Posted on 10/10/2004 7:22:21 PM PDT by dixie sass
WASHINGTON (AP) - Call it the law of unintended consequences. A new national backup system meant to ensure that millions of eligible voters are not mistakenly turned away from the polls this year, as happened in 2000, could wind up causing Election Day problems as infamous as Florida's hanging chads.
Congress required conditional, or provisional, voting as part of election fixes passed in 2002. For the first time, all states must offer a backup ballot to any voter whose name does not appear on the rolls when the voter comes to the polling place on Nov. 2. If the voter is later found eligible, the vote counts.
But Congress did not specify exactly how the provisional votes will be evaluated.
Add the ordinary problems that come with doing something new, and the result is a recipe for mix-ups at the polls and lawsuits over alleged unequal treatment of some voters, said Doug Chapin, executive director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan clearinghouse for information on election reform.
"If I had to pick the one thing that will be source of controversy on Election Day, it will be provisional voting," Chapin said.
State election officials have adopted their own and differing standards for when a provisional ballot will count; some of those rules are still in flux three weeks from the election.
Rules for who casts provisional ballots and how they are counted probably will vary even within states, especially if there are long lines, confusion and hot tempers at the polls, election experts said.
Some of the states where the race is tightest, such as Florida and Ohio, also have the strictest rules for provisional ballots.
Democrats and Republicans are training lawyers and election monitors to look for problems with provisional voting this year. Already, there are suits in five states claiming election officials are adopting too strict a standard for which votes will count and that eligible voters will be denied the right to vote as a result.
Questions about provisional ballots could produce a major battle after the election, too, with nightmarish echoes of the Florida fight of 2000.
Lawyers for President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry are ready for a new overtime contest in states where, if the election is close enough, the winner could be determined by who gets the most valid provisional votes.
Like Florida's punch cards, provisional ballots are pieces of paper that must be evaluated individually and counted by hand. The task is time-consuming, and most states have short deadlines to get the job done, said Doug Lewis, director of the Election Center, a nonpartisan research and training organization for state and local election administrators.
Postelection suits could resemble the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore case that settled the 2000 election. The justices said it was unfair for Florida counties to apply different standards during punch card recounts, and there was not time to fix the problem.
Twenty-six states and the District of Columbia have adopted the view that a provisional ballot must be cast in the correct precinct, or it will not count.
Under that interpretation, voters unaware that their polling place has moved could be out of luck. So could voters given wrong information about their polling place. It would not matter whether the mistake was the voter's fault or a clerical error.
Other states will count a voter's choice for president and other national offices even if the ballot is not cast in the right local polling station. Votes for some purely local races might not count, but the theory goes that the voter should not lose out entirely just because of a ballot case in one precinct rather than another.
Provisional voting is not entirely new. About half the states offered something similar in 2000.
It is impossible to predict how many people will cast provisional ballots this year, said Curtis Gans, director of the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.
It will easily be in the tens of thousands, however. In 2000 in Los Angeles County, the nation's largest voting district, about 101,000 people voted provisionally. Of those, about 61,000 votes were determined to be valid.
This should run hand in glove with your story Swampy.
And rioting in the streets if they eff it up again this time.
Their goons are already positioning --- and here again the liberal Dem mouthpiece -- AP -- is frothing all over the possibility that the scummy Dems will upset the applecart with frivolous BS about voting....their now standard practice.
Anything, anything for power.
More LIBERAL LUNACY
Where is the DOCUMENTATION that MILLIONS were turned away? That is nothing but "elitist media" and dnc PROPOGANDA.
South Carolina has always had a back up system for folks. Most people know where they are supposed to vote - it's on our voter registeration card.
We are always willing to help the voter to find the correct precinct, even if it is in another county. There are those people who have just moved to Dorchester from other counties and didn't have there voter registration updated in time so we help them find where they are to vote or if they can cast a paper ballot.
Thanks Tonk. I wish that the media would self impose a blackout of all election information for at least 24 to 48 hours. That way the whole nation can vote without being influenced by the what has happened on the East Coast.
Hawaii is what - five hours behind us and the West Coast is three? The people are already hearing that candidate XYZ has won and a lot of people don't go to the polls because of it.
There were a lot of accusations about the East Coast is always the one that really elects the President because the press has access to the information after the polls close here and they are still open in the central, mountain, pacific and Hawaii and Alaska and territories.
