced to get off their parents' health care plans.

If You Don't Know What's Going On, Don't Vote. No doubt many of you could get caught up in that excitement and be tempted to exercise your Constitutional privilege to vote. Not because you know what's going on, but because somebody told you it's the "right thing to do." Trust me, it's not. There are millions of Americans with a huge stake in Tuesday's outcome, and the thought of some vapid nitwits negating our carefully considered choices is a bit nauseating. One day off from self-inflicted ignorance in order to "Rock the Vote" simply doesn't cut it.

Freedom is Hard Work. The Founders were endlessly concerned about giving ordinary Americans an unprecedented measure of liberty as offered by the Constitution they were drafting. They wondered if regular folk could muster the sophistication necessary to make rational, intelligent decisions at the polls... Fast forward to 2009 and it's easy to see why the Founders were so worried. In spite of various streams of round-the-clock news and data, most of our electorate is misinformed, blissfully ignorant or simply apathetic with respect to the means by which they are governed.

We would be better off if fewer people voted. Does this seem out-of-line? Suggesting that people who vote should be American citizens, non-felons, informed, not-crazy, and able to speak English if they're going to be voting? I don't think so. That's why if anything, we'd be better off encouraging people like that to stay home, instead of encouraging them to vote.

Stay home; don't vote. Here they come — the earnest exhortations to get out and vote. You'll be hearing it from television newscasters, MTV, newspaper ads, radio talk show hosts, weathermen, schoolteachers ... you get the idea. Everyone has a duty to vote, they will say. No they don't. If a person is utterly ignorant about matters of public policy, then he or she has a solemn obligation to refrain from voting. The percentage of people who fall into the utterly ignorant category is estimated to be about 25 percent of eligible voters.

Are facts obsolete? People who have made up their minds and don't want to be confused by the facts are a danger to the whole society. Since the votes of such people count just as much as the votes of people who know what they are talking about, politicians have every incentive to pass laws and create policies that pander to ignorant notions, if those notions are widespread.

Get-out-the-dopes drives: While it is true that each succeeding generation is more deeply immersed in a decadent popular culture and more devoid of important knowledge than the one that preceded it, the existence of uninformed people is not unprecedented. What is unprecedented, though, is our obsession with encouraging such people to exercise greater control over our lives and those of our progeny, over policies that can send us down a road toward prosperity or one toward destruction, by encouraging them to vote. What I'm talking about is that another election is approaching and, as always, we see organizations that launch "Get Out the Vote Drives."

A Skeptic's View of Voting: Let's face it, ladies and gentlemen, if we raised the voting age to, say, 25, the Democratic party would go the way of the dodo and the Whigs. Liberals want young kids voting for pretty much the same cynical reason they want to extend suffrage to illegal aliens, convicted felons and dead people. It takes a certain mentality, a certain degree of gullibility, after all, to believe … that "hope" and "change" are any more profound and meaningful than "Tastes great, less filling" or "My bologna has a first name."

Generation Gap: Today, Americans under the age of 30 are by far the most Democratic age group in the electorate. They are also by far the most liberal age group. In the 2006 national exit poll, self-identified liberals outnumbered self-identified conservatives 34 percent to 25 percent. In contrast, self-identified conservatives outnumbered self-identified liberals by 33 percent to 18 percent among those 30 and older.

The ignorant American voter. Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, observes in a new study for the Cato Institute that voters tend to be "abysmally ignorant of even very basic political information." This may not be news to scholars, who have documented it in depressing detail, "but the sheer depth of most individual voters' ignorance is shocking to observers not familiar with the research."

Too Uninformed to Vote? A very high percentage of the U.S. electorate isn't very well qualified to vote, if by "qualified" you mean having a basic understanding of our government, its functions and its challenges. Almost half of the American public doesn't know that each state gets two senators. More than two-thirds can't explain the gist of what the Food and Drug Administration does.

Could It Be that Florida Democrats Are Too Stupid to Vote? Of course, the "uncounted votes" which somehow always are found in boxes, or in this case, machines, that were "sitting in a warehouse uncounted" have also been unsupervised by pollwatchers. In both Chicago and in Miami-Dade, this problem only seems to afflict Democratic Precincts in close elections.

