Make Sure You Have Valid Photo ID!

[buttslinger]

vote early

[Prospero]

Bump...

[onmyknees]

Acorn Lives !!!!!!! I believe this is what Libs mean when they say they have a superior "get out the vote" effort.




Concerns raised over possible exploitation of mentally disabled voters
>
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By Gregory Phillips
Staff writer
Jimmy Green's stepdaughter had never voted before. The 57-year-old is mentally disabled, and Green said she doesn't understand the concept of casting a ballot.
But this week, she called her parents to say she had voted for President Obama. The care home in Fayetteville where she lives registered its residents to vote and drove them to the polls, Green said.
"My concern is that somebody told her who to vote for," he said. "She didn't even know there's two different parties."
Complaints of uncomprehending voters being ferried to cast ballots surface every election. And in a presidential race as close as this year's, with huge levels of early voting, any perceived irregularity is falling under intense scrutiny.
But federal and state laws are very clear - there is no competency test for voting.
"The law specifically says that anyone with a disability is allowed to have assistance from anyone that they choose," said Terri Robertson, director of the Cumberland County Board of Elections. "As long as they can communicate to us in some way that they need assistance and who they wish to have assistance from, the law allows it."
In 2010, Gary Bartlett, the state elections director, issued a memo to county boards clarifying the law.
"In the absence of evidence of systematic fraud," Bartlett wrote, "the presumption should work in favor of the opportunity of the voter to vote."
Don Talbot said he saw vans full of mentally disabled voters brought to the polls time and again during his years as a former precinct chief in Cumberland County. He said it often appeared they had little input in completing the ballot.
"The audacity of it to me, it is shameful," said Talbot, a former Fayetteville city councilman. "When you haul people that are not competent and you do their voting for them, that's fraud."
Bob Hall with Democracy North Carolina, a voter rights group, said he hears protests about the opposite problem.
"We also get complaints from people who want to provide assistance being told they're not allowed to give it," he said. "They go overboard on the other direction."
It can be hard for observers to tell how much assistance a voter is getting, said Lisa Grafstein, a lawyer for the Disability Rights N.C. advocacy group.
"It is tough, because you can't really get in the middle of that conversation and know what was going on there," she said. "We can't put a block on a whole host of people voting because we suspect there might be some incidental instances of exploitation ... . I don't think the law can really draw a black line like that."
When exploitation does occur, the focus should be on the people manipulating the voters rather than stripping the rights of the disabled, Grafstein said. She likened their situation to that of an elderly person scammed over the phone.
"We don't take their phone away," she said. "We don't punish them for having been manipulated."
Robertson said she's heard general complaints this year but no specific allegations of voter exploitation. Incidents can be reported to the Board of Elections at 678-7733.
Jimmy Green has not lodged an official complaint about his stepdaughter being escorted to the polls. He said he fears reprisals against her from the care home.
"I'm not holding up for either party here in this case," he said, "but it's just not right."
Bartlett's memo acknowledged there could be instances when a voter who is not capable of communicating his identity or voting preference is permitted to vote.
"That consequence is preferable to the conflicting consequence of inappropriately disenfranchising voters merely because of their communications shortcomings," Bartlett wrote. "In the absence of systematic fraud, this imperfect outcome is simply one with which we must live."

[Prospero]

OMK - Thanks for that article written for a local paper in Lafayette North Carolina by a British born reporter. So much for limeys keeping their noses out of your election.


Interesting little bit of editing by you though. This was your version....""The audacity of it to me, it is shameful," said Talbot, a former Fayetteville city councilman. "When you haul people that are not competent and you do their voting for them, that's fraud."


And this is what was in the original article. "The audacity of it to me, it is shameful, but both parties do it," said Talbot, a former Fayetteville city councilman. "When you haul people that are not competent and you do their voting for them, that's fraud."


Come on now OMK... you don't think we'd catch you out onf that? it gives the whole story a rather different complexion.!

True there are likely to be some abuses on both sides - and if this story is true (though interestingly the central figure has not lodged any formal complaint) then it should be further investigated. But you are sort of scraping the barrel to offer something to counterbalance the vast range of attempts by the Republicans to fix the forthcoming poll.

