McClatchy Newspapers put up a story dated Wednesday, September 26, 2007 on whether voting law changes made in Florida and Ohio, the two states with questionable voting for the 2000 and the 2004 elections, will hold down the Democratic vote in 2008. The article wonders whether the Ohio voting law changes will result in voter "caging" in 2008.
Voter caging goes like this. An organization, say the state GOP, engages in a targeted mass mailing aimed at lower income voters. Studies have shown that such voters are more likely to move and not have forwarding addresses. If the pieces sent out in the mass mailing come back as non-deliverable then that fact is used as the basis for voter challenges in a general election. The intent is to drive down the voter turn-out in Democratic areas by tying up the polling places with challenges on the day of the election.
The article notes that a change made in Ohio law in 2006 requires each election board to send out a non-forwardable notice to every voter on its rolls 60 days before an election. This is sent out at county expense. Because it is a public document, it can be obtained by anyone seeking to challenge voters on election day. This means, as Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner points out, that effectively counties are paying for obtaining data that could be used in a voter caging project.
One of the enduring myths promulgated by Republicans is that there are hordes of low-income and minority voters illegal voting in elections. Never mind the fact that there is almost no evidence of such activity, they believe it. Therefore they justify laws like the change made in Ohio as being a measure to combat election fraud. If it has the supposedly "unintended" effect of suppressing voting by Democratic leaning groups, well that is just the price that has to be paid for election integrity.
Now, of course, it is possible that the McClatchy article raises concerns that aren't justified. The change in Ohio's law, for example, took place in 2006 and there were no reports of widespread challenges in last year's election. Then again, GOP efforts to suppress voting are usually reserved for presidential elections. When asked by McClatchy whether the Ohio GOP would engage in voter caging in 2008 a spokesman for the party refused to comment.
This is why we believe that Democratic organizations should encourage the use of absentee ballots in Ohio. The GOP believes that their voters are more likely to vote absentee than are Democratic voters. Therefore, when they passed the Ohio voting changes in 2006, they made it relatively easier to cast an absentee ballot than a regular ballot. One change, for example, was to allow anyone to vote absentee without stating a reason. This means that Democratic organizations could obtain absentee ballot applications, distribute them to their voters so that they could vote before the election and avoid efforts to tie up polling places on election day.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
This is not only a highly potential caging issue, it is one of abuse of power by anyone in office, the "party of money and power" as so many have come to call our governments, that reaches far beyond all too typical, and now almost inconsequential party lines.
Focussing on just the possible challenges that would tie up polling place lines, as indicated by SoS Brunner, which was also a major Dem put-out-there diversionary fear in '04 and '06 that didn't happen is only a minor focus.
As you explained above, HB3 mandated that a government paid, non-forwardable mass mailing be sent out to all registered voters previous to elections. AND that studies have shown that low income voters are far more likely to move, live in mass rental areas which receive far less than all their mail (left on counters, floors, no one takes the time to find them) and not even have forwarding addresses.
What Brunner is NOT saying is that when the HB3 pieces sent out by the election boards come back to them as non-deliverable, then the fact is these names can be used NOT ONLY as the basis for voter challenges in a general election, tying up the polling places; but ALSO such non-deliverability of the HB3 mailing, also mandates that that voter votes a Provisional Ballot - which then is subject to further, often confused and confusing ID requirements. The problems that election advocates have found in election officials invalidly not verifying/not counting such Provisional Ballots has been huge.
Also what Brunner is not saying is that:
• despite the fact that Ohio has had one of the largest numbers of Provisional Ballots of all states in our elections;
• and has one of the highest rates of Provisionals being discounted/not counted/not verified;
• and despite the fact that to date it is only through public action - way after the election - when such Provisional information is finally released to the public - has it been found, BY THE PUBLIC - that some of these unverified ballots should have been verified,and that many of the Provisional Ballot votings, and rejections were due to numerous "mistakes"in the state's and local elections boards own registration lists, or in lack of poll worker training.
And despite all of the above, she has currently been considering a directive that would keep all such provisional information - not how people voted, just their names and whether or not their ballots were counted - from the public's eye in the future.
THAT would realistically, invalidly disenfranchise far more. Even the most dedicated elections boards have shown neither the time nor certainly the to properly investigate and often to expose their own problems.
Dedicated, mostly unpaid activists have, and the results have not been pretty for election officials.
Absentee ballots are NOT the solution, especially to this put-forth problem that, once again, uses the old saw of partisanship being the problem in elections.
Abuse of power, and/or protecting inside wrongdoing or incompetence from exposure, not the voters, is a huge problem. The glossed over, but ultimately FALSE assumption of no need for transparency to the people, or that the people are "bad" and all election officials are "trustworthy" is a huge dynamic that keeps the entire huge election messes going.
A far larger solution to the problem - which is certainly not only partisan caging, which has been labeled as THE problem for years, and has not happened as stated for years ( did happen to some extent with GOP threat letters sent out in '04) but is more endemically making us think that those inside, are the OWNERS of OUR elections, and are somehow worthy of our blind trust, in whatever they tell us.
A far larger solution to the problems as you've set them out is, and remains, TRANSPARENCY in everything the SoS office and our boards do, so we can oversight, point out any wrongdoings, ask and get answers, and help fix them.
A big part of the solution to the problems as you've set them out is keeping Provisional Voter information public, so the major organizations who have worked so hard in the past to aright people's votes invalidly not being counted, and to stop the same people from thinking year after year, that they went to the polls and voted, so falsely, that their votes counted from contiually being caught in what could be a growing method of government
disenfranchisement - especially of the poor and most vulnerable.
I agree with Ms. Eisner and will add that absentee ballots HAVE been delayed at the post office-200 of them in a single location--in a recent election--I can get the details shortly and will post here, so that they were NOT counted in the election. Whether this was intentional or not, it shows that absentee, or early voting, is NOT the simple solution it appears to be. These ballots CAN be entered into a touchscreen machine as was done in Cleveland by a single data entry clerk, unsupervised. We do NOT trust touchscreen machines, even if the data is entered correctly.
Who is overseeing the handling of the early mail-in ballots? Since early voting takes place over several weeks, it is a nightmare of chain of custody insecurities. As one activist put it, "Mail-in voting gives them even more time to do what we already suspect they may be doing with our votes!"
Post a Comment