On the other hand...
Pandering to the crackpot left: You'll recall that last month, Mrs. Heinz Kerry put on her shiniest tinfoil hat and blamed the Democrats' loss in November on rigged voting machines. As reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mrs. Heinz Kerry openly questioned the election results and fixated on areas of the country where optical scanners were used to record votes. "Two brothers own 80 percent of the machines used in the United States," Mrs. Heinz Kerry intoned, and it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."

Can Your Vote Be Bought? Given his incompetence in handling the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it was surprising to many that Mayor Ray Nagin was reelected. A poster on the Huffington Post put this absurdity down to the stupidity of the New Orleans voters. Next month, we'll see if New Yorkers will rate the same judgment. Both Mayor Bloomberg and many City Council members will be seeking reelection despite residents voting for term limits twice.

Bad ideas

San Joaquin County looking into absentee-only voting ballots. By 2012, voters in San Joaquin County may not have a polling place in which to cast their ballot. Instead, they may be required to vote by absentee ballot only. County officials are exploring the idea of a vote-by-mail-only system because it could save the county considerable money, Registrar of Voters Austin Erdman told the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday [8/31/2010].

The Editor says...
Something tells me this idea originated at ACORN.

Vote system that elected NY Hispanic could expand. The court-ordered election that allowed residents of one New York town to flip the lever six times for one candidate — and produced a Hispanic winner — could expand to other towns where minorities complain their voices aren't being heard.

How Is Rigging Elections Fair to Immigrants? A Nebraska town wants renters to prove they are in the country legally, and Port Chester, N.Y., was forced to swallow a goofy voting scheme that makes sense only if the aim is to erase the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. Under the plan, imposed by a federal judge in response to a 2006 Justice Department civil-rights suit, each voter in the board of trustees election got six votes. A voter could give all six votes to one candidate, or divide them among several.

Trying to Make History, With 6 Votes Per Person. No one is sure whether the complicated new process, which emerged from a bitter and expensive legal battle, will have the desired effect — or plunge the community into a new round of litigation.

The Demise of One Man, One Vote. In yet another scheme to radically transform our country, progressives have quietly carried out their plan to incrementally disenfranchise citizens and grant extraordinary voting rights to non-citizens. This is accomplished by challenging requirements to prove citizenship when registering to vote and replacing the "one man, one vote" principle with proportional voting, a voting method promoted by the far-left Congressional Progressive Caucus as one of their progressive promises to America.

Residents get 6 votes each in suburban NY election. [Arthur] Furano cast multiple votes on the instructions of a federal judge and the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a new election system crafted to help boost Hispanic representation.

The Editor says...
Why stop at six votes? Why not give a dozen votes to everyone who is not (for example) a white male? How about allowing ten votes per Democrat, and one vote per Republican? All in the interest of fairness, of course.

Goodbye to One Man, One Vote. If you thought that "one man, one vote" reflected the full flowering of representative democracy, think again. In the village of Port Chester, N.Y., just a few towns north of my locality in Westchester County, there is a new system. It's "one (minority) man, six votes" — brought to us courtesy of the U.S. Department of Injustice and a lunkhead of a federal judge named Stephen Robinson.

Why Tea Partiers Say Throw the Bums Out: Demoting all major economic and corruption problems facing our country to the bottom of the agenda, the House devoted a long afternoon [4/29/2010] and 12 roll-call votes to passing a bill to force U.S. statehood on Puerto Rico. Of course this ploy had to be Nancy Pelosi's doing, but she made it bipartisan by getting 39 Republicans to vote with her. ... [T]he new vote prescribed in the mischievously named "Democracy" bill will set an all-time record for dishonest elections. ... The bill would allow persons who were born in Puerto Rico but now live and vote in the United States to vote in these Puerto Rican referenda. That means giving the vote to a group based on ethnicity rather than on residency, and should be held unconstitutional under the 15th Amendment.

More about the 51st State.

UVR = Universal Voter Registration
How to Lock Democrats in Power: A variety of moves being undertaken by Democrats are designed to ensure their permanent hold on power through engineering a new electorate. ... [John] Fund asserts that UVR will open the nation up to massive vote fraud. The reasons are straightforward and many. Among them, (1) registering people using existing government databases will result in many duplicates, (2) many of the lists contain names of illegal immigrants; and (3) the list could be expanded to include felons currently ineligible to vote.

