About that voter suppression

[pecunium]

A week ago I wrote a post about the Republican vote suppression efforts.

One of the things I mentioned was someone making a joke about telling people the parties vote on diffierent days, so those who are registered Democrats would stay home on election day.

Someone seems to have done it for real, Flier says Virginians vote on different days.

A phony State Board of Elections flier advising Republicans to vote on Nov. 4 and Democrats on Nov. 5 is being circulated in several Hampton Roads localities, according to state elections officials.

In fact, Election Day, for voters of all political stripes, remains Nov. 4.

The somewhat official-looking flier - it features the state board logo and the state seal - is dated Oct. 24 and indicates that "an emergency session of the General Assembly has adopted the follwing (sic) emergency regulations to ease the load on local electorial (sic) precincts and ensure a fair electorial process."

The four-paragraph flier concludes with: "We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause but felt this was the only way to ensure fairness to the complete electorial process."

Assuming the local officials do their jobs, and that they manage to catch these bastards (because what they are doing is undermining the electoral process) they will find they picked the wrong state to pull that trick. Virginia is one of the few states in which that's a crime. It's only a misdemeanor, but we can hope each flier is a separate count.

Assuming the fliers fail, there seems to be worse going on in Florida:

Three Hialeah voters say they had an unusual visitor at their homes last week: a man who called himself Juan, offering to help them fill out their absentee ballots and deliver them to the elections office.

The voters, all supporters of Democratic congressional candidate Raul Martinez, said they gave their ballots to the man after he told them he worked for Martinez. But the Martinez campaign said he doesn't work for them.

Juan "told me not to worry, that they normally collected all the ballots and waited until they had a stack big enough to hand-deliver to the elections department," said voter Jesus Hernandez, 73. "He said, 'Don't worry. This is not going to pass through the mail to get lost.'"

I'm sure all of it is the work of a, "few bad apples." I also know that one bad apple can spoil the barrell.

Comments

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

The way you keep one bad apple from spoiling the barrel is to throw it out as soon as you find it. If the Republicans were serious about not letting this shit happen, they'd be all over every one of these reports, finding out who did it, filing any available charges themselves, and publicly repudiating them. Instead, they go, "Oh, we didn't TELL anyone to do that," wink-wink-nudge-nudge. They put no effort into finding or punishing the culprits, so of course it keeps happening.

This is exactly similar to the way the two campaigns have handled outrageous speculation. Obama stood up and said, "That's not how we do things," as soon as it started... and it's pretty much stopped. The McCampaign has paid lip-service to shutting down the really nasty stuff, but since it's their own PR system that's been spreading it, I don't think that says much.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I don't think they are doing the wink, wink, routine.

I think the plan is plausible deniabilty. When they have an operative; in touch with the White House, go to prison for supressing the vote, and then being hired by the Party as soon as he got out, well the reasonable man would say they approved of what he did.

Did you disable comments?

[dragonet2.livejournal.com]

When I typed McCain in the subject it tossed me out.

I do not think the Repugnicrats care about the bad apples, they can always say 'we don't support them' while allowing them to spread their evil.

Re: Did you disable comments?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

No... I don't know what happened.

Re: Did you disable comments?

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I've found lj doing obscurely strange wonky things during the past week. Maybe they'll get straightened out eventually, or maybe they've just "improved" in ways incompatible with my (admittedly antique & flaky) browser. *sigh*

Re: Did you disable comments?

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

Yeah- it's been down a few times of late. So has Comcast's webmail, but that's probably unrelated.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that quite a lot of the Leaders of the Republican Party are exhibiting a True Believer mentality. They _know_ that theirs is the the only salvation of our American nation & way of life, so they _must_ win, by any means possible. There are, of course Democrats and Liberals with a similar mind-set, but I think the percentage of them is far smaller, and they very rarely get into positions of leadership.

[kukla-red.livejournal.com]

Hi... I was pointed in your direction by bifemmefatale via bibliovixen. Would you mind if I friended you? I always ask first.

I've been reading your journal and I really like your POV. Feel free to check out my journal if you need reassurance that I am not a crazy stalker person.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Feel free, all it does is make an in-house bookmark, so I don't see there's any need to worry about it. A big string of recorded bookmarks; which I open in tabs, is how I read other blogs, and nothing stops someone from doing that with Lj.

I look at everyone who comments, because I am curious about who is interested in my maunderings.

Weclome.

[kukla-red.livejournal.com]

Thanks! One of the things I like best about LiveJournal is the preponderance of intelligent, thoughtful people who actually know how to write coherently. It's a pleasure.

Nice to meet you, electronically speaking.