Just like the so-called Jim Crow laws managed to take away voting rights from newly-liberated blacks in America and thus to practically revert the abolition of slavery for another 100 years, much the same mechanism is used again (and has been used in the last few US presidential elections) to make some of those unwelcome Democrat voters go away on paper.
Quote of the season:
“If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat McCain at the polls – they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering.”
Read more about it on Greg Palast’s wonderful website. He’s one of those people who’ve been saying it for years now. It’s no miracle that Bush was elected and re-elected. They simply removed Democratic voters from the voter lists, so they wouldn’t count. Revoked registration, no vote, no say. That and delivering faulty voting computers to strategically interesting states…
But so far I don’t see people up in arms about this ridiculous travesty that is the Bush administration and what may very well be the McSame administration.
Nicely done. And here’s the Kennedy and Palast article in Rolling Stone on five pages…
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/23638322/block_the_vote
There’s also a video.
When I watched HBO’s “Recount” recently (http://www.hbo.com/films/recount/), the issue of people being turned away from the voting booths also came up. This was something I wasn’t aware of before.
For whatever reason, convicted felons are not allowed to vote in the States, even when they’ve been released from prison. During the 2000 election fiasco, about 20,000 completely innocent people, who had never committed a crime in their life, were turned away from the polls because their names were either similar or identical to those of convicted felons. The election officials in each electoral district received lists with names of felons who were not allowed to vote. Well, let’s just say the lists weren’t quite as accurate as they should have been.
Here’s a bit more background…
http://www.commondreams.org/news2001/0412-02.htm