Universal voter registration: Letting crooks & illegals vote. The proposal is to register everyone on every welfare list, everyone getting unemployment insurance, everyone with a driver's license, everyone who has had run-ins with the legal system, everyone owning any property — basically everyone on every list the government keeps. People will be registered to vote whether or not they want to be registered. If individuals are on any public record, they will be automatically registered. Obviously a lot of illegal aliens have driver's licenses, and many get other government benefits. Quite a few have rap sheets.

New voting law taking effect. A key change to Iowa's voting system takes effect Jan. 1. This year the Iowa Legislature approved same-day voter registration. That means Iowans will be able to register to vote on Election Day.

Voting initiative could create a millionaire. With supporters hoping to boost voter participation, an initiative filed Monday [5/22/2006] for [Arizona's] November election would provide $1 million to one randomly chosen Arizona voter just for casting a ballot.

[How would that improve the quality of elected officials?]

Miscellaneous issues

Texas Wins One for Judicial Restraint. On January 20, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the decision of a three-judge federal court in Texas in a case that shows the Voting Rights Act at its most unworkable. The Court's ruling highlights the importance of a state's legislative policy judgments in redistricting work and, in so doing, reinforces the importance of judicial restraint.

White Air Force Vet Prohibited from Registering to Vote Because of Race. Believe it or not, there is a place where the American flag flies that citizens of particular races are excluded from voting. Citizens not of the chosen race are not allowed to vote in an important election. White and Asian citizens of the United States there are even prohibited from registering to vote for the election. As implausible as it sounds, such is the law on the island of Guam, a territory where the American flag flies and the Voting Rights Act applies, along with the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. Unless you are a Chamorro (a "native"), you are not allowed to register to vote for a certain election involving the future of Guam. If you are white, or Filipino, you are prohibited from participating.

The Left Owns the Election Law Industry. Leftist foundations, litigators and organizations have established permanent structures designed to alter election outcomes through policy advocacy and strategic litigation. ... They bring lawsuits under federal and state statutes ranging from the Voting Rights Act, Motor Voter law and the Help America Vote Act. They station teams of election observers in polling places around the nation every election to fuel their litigation and their media efforts. Almost nobody opposes their efforts.

Montgomery County voter rolls mistakenly boosted by 3,000. Montgomery County [Pennsylvania] mistakenly inflated its voter rolls for years, registering more than 3,000 people as independents who never meant to sign up to vote at all, officials said Friday [5/13/2011]. The revelation — less than a week before Tuesday's primary election — won't necessarily open the floodgates to a new wave of voters. Only registered Republicans or Democrats can cast ballots in their respective primaries.

A Reform the Tea Party Should Embrace. Gerrymandering is a perfect example of bloated corruption in American government today. Ending gerrymandering is not hard. Congress could pass a very simple statute like this: "All legislative districts in the United States shall be drawn compact, contiguous, and as nearly as possible along existing county or parish borders."

All of Harris County's voting machines destroyed in 3-alarm north Houston fire. Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman this morning said she is confident of timely, clean elections in November, even as a fire that destroyed the county's entire inventory of 10,000 electronic voting machines still burned. Kaufman urged voters to cast their ballots early to help the county cope with a possible shortage of equipment on election day.

It's Time to Worry About Houston. Voter fraud and a suspicious fire threaten the November elections in Texas' largest city.

New York State Opens a Door to Vote Fraud. In the era before the Australian "secret ballot" came to America, voting could be a tricky — and often violent — proposition. Goons from such big-city machines as Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall knew how you voted, and if you knew what was good for you, you voted the right way. All that changed with the secret ballot. What you did behind the curtain stayed behind the curtain. American elections got a lot cleaner and fairer. But with an absentee ballot, party activists can "assist" you in filling out those ballots as they cannot "assist" you at your local polling place. The possibility for intimidation increases exponentially once those in power — or those who lust for power — know how you are voting.

Value Added Tax and Illegals. Many Americans believe voting is the most important thing they do as U.S. citizens. No. It isn't. The most important thing good American citizens can and should do is to become involved in the candidate selection process before voting. That means you need to attend local caucuses or whatever pre-ballot candidate selection process your State offers. You must become informed about candidates so you know to whom political power is being given before their name appears on a ballot.