But a rather more significant threat to warp the entire fabric of how the electoral process in America is in prospect if the GOP win this election. The Supreme Court will need new appointments soon. Three judges are likely to retire. Romney has already indicated that he would appoint young Conservatives. Their impact would go far beyond the life of the next administration and the few that follow.

This is written by one of the USA's foremost legal experts, a professor of jurisprudence at harvard, Ronald Dworkin (excerpted from a longer article)

"If the public had been engaged, it would have been warned about a further decision compromising democracy that the Roberts Court seems poised to make. It seems likely to declare unconstitutional crucial parts of the venerable Voting Rights Act of 1965. Section 5 of that act requires all or some counties in states that have a particularly egregious record of voter discrimination in the past—Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia—to obtain a “preclearance” from the Department of Justice or from a three-judge federal court before they change their voting laws in any way. The act was a celebrated civil rights victory when first adopted, and it has been reenacted by Congress several times since, most recently in 2006 when it was extended for twenty-five years by a large majority of both houses. It places the burden of proof on a covered state to show that any new law would not have the effect of disadvantaging minority voters.

Section 5 continues to be an important safeguard of electoral fairness. Since 2010, when the Republican Party greatly expanded its power in state governorships and legislatures, it has tried through a variety of means to minimize the electoral impact of citizens likely to vote Democratic or to prevent them from voting at all, and Section 5 has been crucial in blocking the most blatant of these attempts.

When Florida recently decided to reduce the number of early-voting days, which allow people to vote who cannot take time off on Election Day, it was barred from making the change in five counties covered by the preclearance requirement. So it simply exempted those counties from the change. The Department of Justice then objected to different election schedules in different counties and required Florida to negotiate a common voting schedule for the entire state. Freed of the requirements of Section 5, Florida would have had much greater latitude to curtail early voting.

When Texas was recently awarded four additional congressional seats, the state legislature drew the new boundaries so as to reduce the chances that Hispanics would have an impact on elections in mixed districts. The plan was blocked by Section 5: neither the Department of Justice nor a federal court would grant the preclearance the act required. A three-judge federal panel said, unanimously, that the evidence left no doubt that the plan was designed to reduce the overall voting power of Hispanics in the state.

Since 2010, several states (all but one with Republican governors) have enacted laws that require voters to present official identification cards, in many cases with a photo, at the voting booth. The most common ID is a driver’s license; people who do not have one are mostly poor and disproportionately black or Hispanic. Such citizens can obtain substitute ID cards in those eleven states but only after burdensome and in some cases expensive application, often requiring applicants to travel a considerable distance to official card-dispensing offices.

The antidemocratic intent of voter ID laws has barely been disguised. A Pennsylvania Republican official openly declared that that state’s new ID law would help ensure that Romney carried the state.5 Governor Rick Perry of Texas rushed through a particularly strict ID law as “emergency” legislation, bypassing established procedures to ensure that the law would be in place for the coming election. Perry’s law provided that gun permits, among other official certificates, would be acceptable ID cards but that student registration cards would not.

When Republicans defend voter ID laws at all, they claim them necessary to prevent voter impersonation fraud. But there are extremely few documented cases of such fraud in recent years. Pennsylvania, when its law was challenged in federal court, declared that it did not rest its case on any assumption that fraud was a serious problem,6 and an executive of the South Carolina Election Commission conceded, in court, that the new law would not prevent voter fraud.7

Courts have declared several voter ID laws illegal, or postponed their enforcement, after extensive litigation. But Republicans try to adopt such laws shortly before an election so that litigation cannot prevent their immediate use. A Pennsylvania judge refused to enjoin its ID law while it was being tested in the courts; it was finally denied immediate effect on October 2, only weeks before the presidential election. The Pennsylvania judge ruled that people could vote without ID cards, in this election, though they could—pointlessly—still be asked to produce one. The preclearance demanded by Section 5 provides, for the historically most racist states, a much more effective barrier. Texas’s statute could not go into effect without positive clearance, and voter ID laws were refused preclearance in South Carolina.

