ACORN

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Cheney's fault.

"It's Bush's fault!"

[Undertoad]

Gentlemen, the elections are run by the states.

[xoxoxoBruce]

C'mon, The national political figures, especially the ones in power controlling all that federal money to the states, have no influence with the state level politicians who run the elections?

[Undertoad]

No, they really don't.

If they tried attaching federal highway money or some such to election regulations, it would be ruled unconstitutional before the ink dried on the Federal Register with the number of the House Bill.

[Shawnee123]

Who is the guy playing Dub? I saw him on Letterman or something, and he sounded so much like him! I don't remember who it was, but it wasn't someone I expected. Hang on... Oh yeah, Josh Brolin. Who the heck is he, anyway?

[lookout123]

Babs's eseessesses stepson.

Josh Brolin's dad played Reagan in the hitpiece they did on him a couple years ago.

[Shawnee123]

Oh yeah, James Brolin's son? Gotcha! He had confused me by telling Letterman he was Brando's son. I was like "WHAT?" I haven't seen him in anything, that I remember.

Anyway, I thought he looked more like a rough and tough kind of actor. I'm interested to see the movie, myself.

[lookout123]

he was a piss poor actor in a really lousy naval aviation tv show his dad had for awhile.

[bluecuracao]

You guys must have missed "No Country For Old Men" then. He was good in that.

[richlevy]

I've never had a problem at the voting booth before, but I've always voted at upper middle class voting places. My current township is mostly Republican. I would be sort of surprised if I went up to the polls and found that I had either been struck from the polls or that someone there was challenging my vote. Even though I am well educated and somewhat versed in the Constitution, I would be confused. If I was a working class high school grad, how would I handle it?

In Pennsylvania, could my vote be challenged if my name does not exactly match the name on my social security card - "James K. Smith" versus "James Keith Smith" or "Jim Smith"?

What if there was a mistake and the election commission had the wrong social security number?

From here

Currently, just under 10 percent of the 250 million W-2 forms sent to SSA by employers fail to match the information in the SSA database. At least three fourths of these mismatches are unrelated to immigration status. They occur for many reasons, including name changes, incorrect use of titles, and transposition errors. All of these problems are much more likely to occur with "foreign" names, due to the likelihood of transcription errors and differing customs for treating titles and family names.

And if I allowed them to force me to fill out a provisional ballot, how would I know if it was counted?

The new ruling in Cuyahoga County mandates that provisional ballots in yellow packets must be “Rejected” if there is no “date of birth” on the packet. The Free Press obtained copies of the original “Provisional Verification Procedure” from Cuyahoga County which stated “Date of birth is not mandatory and should not reject a provisional ballot.” The original procedure required the voter’s name, address and a signature that matched the signature in the county’s database.

A lot of people consider election fraud in the form of multiple votes or illegitimate votes to be a terrible problem. I think any unreasonable barrier to a legitimate voter who wishes to exercise his or her right and duty to vote is the greater crime.

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by richlevy

In Pennsylvania, could my vote be challenged if my name does not exactly match the name on my social security card - "James K. Smith" versus "James Keith Smith" or "Jim Smith"?

No.

What if there was a mistake and the election commission had the wrong social security number?

The election commission doesn't collect social security numbers, nor do they require them in any way on election day.

And if I allowed them to force me to fill out a provisional ballot, how would I know if it was counted?

If you really give a shit, you could easily become a poll-watcher or even assist election officials in your precinct. If you really really give a shit, you can run for Inspector of Elections or Judge of Elections and become an election official yourself. There is one Judge, and two Inspectors in each precinct. You would have to run for the office, but often who is going to run is agreed upon ahead of time. ("Cheryl doesn't want to do it any more with her arthritis getting bad.") It's a paid position, you work the poll all day from the opening through final count, and you are allowed to bring along a lesser-paid assistant if you like, so you can take a break.

[Undertoad]

Yeah, but that's DC where there's a beltway culture of influence -- the 50 different Departments of State don't have much to be influenced by. They aren't elected. They're state-level bureaucrats... a shitty place to be. (I've been to their Harrisburg office, and it sucks.)

Furthermore, in PA it's the counties who decide which machine to have, so now you've got to influence 67 different county-level commissioners. It's a long road.

[xoxoxoBruce]

More like a string of dominos. A little pressure on one end can be felt all along the line. Especially when each domino is beholding, and trying to please, to the next one up the line.

When you're a state level bureaucrat, in a shitty place, contact from someone far up the line, can be flattering and spark hope of recognition/reward for favors. Very important in the un-elected world of political appointments.

The bottom line is, I don't trust the fuckers and want as much transparency as possible with a secret ballot.


btw, here's an article on how the votes were counted in 1936.
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/...0000000-votes/

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Furthermore, in PA it's the counties who decide which machine to have, so now you've got to influence 67 different county-level commissioners.

There also is no requirement that anything electrical meet UL standards. But effective standards exist where no other alternative exists. Therefore every electrical appliance manufacturer goes the extra (and expensive) step to get that UL approval – which no one is required to have.

HAVA was supposed to do same for electronic voting machines. Just like UL, HAVA was supposed to be a useful standard to define a reliable voting machine. A question is how much did Diebold, et al pay to get HAVA killed.

The only reason to go to electronic voting machines is to make the election more secure and accurate. Instead we computerize something to make it less secure and less reliable? Yes, I too often see people computerize only because "computerizing must be good" rather than ask and define the strategic objective.

In asking about the strategic objective, let's say the fraudulent voters, identified by the election commission, appears to vote. Will the police be called to the poll station?

[Undertoad]

I'm wrong and so is tw. Hell, most of us are wrong.

I'm wrong because I thought the feds could not rule how the states run elections. They have done. That's what HAVA is. It's the Help America Vote Act of 2002. It passed Congress and was signed by Bush.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_America_Vote_Act

Currently all electronic voting machines are HAVA-compliant, including those of Diebold/Premier Election Systems.

In fact, one of the criticisms of HAVA is that it causes election officials to switch to the electronic machines because their current punch card systems were not HAVA-compliant. By Election 2006, a third of the nation's precincts had switched to HAVA-compliant -- mostly electronic machines. Can't find numbers on how many more have switched since then.

Originally Posted by The Commission on Federal Election Reform's 2005 report

"The Help America Vote Act of 2002 authorized up to $650 million in federal funds to replace antiquated voting machines throughout the country. States are using these funds and their own resources to upgrade voting technology, generally to replace punch card and lever voting machines with new optical scan and electronic voting systems...

TW read an IEEE Spectrum article in 2004 that said not all HAVA money was spent by NIST -- and assumed wrongly, for four years apparently, that it was "killed" or that the administration strategically de-funded it. That is not the case. They were just late. The standards were finished in Dec. 2005. Here is the PDF of it.