Obama and the White House Chicago Boys. Barack Obama has a problem. His polls numbers are dropping and his policies are fueling an angry backlash across America. The Democratic party is held in disrepute, and congressional Democrats are dropping like flies. This imperils Obama's radical agenda and his own 2012 prospects. What to do? Game the system and rig the future elections. That is how things are done in the streets of Chicago.

Ohio Election Fraud: Convicted Felons Illegally Worked for Anti-Smoking Initiative. Among other violations, 47 felons were hired illegally by the advocacy group SmokeFree America to collect signatures for issue five, a ballot initiative to ban smoking in Ohio's small businesses. Kidnappers, thieves and rapists were hired to collect signatures and addresses despite the fact that Ohio election law prohibits felons from working petition workers.

A Wave of Likely Voter Fraud and the Linguistic Ripple. The solution [to unauthorized voting] is not yet — and perhaps never may be — politically acceptable. Two possibilities come to mind. One would be a Federal or State identification card, driver's license or otherwise, which displays not less than full name, home address, voting situs (township, ward, precinct, etc.), date current residence acquired, photograph. Another would be a document created and certified under State law evidencing that the holder owned the property of his or her residence, fee simple or condominium, or rented pursuant to a written lease. Simplest of all, State law also could require advance registration of six months, preferably one year, perhaps with an exception for active-duty military personnel and their spouses.

Pro-Obama, Muslim-led voter registration in mosques. A leading critic of Islam isn't surprised there has been virtually no coverage or action taken against a Muslim group that has been running an illegal "get out the vote" campaign in swing-state mosques.

UK elections vulnerable to fraud — e-voting no solution. An investigation into the UK's electoral system has found serious failings with security ahead of London's Mayoral elections on Thursday [4/24/2008]. The Rowntree Reform Trust's report Purity of Elections in the UK: Causes for Concern highlighted weaknesses with postal voting and the inaccuracy of the electoral roll as the biggest threats to British democracy.

ID confusion could nullify mail ballots. More than 35,000 newly registered Colorado voters could see their mail ballots tossed out because of confusion over the need to include a copy of their ID with their votes. The state requires county clerks to verify the identification of all new voters. Often, it's as simple as comparing a driver's license number on a voter registration form to the state's motor vehicle database.

Human Error Not Machine, Found During Recount. New Hampshire's presidential primary recount has drawn national attention and a great deal of scrutiny from hundreds of voters across the nation who think there could be a conspiracy, but officials said the minor problems that have been found so far were the result of human error.

Wisconsin court: Voter registration official did not commit a crime. The supervisor of a voter registration drive did not commit a crime during the 2004 election when he failed to stop others from submitting fraudulent voter registration forms, a state appeals court ruled Wednesday [4/25/2007]. The court reversed the conviction of Damien Jones on one count of falsifying statements relating to voter registration as party to a crime. Jones, 27, supervised a voter registration drive for a liberal-leaning group in Racine and Kenosha. The appeals court said he was guilty of poor supervision but that is not a crime.

Voter Registration Is the New Battleground. In just about every election, understaffed polling sites, malfunctioning voting machines and outdated voter data are reported. Such bureaucratic problems often are rolled into the divide between Democrats and Republicans over who should vote and how — a battle that has become more intense since the 2000 Florida recount.

Voter deception bill passes House. Those who knowingly convey false information with the intent to keep others from voting would face up to five years in prison under voter deception legislation that passed the House on Monday. The legislation, passed by voice vote, was spearheaded by Democrats who cited alleged incidents during the 2006 elections of minorities, immigrants and other legal voters being misled about election dates, guided to the wrong polling sites or told they were ineligible to vote.

Feds sue Philadelphia over voting rights. The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday [10/13/2006] sued the city of Philadelphia, claiming it violated the rights of Spanish-speaking voters. The complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said the city failed to provide language assistance at the polls to most Spanish-speaking voters in recent elections, the department said.

A Repeat of 2004 Philly Voter Chaos, Fraud. GOP Election Board members have been tossed out of polling stations in at least half a dozen polling stations in Philadelphia because of their party status. A Pennsylvania judge previously ruled that court-appointed poll watchers could [NOT be] removed from their boards by an on-site election judge, but that is exactly what is happening, according to sources on the ground. It is the duty of election board workers to monitor and guard the integrity of the voting process.

Audit finds $3.8 million in election funds improperly spent. More than $3.8 million in federal election money was spent improperly or without required documentation by former Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, federal auditors said in a report released Wednesday [12/21/2005].