In the Texas case, a three-judge federal court declared, in a long and painstaking opinion by Judge David Tatel of the D.C. court, that the evidence Texas offered not only failed to prove that its law was not discriminatory, as the act required it to show, but positively proved the opposite: that the law was in fact thoroughly discriminatory.

However, Shelby County, Alabama, which is covered by Section 5, has now asked the Supreme Court to declare Section 5 unconstitutional, and it has been joined by the attorneys general of five states. They were all but invited to sue by Roberts, who, in a related 2009 case, went out of his way to suggest that he thought Section 5 unconstitutional, and that he would vote to strike it down if asked to do so. “Things have changed in the South,” he said. “Voter turnout and registration rates now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, speaking for himself, was even clearer: “I conclude,” he said, “that the lack of current evidence of intentional discrimination with respect to voting renders Section 5 unconstitutional.” It seems likely that the rest of the right-wing justices will follow this lead and agree to strike down the preclearance requirement, perhaps in yet another 5–4 decision.

Roberts’s statement was curious. He summarily contradicted Congress on a complex judgment of fact, in spite of the extensive record of continuing discrimination that Congress compiled in renewing the Voting Rights Act in 2006, and in spite of the large majorities that voted for renewal. The recent Texas examples alone, in which obviously discriminatory redistricting plans and voter ID laws were blocked by the preclearance requirement, would seem to indicate that Congress had at least a substantial basis for its decision.

In any case, the coming Supreme Court ruling will be yet another decision testing the integrity of our democracy. From time to time, when a new justice is nominated and Senate hearings are held, the nation’s attention does shift, mildly, to constitutional issues. But these hearings are a sham: candidates say only that they believe in applying the law and senators duly nod approval.

Most politicians apparently assume that the character of the Supreme Court is too abstract an issue to figure in an election campaign. But FDR successfully campaigned against the “nine old men” who were blocking his New Deal, Nixon made the Court’s race decisions the center of his “southern strategy,” and generations of Republicans have been elected by denouncing the Court’s 1973 decision recognizing abortion rights. The record of the Roberts Court is already one of the worst in our history. In pursuing a right-wing agenda it has overruled many precedents. Next term it will probably not just strike down Section 5, but also overrule its own recent decision allowing limited affirmative action. It gives every sign of soon reversing abortion rights. Perhaps it is impossible to make independent voters alert to these dangers. If so, that is a shame."
__________________

[onmyknees]

I don't mind Limey's sticking their nose in our election...Although one wonders why they're not sweeping up their own dirt. .It's the ones who act like they're tenured university professors, and the rest of us are first year political science students gathered at their knee to be schooled in the unfortunate ways of the Colonies. Those are the ones is I despise. Know anybody like that?

[Prospero]

What about your little bit of editing to distort his article, OMK?

[Prospero]

Now after that little of cheap dishonesty from OMK, our little house Goebbels, back to the point of this thread which is
VOTE....

But I'l hand that over to Tricia and others, of right and left, who care about democracy.

[Queens Guy]

This has been a long thread, but what do you think of marking one of you fingers with ink, the way they did in Iraq?
You could vote, but only once. At least at the polling places.

[onmyknees]

OMK - Thanks for that article written for a local paper in Lafayette North Carolina by a British born reporter. So much for limeys keeping their noses out of your election.


Interesting little bit of editing by you though. This was your version....""The audacity of it to me, it is shameful," said Talbot, a former Fayetteville city councilman. "When you haul people that are not competent and you do their voting for them, that's fraud."


And this is what was in the original article. "The audacity of it to me, it is shameful, but both parties do it," said Talbot, a former Fayetteville city councilman. "When you haul people that are not competent and you do their voting for them, that's fraud."


Come on now OMK... you don't think we'd catch you out onf that? it gives the whole story a rather different complexion.!

True there are likely to be some abuses on both sides - and if this story is true (though interestingly the central figure has not lodged any formal complaint) then it should be further investigated. But you are sort of scraping the barrel to offer something to counterbalance the vast range of attempts by the Republicans to fix the forthcoming poll.

