This is what voter Fraud, and Intimidation look like

[pecunium]

A man arrested for voter fraud in Ontario Calif.

A crowd intimidating voters in N. Carolina.

Take a guess about which side was doing those. Good luck finding comparable examples from the other side of the aisle.

(p.s. the Michigan GOP admits to illegally trying to suppress voters)

Comments

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Anyone care to explain something to an ignorant Brit?

What's this whole "voter registration" thing about?

Over in our little country's elections you get a free, secret vote on the day and a pollster _might_ ask you on the way out if you'd like to tell them too (I've never understood this - seems like it's too late by then). We also have political parties that you can join, but really very few people do - mostly quite serious activists.

So what's "registration" in the USA? Presumably I can still "register" as a Republican but sneakily vote Democrat on the day, and no-one would ever know?

Is registration only significant for those candidate-chooosing caucuses before the election? Or is a count of registrations taken to mean something about predicting likely poll outcomes?

[aostara.livejournal.com]

Here in the States, you CANNOT vote without registering first - you have to give your address on your registration form and (in most places, at least) need to show photo ID as well. The county you register in checks your information BEFORE ELECTION DAY to make sure you are legally allowed to vote in the election - there are a variety of legitimate reasons that you may not be allowed - there are also a ton of BOGUS reasons that the GOP tries to use to disenfranchise votors (see link 3 in the original post, for example).

You do not have to select a party (although if you do, it determines what your PRIMARY ballot looks like, at least in California, where I live - every party gets the SAME ballot for the General Election). I.e., I register Green, so did not get to vote Obama vs. Clinton in the Democratic Primary, or McCain vs. Romney in the Republican Primary.

Some places (rare, I believe) have same-day registration (register and vote on the same day); most places have a deadline WELL IN ADVANCE of election day - in Calif it was October 20. So - if you decide AFTER that deadline that you want to vote - too bad... you can't.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see - thankyou. In all the fuss over registering for a party, I'd missed that this was also basic registration.

Here in the UK we broadly work it by having some list of registered voters at each address, and by assuming this stays constant year on year. There's a _confirmation_ letter goes out beforehand (by local government, not party) but if things haven't changed, then it's broadly assumed that those last registered there will still be entitled.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Historically, it's long been proven that the reports in exit polls about who voted for whom match up very closely with the final election results. For that reason, they are often used as a way to predict the outcome on the news before the final results are in.

But this is also why it's extremely suspicious that in the 2004 election, the Ohio exit poll results were wildly at variance with the reported official results... any why it's odd (to say the least) that the Republicans then pooh-poohed the validity of exit polling, which they'd never done before. And why it's worrisome that they are now pushing a meme to the effect that all polling is suspect, given that recent poll results show Obama up by anywhere from 6 to 15 points.*

Yes, you can be registered for one party and vote for the other one -- but only in the general election. Where voter registration includes party affiliation, you can only vote in your party's primary election. In Texas (where I live), you aren't required to choose a party at registration, and you can declare for either party when you show up on primary day. This sometimes results in significant amounts of "crossover voting", where members of one party vote in the other party's primary specifically to try to throw the candidacy to someone they consider defeatable in the general election. At the precinct and district caucuses I attended, there were some people in the Hillary Clinton camp who I wondered about, based on the social cues from their clothing and conversation; it wouldn't have surprised me to discover that they were crossover Republicans, but in the long run it didn't matter -- Obama's overall support was too strong for any crossover vote to have made a difference.

* Yes, it's true that advance polling is less reliable than exit polling. But the claim is that ALL polls are deliberately selection-biased to exclude McCain voters. To a lot of us, that sounds like a setup for unprecedented election-day shenanigans.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The issue is really simple. If you aren't registered, you can't vote.

To case a primary vote (which is a partisan election) one must be a registered member of the party.

People tend (about 80 percent of the time) to vote for the candidate of the party to which they belong, when the actual election takes place.

Which means finding a way to get 10 of them off the rolls = -8 votes to the opposition, and -2 votes to your candidate. Which is a net win.

[calcinations.livejournal.com]

It's this registering for a party thing that I find weird, as a briton.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

It's independant of whom you vote for. It's a way to have an individual say in the selection process the party engages in when choosing which people will stand for office, representing the party.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Registering for a party in the US is so that you may vote in its primary: that is, to decide on its candidate for the general election. The British equivalent of this is joining a party and going to the constituency candidate selection meetings, except that for the US primaries there's no party membership fee.

Or another point:

Who decides who will be the Labour or Conservative or Lib Dem party leader and thus the candidate for Prime Minister? Well, it used to be the M.P.s, and the voters were stuck with the choice. Now they hold a ballot and the party members get to vote. That's rather like a U.S. presidential primary.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

But that's the difference. If I join the BNP (UK), I might get to vote between the Mosley / Whiplash candidates. I join that party, I get to go to that party's conferences, I get to vote on internal party stuff. I don't need to go anywhere a _government_ or even a civil service "registration" process that then influences some supposedly independent party's choices.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

What's the difference in this difference? The government is just keeping the lists and managing the party primaries; it doesn't interfere with them. (There are a lot more gruesome stories of British local parties manipulating procedural rules to force in preferred candidates than there are in the U.S., precisely because we use straightforward primary elections in the U.S.) Anyone can join any party in the U.S., just as in the U.K., and they don't have to pay to maintain memberships.

As far as I know, people active in actually managing the parties, or running for office, are expected to maintain party membership, but that's also as far as I know true in both countries.