Study finds the 2004 election was the most accurate of modern times. The 2004 national elections were the most accurate of modern times with nearly 99 percent of all ballots cast registering a vote for president, according to a new study by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Study Shows Voting is Harder in Some States. Some states have enacted laws that make it harder to vote instead of correcting ballot problems that have plagued various parts of the country since the 2000 election, according to a study released Thursday. Describing their findings as "troubling," voting reform advocates sampled 10 states with past election difficulties.

Problems Plague Election Administrators. Wendy Noren had all the voting machines she needed. What she lacked was the stuff that made them work. So the elections supervisor of Boone County, Mo., didn't sleep Tuesday night. Instead, she worked furiously into the next morning, outlining a last-minute election plan for a county of 150,000 people, a plan that relied on pen and paper and hand-counted votes and that's with the country's midterm election little more than two weeks away.

Federal judge invalidates Florida 100-foot exit poll restriction. A federal judge Tuesday [10/24/2006] declared unconstitutional a Florida law that prohibits exit polling within 100 feet of a voting place, finding there was no evidence that such surveys are disruptive or threaten access to voting.

Californians are sick of voting. Californians set a record in 2002: Fewer turned out for a primary election than ever before — just 34.6% of registered voters. Even fewer may turn out for June's primary.

[There's nothing wrong with low voter turnout. Those who are informed and motivated will vote every time. Many Democrats show great determination to get to the polls on election day, even if they're dead!]

Voting Equipment Usage in the United States: Voting equipment maps and reports provide statistics on the types of voting equipment and used by election jurisdictions in the United States. Information from voting equipment maps is summarized on a voting equipment report that also includes names of voting equipment vendors and information on voting precincts, population, and registered voters.

Half of Lost Voter Records Found in Denver. More than half of the 150,000 voting records reported missing from city election offices have been found, raising hopes that they were simply misplaced during a move in February, not lost or stolen. The lost microfilmed voter registration files records contain Social Security numbers, addresses and other personal information from 1989 to 1998.

ACLU, Chesterfield again at odds. The ACLU of Virginia is offering its legal services to Chesterfield County voters who are denied absentee ballots for refusing to give their Social Security number to election officials. The issue gained attention this month after Chesterfield election officials blocked a county voter from submitting an absentee ballot after he refused to provide his Social Security number.

Maryland judge nixes early voting. Early voting in Maryland is illegal because the state's constitution allows only one day to cast ballots, an Anne Arundel County Circuit Court judge ruled Friday [8/11/2006].

Ohio's odd numbers: No conspiracy theorist, and no fan of John Kerry's, the author nevertheless found the Ohio polling results impossible to swallow: Given what happened in that key state on Election Day 2004, both democracy and common sense cry out for a court-ordered inspection of its new voting machines.

The drunks may save our election system. The burden in a criminal case is on the state to show that the [breathalyzer] machine was certified. … Failing that, of course, you can have a "Wizard of Oz" effect, where the man behind the curtain presses a secret button and the machine says "drunk." [But it's very different in the case of electronic voting machines.]

Elections commission fines Oliphant $10,000. The Florida Elections Commission on Friday [11/18/2005] fined a former Broward County elections supervisor $10,000 for neglecting her duties during a botched 2002 primary. The commissioners said Miriam Oliphant willfully neglected her duties, which caused dozens of polls to open late and close early in the county during that year's gubernatorial primary.

Felony conviction looms over official. Marc Hoskins won a Galveston City Council seat May 13 even though he acknowledged publicly that he is a convicted felon — a fact that usually bars a person from holding elected office in Texas.

Why is it so hard to run an honest election? My advice is to vote carefully. Read the instructions carefully, and ask questions if you are confused. Follow the instructions carefully, checking every step as you go. Remember that it might be impossible to correct a problem once you've finished voting. In many states … you can request a paper ballot if you have any worries about the voting machine.

Academia Still Fixated on John Kerry. John Kerry conceded defeat weeks ago, and President Bush has already revamped his Cabinet. But as states certify final election returns, an academic debate over their accuracy is heating up. None of the experts examining the returns has discovered voting anomalies significant enough to have swung the election.