But a rather more significant threat to warp the entire fabric of how the electoral process in America is in prospect if the GOP win this election. The Supreme Court will need new appointments soon. Three judges are likely to retire. Romney has already indicated that he would appoint young Conservatives. Their impact would go far beyond the life of the next administration and the few that follow.

This is written by one of the USA's foremost legal experts, a professor of jurisprudence at harvard, Ronald Dworkin (excerpted from a longer article)

"If the public had been engaged, it would have been warned about a further decision compromising democracy that the Roberts Court seems poised to make. It seems likely to declare unconstitutional crucial parts of the venerable Voting Rights Act of 1965. Section 5 of that act requires all or some counties in states that have a particularly egregious record of voter discrimination in the past—Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia—to obtain a “preclearance” from the Department of Justice or from a three-judge federal court before they change their voting laws in any way. The act was a celebrated civil rights victory when first adopted, and it has been reenacted by Congress several times since, most recently in 2006 when it was extended for twenty-five years by a large majority of both houses. It places the burden of proof on a covered state to show that any new law would not have the effect of disadvantaging minority voters.

Section 5 continues to be an important safeguard of electoral fairness. Since 2010, when the Republican Party greatly expanded its power in state governorships and legislatures, it has tried through a variety of means to minimize the electoral impact of citizens likely to vote Democratic or to prevent them from voting at all, and Section 5 has been crucial in blocking the most blatant of these attempts.

When Florida recently decided to reduce the number of early-voting days, which allow people to vote who cannot take time off on Election Day, it was barred from making the change in five counties covered by the preclearance requirement. So it simply exempted those counties from the change. The Department of Justice then objected to different election schedules in different counties and required Florida to negotiate a common voting schedule for the entire state. Freed of the requirements of Section 5, Florida would have had much greater latitude to curtail early voting.

When Texas was recently awarded four additional congressional seats, the state legislature drew the new boundaries so as to reduce the chances that Hispanics would have an impact on elections in mixed districts. The plan was blocked by Section 5: neither the Department of Justice nor a federal court would grant the preclearance the act required. A three-judge federal panel said, unanimously, that the evidence left no doubt that the plan was designed to reduce the overall voting power of Hispanics in the state.

Since 2010, several states (all but one with Republican governors) have enacted laws that require voters to present official identification cards, in many cases with a photo, at the voting booth. The most common ID is a driver’s license; people who do not have one are mostly poor and disproportionately black or Hispanic. Such citizens can obtain substitute ID cards in those eleven states but only after burdensome and in some cases expensive application, often requiring applicants to travel a considerable distance to official card-dispensing offices.

The antidemocratic intent of voter ID laws has barely been disguised. A Pennsylvania Republican official openly declared that that state’s new ID law would help ensure that Romney carried the state.5 Governor Rick Perry of Texas rushed through a particularly strict ID law as “emergency” legislation, bypassing established procedures to ensure that the law would be in place for the coming election. Perry’s law provided that gun permits, among other official certificates, would be acceptable ID cards but that student registration cards would not.

When Republicans defend voter ID laws at all, they claim them necessary to prevent voter impersonation fraud. But there are extremely few documented cases of such fraud in recent years. Pennsylvania, when its law was challenged in federal court, declared that it did not rest its case on any assumption that fraud was a serious problem,6 and an executive of the South Carolina Election Commission conceded, in court, that the new law would not prevent voter fraud.7

Courts have declared several voter ID laws illegal, or postponed their enforcement, after extensive litigation. But Republicans try to adopt such laws shortly before an election so that litigation cannot prevent their immediate use. A Pennsylvania judge refused to enjoin its ID law while it was being tested in the courts; it was finally denied immediate effect on October 2, only weeks before the presidential election. The Pennsylvania judge ruled that people could vote without ID cards, in this election, though they could—pointlessly—still be asked to produce one. The preclearance demanded by Section 5 provides, for the historically most racist states, a much more effective barrier. Texas’s statute could not go into effect without positive clearance, and voter ID laws were refused preclearance in South Carolina.