There's a Murphy's law, a Peter principle, etc., but there is not now, nor has there ever been a "law of unintended consequence". Whoever came up with the idea didn't pass on the "law" part. Anyone?
law of unintended consequences
I seriously doubt that any eligible voter was turned away from the polls in 2000. As for "hanging chads" I have this image burned into my memory of this ridiculous "goober" with the magnifying glass examining punched cards looking for "hanging," "swinging," and whatever chads on the punched cards. What a bunch of crap that was!!
Oh well, you know the press - they've always got to be different!
I remember those days very well...
I pray for America every night
The stakes are too high.
The highest they have ever been, in my opinion.
This is possibly one of the dumbest ideas ever. If you move after the registration deadline, get an absentee ballot. If you're too dumb to know the correct precinct, which should be on your registration card, you're probably too dumb to vote! I like the excuse that some people can't read! This is just another way for the Democrats to delay the results.
With such a blatant inaccuracy (i.e. lie) as this in the first sentence, it is quite apparent that reading the rest of the article is a waste of time. (Reading the comments after, however, is always worthwhile.)
So do I, Tonk. People just won't stop and think, we see that everyday with some of the people here on FR and other sites, conservative or otherwise.
People seem to think this is a game...
How wrong can they be?
How Democrats Steal Elections - Top 10 Methods of Liberal Vote Fraud
1. Over-Voting. In Democrat strongholds like St. Louis, Philadelphia and Detroit, some precincts had 100% of their registered voters voting, with 99% of the ballots going to Gore. Clearly, multiple voting resulted in extra tallies for Gore in the 2000 election. (New York Post, 12/09/00).
2. Dead Voters. This classic Democratic method of vote fraud goes all the way back to 1960 in Chicago and Dallas. The 2000 election was no exception. In Miami-Dade County, for example, some of the 144 ineligible votes (those which officials actually admitted to) were cast by dead people, including a Haitian-American who's been deceased since 1977 (Miami-Herald, 12/24/00).
3. Mystery Voters. These "voters" cast votes anyway but are not even registered to vote. In heavily Democratic Broward County, for example, more than 400 ballots were cast by non-registered voters. (Miami-Herald 1/09/01)
4. Military ballots. Many of these votes were disqualified for the most mundane and trivial reasons. At least 1,527 valid military ballots were discarded in Florida by Democratic vote counters (Drudge Report, 11/19/00).
5. Criminals. Felons are a natural Democratic voter and they're protected on voter rolls across the country. In Florida at least 445 ex-convicts - including rapists and murderers -- voted illegally on November 7th. Nearly all of them were registered Democrats. (Miami-Herald 12/01/00)
6. Illegal aliens. These voters have long been a core liberal constituency, especially in California. In Orange County in 1996, Rep. Bob Dornan had his congressional seat stolen from him when thousands of illegal aliens voted for Loretta Sanchez (Christian Science Monitor, 9/2/97).
7. Vote-buying. Purchasing votes has long been a traditional scheme by Democrats, and not just with money. In the 2000 election in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Democratic workers initiate a "smokes-for-votes" campaign in which they paid dozens of homeless men with cigarettes if they cast ballots for Al Gore (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 11/14/00).
8. Phantom Voters. These voters don't really exist, but their ballots do. In the 1996 Lousiana Senate race, GOP candidate Woody Jenkins had the election stolen from him when he discovered that 7,454 actual votes were cast but had no paper trail to authenticate them (Behind the Headlines, F.R. Duplantier, 4/27/97).
9. Dimpled chads. Those infamous punch-cards were a ballot bonanza for Al Gore. Democratic poll workers in Palm Beach, Dade and Broward counties tampered and manipulated thousands of ineligible ballots and counted them for Gore, even though no clear vote could be discerned. (NewsMax.com 11/27, 12/22, 11/18, 11/19/00).
10. Absentee ballots. Normally it's assumed that Republicans benefit from absentee ballots. But in the case of Miami's 1997 mayoral election, hundreds of absentee ballots were made for sale or sent out to non-Miami residents. Fraud was so extensive in the race that the final results were overturned in court (FL Dept. of Law Enforcement Report, 1/5/98)."
SOURCE: http://www.conservativeaction.org/resources.php3?nameid=votefraud
Links on freerepublic:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=electionfraud
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=votefraud
WE MUST FIGHT VOTE FRAUD!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.