Remember the Florida 'Chad' Fiasco? Uniquely, the 4.14% double-punch rate in Palm Beach County was four times larger than it was in any other voting precinct in the United States using a punch card ballot. The double-punch rate in the presidential race in the rest of Florida was 1%. The double-punch error rate for the US congressional and senatorial candidates nationwide and in Florida was also 1%. What is even more strange is that in the precincts which experienced the 4.14% double-punch rate at the top of the ticket, the double-punches for the congressional and senatorial candidates mirrored the national average of 1%. The only explanation for the 4.14% double punch rate at the top of the ticket is that precinct workers were pre-punching the ballots before giving them to the voters. In Palm Beach County, Pat Buchanan did not have any supporters handing out ballots to voters standing in line to vote. All of the double punched ballots had a vote cast for Gore. There were no double-punched ballots for Buchanan and Bush — only Buchanan and Gore or Bush and Gore.

Stop and think. While many people are urging us to vote — regardless of for whom, for what, or for what reason — there are very few urging us to do what is far more important: Stop and think! Voting is not a matter of personal expression but a serious responsibility for choosing what course this country will take in the years — and decades — ahead.

Do Voters Choose Politicians, or Do Politicians Choose Voters? Gerrymandering, campaign finance reform, and public subsidies are three ways that government intervention has reduced political competition, according to a new study.

Voting chaos looms for American election. The electronic voting system designed for the forthcoming American election is fundamentally flawed and could undermine the trustworthiness of the entire US democratic process, a scientist has told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Asleep at the wheel. In spite of what you hear from your government school teacher, your leftist college professor, or that smiling talking head on television, we are not a democracy. Never were. Weren't supposed to be. You won't find the word "democracy" in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States or in any constitution of any of the 50 States. There's a reason for that. Our founding fathers hated the idea of democracy. They knew that a government of majority rule would dissolve into a tyranny of plunder and chaos.

Lorain County should resist DOJ claims of bilingual voting woes. Lorain County Board of Elections officials should resist efforts by the U.S. Department of Justice to impose what could be costly and unnecessary additional bilingual services to voters who only speak and understand Spanish. For decades, the county elections board has provided bilingual translators for Spanish-speaking voters. Elections Director Paul Adams said the board has not received any complaints from Spanish-speaking voters of not being able to cast ballots. Apparently, that's not good enough for the Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder.

The Democrats' Recall Bomb. The left-liberals have got themselves a new political weapon. Democrat inability to prevail at the ballot box has led to tactics of desperation. Falling numbers of Democratic voters ... [has resulted in] the introduction of all sorts of novel electoral tactics, usually backroom stuff that would be familiar to Boss Tweed and Frank Hague: endless recounts spiced up by ballots appearing out of quantum black holes, opponents being denied places on the ballot by legal action (a Cook County special strongly endorsed by none other than Barack Obama), voting by felons and illegal immigrants. Frivolous recall elections are simply the latest of these.

Flaws seen in absentee ballot program. Less than 5 percent of 2 million military personnel in states that are home to 80 percent of U.S. troops voted last year, the report by the Military Voter Protection Project (MVP) said.

Web sites:

VerifiedVoting.org: Will your vote count in the next election? Maybe not! How will we even know? We advocate the use of voter-verified paper ballots (VVPBs) for all elections in the United States, so voters can inspect individual permanent records of their ballots before they are cast and so meaningful recounts may be conducted. We also insist that electronic voting equipment and software be open to public scrutiny and that random, surprise recounts be conducted on a regular basis to audit election equipment. Paperless electronic voting systems are failing us. Worse yet, resistance from the elections official community is astonishing!

Voter Action "... is a not-for-profit organization that provides legal, research and organizing support to ensure election integrity in the United States. Our current focus is to protect as many jurisdictions as possible from the acquisition and use of privatized, electronic voting systems which have been shown to have the most severe security risks and records of inaccuracy and unreliability."

FEC web page about the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

Full text of the Act - HTML version PDF version

Capitol Grilling: Electronic Voting Machine Controversy. (Discussion forum)

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has a very good page about voting in general and electronic voting in particular.

Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century. Black Box Voting is defined as any voting system in which the mechanism for recording and/or tabulating the vote are hidden from the voter, and/or the mechanism lacks a tangible record of the vote cast.

List of voting machine errors. There are several ways the mechanical lever machines can be rigged. [But] computerized voting opens the door for a single individual to manipulate votes in elections across the country.

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