In the Texas case, a three-judge federal court declared, in a long and painstaking opinion by Judge David Tatel of the D.C. court, that the evidence Texas offered not only failed to prove that its law was not discriminatory, as the act required it to show, but positively proved the opposite: that the law was in fact thoroughly discriminatory.

However, Shelby County, Alabama, which is covered by Section 5, has now asked the Supreme Court to declare Section 5 unconstitutional, and it has been joined by the attorneys general of five states. They were all but invited to sue by Roberts, who, in a related 2009 case, went out of his way to suggest that he thought Section 5 unconstitutional, and that he would vote to strike it down if asked to do so. “Things have changed in the South,” he said. “Voter turnout and registration rates now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, speaking for himself, was even clearer: “I conclude,” he said, “that the lack of current evidence of intentional discrimination with respect to voting renders Section 5 unconstitutional.” It seems likely that the rest of the right-wing justices will follow this lead and agree to strike down the preclearance requirement, perhaps in yet another 5–4 decision.

Roberts’s statement was curious. He summarily contradicted Congress on a complex judgment of fact, in spite of the extensive record of continuing discrimination that Congress compiled in renewing the Voting Rights Act in 2006, and in spite of the large majorities that voted for renewal. The recent Texas examples alone, in which obviously discriminatory redistricting plans and voter ID laws were blocked by the preclearance requirement, would seem to indicate that Congress had at least a substantial basis for its decision.

In any case, the coming Supreme Court ruling will be yet another decision testing the integrity of our democracy. From time to time, when a new justice is nominated and Senate hearings are held, the nation’s attention does shift, mildly, to constitutional issues. But these hearings are a sham: candidates say only that they believe in applying the law and senators duly nod approval.

Most politicians apparently assume that the character of the Supreme Court is too abstract an issue to figure in an election campaign. But FDR successfully campaigned against the “nine old men” who were blocking his New Deal, Nixon made the Court’s race decisions the center of his “southern strategy,” and generations of Republicans have been elected by denouncing the Court’s 1973 decision recognizing abortion rights. The record of the Roberts Court is already one of the worst in our history. In pursuing a right-wing agenda it has overruled many precedents. Next term it will probably not just strike down Section 5, but also overrule its own recent decision allowing limited affirmative action. It gives every sign of soon reversing abortion rights. Perhaps it is impossible to make independent voters alert to these dangers. If so, that is a shame."
__________________

So now we're going to turn this into a discussion on the Supreme Court? I'm not suggesting that's not an issue, but you've wandered far afield here as usual. I can find my own leagl "experts" and I assure you, they don't share your view...in fact let me give you some semi-recent reality in case only the left side of your brain is functioning.
When Robert Bork came before the Senate for his confirmation hearings, he was the preeminent legal constitutional scholar in the country. His qualifications and experience were bullet proof. ( and silly us....we thought that's what the hearings were about !) Now you can deplore how he chose to interpret the Constitution, I suppose that's your prerogative as a British subject, but they so destroyed his character in an effort to defeat his confirmation, that they actually coined a new phrase "Borked".....and your buddy Biden and The Swimmer, Teddy Kennedy were behind the entire disgraceful episode, Imagine a guy like Kennedy sitting in judgement of Robert Bork ? ....It's the ultimate political irony. .so save your legal scholars feigning their indignation and dire warnings about who Romney might appoint....it's entirely hollow. ..

[trish]

http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/break...icle20598.html

The Einhorn Family Foundation is engaged in a "public service" campaign placing billboards in minority neighborhoods in Ohio reminding people that voter fraud can cost you 3.5 years in jail and a $10000.00 fine. I wonder why only minority neighborhoods were targeted? How shamefully embarrassing for the Einhorn family!

VOTING IS A RIGHT, VOTING IS A DUTY...VOTING IS NOT A CRIME.

Whoever your choice, make sure your vote isn't suppressed.

Get your papers, help your family, friends and neighbors get theirs and then vote.