Fear of Voting (Indianapolis GOP ballot rigging)

Link to full article
http://www.nuvo.net/archive/2003/10/15/fear_of_voting.html

Fear of voting -- By Steve Hammer
I’m starting to get very worried about the vote in 2004. Oh, I’m not worried about the results, since I figure 51 percent or more of the people will not return George Jr. to office. I’m just worried about whether our votes are going to count.

Just look at the recent situation in Marion County. The Republicans are so scared that they’re going to lose their stranglehold on the City-County Council that they designed a confusing and illegal ballot...the ballot scam was too blatantly illegal for even a Republican judge, who threw the thing out and ordered a redesign. The Republicans are whining that it may delay the election a few days. Apparently, there aren’t enough printing presses in the world to handle the order.

The point is what is it with certain Republicans these days? Why are they so afraid of elections? Why do they hate a fair vote so much? If you really want to get paranoid about vote stealing, look at blackboxvoting.com. It details hundreds of ways that touch-screen voting machines can and have been altered to produce the desired results.
More at the link
http://www.nuvo.net/archive/2003/10/15/fear_of_voting.html


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More links at the Indianapolis Star about the situation--

A deal has just been struck but no details yet:
http://www.indystar.com/print/articles/8/083507-7708-092.html

An article from this morning:
http://www.indystar.com/print/articles/4/083438-9634-098.html

Some notes of interest: The mayor is a Democrat, Bart Peterson. The GOP is quaking in fear that he will get a Dem majority on the council this November. The County Democratic Party Chairman was calling for contempt of court proceedings against the GOP County Clerk a few days ago. Saying, "Let her conduct the election from a jail cell." So we know he has some cajones. Have to give him some credit. The GOP has been totally opportunist throughout in the press, and dragging their feet all along. Something tells me the ballot is still not going to end up in the format a REPUBLICAN judge said it should be ordered in. It appears that Dems all over the country are going to have to be preemptive in assessing ballot designs when the county clerk is GOP. In this case the clerk’s husband is the campaign manager for the GOP mayoral challenger, which shows the rife hypocrisy and conflict of interest in her positions throughout this. The new machines here are ES&S optical scan. Wish us luck.

... that we have what, 10% voter turnout here in Indiana ?
A team of 100 volunteers could count and validate those babies by hand in a couple of days.

I am amazed to think that the past hundred years' worth of hand counted, hand written votes and punch ballots <which regularly determined state and federal elections all over the US> should now be considered 'invalid' because they weren't optically scanned ??

WTF ??



:hippie:

Great article in the paper out of the U.K. They mention that punch card has approximately 5% error rate and everything else has a higher error rate. Touch screen voting is the least reliable methid and it is currently not auditable. That makes it even less reliable.

"Only machines can be accurate because they are objective while people are subjective." This was directly after campaigning on the "I Trust the People" platform.

In that first link above:

Today, the judge agreed to that idea -- with more modifications. For starters, the ballot will more clearly label which candidates are Democrat and which are Republican.

We need to be raising more of a stink about this. Yes, this is language war, and yes, we are losing.

Now if you could only find a Democrat with the balls to speak out against it.

the Marion County Election Board meetings from yesterday and today. They are being broadcast now on Comcast channel 16 for you interested Hoosiers. Yesterday's meeting included the vendor representatives.

We should do that at all our meetings.

Eloriel