There's more than one way to steal an election. Disenfranchisement works.

[BurtWorm]

Kos makes the point:


http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/36220733/397


Too many people are singularly obsessed with Diebold machines, not noticing that black boxes aren't necessary to keep people from voting. Voter integrity issues run far wider and deeper than just electronic voting machines.

It's stuff like this:

In Arizona, about 21,000 voter registration applications were rejected because of inadequate proof of citizenship, required under a 2004 law. Most who were affected lacked up-to-date driver's licenses, birth certificates or passports.

A federal appellate court blocked enforcement of the law -- which also requires voters to show ID at the polls -- last week, four days before the registration deadline. "We're looking at an enormous disparate impact on people of color," says Linda Brown, executive director of the Arizona Advocacy Network.

In Florida, a law setting up new requirements for independent groups that register voters prompted the League of Women Voters to suspend registration drives for five months until a court intervened. In that period, the league could have registered thousands of people, The registration deadline is Tuesday. "You've just got to assume it's going to have an impact," says Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, the league's state president.

In Ohio, a law that made paid workers liable for the validity of the registrations they collect caused several groups to stop signing up voters for two months this summer. By the time courts intervened, the opportunity had been lost for thousands of registrations.

The group ACORN, which advocates for low-income families, wanted to sign up 138,000 Ohioans this year; now it will settle for 100,000. "Those were really the critical months," head organizer Katy Gall says. "In past years, we've met or exceeded our goals."

In Ohio, tens if not hundreds of thousands of voters were disenfranchised. The Conyers report is quite depressing, yet none of it had anything to do with electronic voting machines. It was stuff like inaccurate felon lists, not enough machines in urban districts forcing people to wait in line for up to 8 hours to vote, while in conservative-leaning suburbs, voters were in and out in 15 minutes, thugs outside of polling places, Republican poll observers making bullshit challenges to slow down the lines, ensuring that absentee ballots going to Dem-leaning areas were "lost", and so on.

The fight for voting integrity is a big one, and is much bigger than electronic machines.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

1. Great post, k/r.

[John Gauger]

2. Very true

The biggest issue concerning free and fair elections is the variety of ways the Republicans use law and policy to throw out Democratic votes. The machines are only a small part of their scheme.

[spindrifter]

3. And in numerous states

people who have been convicted of felonies have been disenfranchised by so many hoops to jump through that few are able ever to vote.

[BurtWorm]

5. And, as in Florida 2000, many of those "felons" are just mistaken for one.

But as in Florida, the burden of proof is on the unjustly disenfranchised to prove their right to vote.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

4. We are one House revote and one Senate vote away from 11 million

disfranchisements in 2008, from "Voter ID". HR4844 already has passed the House once, and will pass again unless November changes its composition and agenda drastically. See a great DU thread on a NY Times editorial when the bill passed last month, at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x2184544 .

[BurtWorm]

6. kick