Something's Rotten in the State of America UPDATE: Even More Rotten

For a longer list of human-error ballot blunders, see this list.

The Consort passed along a link to a Daily Kos piece last week, but I didn’t pay attention to it until he brought it up again this weekend.

Now, I think everyone should go read the entry, and have all their friends read the entry, no matter what political party you call your own; but I’ll briefly summarize here.

In four critical states, including Ohio, a new Diebold voter registry system has been preparing to purge voter registry lists. They’ve focused on university areas and apartment dwelling areas (both traditionally Democratic and with high turnover). They generated a list of over 1 million addresses, to which a long letter was sent explaining voter risk, voter security, blah, blah, then, buried deep in the letter, was a warning that unless the voter went and confirmed their address, their name would be purged from the voter lists. (Some examples of the discrepancy between lists was a university student who changed dorm addresses and a bloue-collar worker whose voter registration had only his building address, but his drivers liscense included an apartment number.)

It seems that if one did read the entire letter, and then went to the appointed place to fix any discrepancies, then there would be long lines in which “[w]hile everyone present seemed to have enough information to allow the records to be updated, my friend told me it was being done by one and only one clerk and was taking a very long time, about 5 minutes per person to resolve. Everyone in line confirmed that several voters had given up in frustration and left.”


I don’t care where one places oneself on the political spectrum, I think most people are honest and fair and would prefer to win in an honest and fair election. Cheating is just plain wrong, folks.

Go read the report at the Daily Kos.