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Disenfranchised In Nevada
An anonymous reader writes "If you are a Democrat and you decided to register to vote in Nevada through non-official channels, you may have gotten disenfranchised by a private voter registration company. In this news article, it appears that employees of 'Voters Outreach of America' have been busy tearing up registration forms, specifically those from Democrats. The article indicates that hundreds to thousands of voter registrations may have been trashed.
Unfortunately, the deadline to register to vote in Nevada has already passed."
I live in a state where there we do not register for a party affiliation, have open primaries, and can register the same day at the voting site. It is still amazing to me that consituents of states that do not have these three rights (yes, I said rights, not privledges) do not rise up and demand for it to be this way. The only reason I can imagine is that voters in Nevada and others have not had the experience of how easy it is to vote with these artificial burdens removed.
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dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
There's a comment on this blog that suggests that there are more than one, I'm guessing the one you cite isn't the one in Nevada).
Portland Communique also mentions that they're seeing something similar in Portland.
Karma: It's not just a good idea. It's the law.
You have to mark your affiliation on your registration??? WTF?! Who thought that was a good idea???
Historically, it was necessary to determine which primaries you were eligible to vote in: Democrats voted in Democratic primaries, Republicans in Republican primaries. A lot of states (like my own) have since gone to a system where you can register as "unenrolled," then select any (in theory; in practice, either) primary ballot at the primary. Taking a primary ballot effectively registers you in that party. What you then must do is re-register as "unenrolled" to retain your ability to select either primary ballot; but conveniently, there are registration cards at the polling places (only during primaries, and only for those who are already registered and want to change their enrollment). Nevertheless, a lot of people do still put their affiliations on their registrations, and it is possible that many states still require you to list an affiliation on your registration in order to vote in a primary.
http://www2.kval.com/x30530.xml?ParentPageID=x2649 &ContentID=x47627&Layout=kval.xsl&AdGroupID=x30530
Same company. This time in oregon.
I hope these people pay for their crimes.
There's nothing incorrect with registering this way.
A GOP funded organization stole the name from the real America Votes to help perpetuate this fraud. Aside from disenfranchising dozens? hundreds? thousands? of Democrats I think one of the biggest tragedies is that the real, non-partisan America Votes will be hurt by this. I don't blame you for being confused, that was the point.
link 1
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Text:
(Oct. 12) -- Employees of a private voter registration company allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands of voters who may think they are registered will be rudely surprised on election day. The company claims hundreds of registration forms were thrown in the trash.
Anyone who has recently registered or re-registered to vote outside a mall or grocery store or even government building may be affected.
The I-Team has obtained information about an alleged widespread pattern of potential registration fraud aimed at Democrats. The focus of the story is a private registration company called Voters Outreach of America, AKA America Votes.
The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.
Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.
"We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assisatnt to get those from me," said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee.
Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law.
So the people on those forms who think they will be able to vote on Election Day are sadly mistaken. We attempted to speak to Voters Outreach but found that its office has been rented out to someone else.
The landlord says Voters Outreach was evicted for non-payment of rent. Another source said the company has now moved on to Oregon where it is once again registering voters. It's unknown how many registrations may have been tossed out, but another ex-employee told Eyewitness News she had the same suspicions when she worked there.
It's going to take a while to sort all of this out, but the immediate concern for voters is to make sure you really are registered.
Call the Clark County Election Department at 455-VOTE orclick here to see if you are registered.
The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee. Similar complaints have been received in Reno where the registrar has asked the FBI to investigate.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
Just when you thought the story couldn't get any scummier...
You are 100% correct. These are all liberal supporters of http://www.americavotes.org/
The devil is in the details. This is an ENTIRELY different organization, "Voters Outreach of America" has been misrepresenting itself as "America Votes" to accomplish it's goals. The article doesn't point out this fact, but others do, here's ONE:
Portland Communique
ymmv
WA state had also had a blanket primary for a lot longer (70 years) and that just got invalidated in the last year.
Personally, I can agree with the reasoning of the court (only members of a group should be allowed to pick that groups representatives), but I think that it caused a bad policy decision. The advantage of a blanket primary is that it keeps you enfranchised on both the state and local level if you live in a Republican region of an overwhelmingly Democratic state (or vice versa). If the local Republicans always win, and the statewide Democrats always win, then having to pick a ballot by party automatically cuts you out of having a say in one set of those races.
Also, the studies that I saw that looked at "malicious cross-over voting" (Democrats voting for the kookiest Republican, so that the Republican would be sure to lose in the general election) concluded that when that happened, it was far out-weighed by voters crossing over to vote for what they thought was the opposite, the more centrist, least-objectionable candidate. (Which I think was the real problem that the national parties had with the blanket primaries--it tended to produce candidates who were less beholden to the party, and less partisan.)
BTW, I think anyone who crosses over to get the opposite party to nominate a crackpot, in order to help out their "real" party is playing with fire, anyway. Once someone makes it to the general election, anything can happen.
Here in WA, everyone was so disgusted with having to only take primary ballots from one party that there is an initiative to change the system to the Louisiana-style primary system, where everyone running for an office is on the same primary ballot, and the top two votegetters advance to the general election, regardless of their party affiliation. From what I can tell, it stands a very good chance of passing. (Personally, I think it would work better than the "declaring your party" primary we have now, and not as well as the blanket primary. But we shall see.)
He decided to just watch the government, and kind of scale it down to size, and run his life that way. --Laurie Anderson
Again, I fail to see the irony
i'll explain. or try to.
you are saying anti-democrat stuff. he clicks on the link to go to your website, which he expects to be about you, and it says "Paid for by Bush-Cheney '04, Inc".
So it would seem that YOU were paid for by Bush-Cheney '04, Inc.
get it?
now no one said that you are, just that it's ironic that you had that on your webpage.
Via name_withheld from SensibleErection:
Colorado
Ohio
Pennsylvania
Florida
Tennessee
Michigan
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Clinton got a blow job in the White House and was pursued mercilessly for well over a year. Bush is sending US kids to die for some filthy oil war and nobody cares. It's not 50/50, I can assure you of that.
- One guy was 15 minutes late filing voter reg forms in FL
- a legal fight over requiring ID for provisional ballots
- 25 forms where the address MIGHT be invalid, in a county with 500k registered voters
- A county commissioner claiming fraud because he is unable to cope with the flood of new registrants
- A legitimate complaint about duplicate registrations in Denver
One out of five isn't so bad, I guess. But I am not sure how some duplicate registrations in Denver are even in the same league as an RNC funded company with a misleading name shredding hundreds or thousands of Democratic voter registration forms in Nevada and possibly Oregon, Pennsylvania and Arizona.Are you kidding? He had a temp job in a temporary operation at a temporary location, that was run by criminals pretending to be someone else. In my late teens I had plenty of jobs where I was never told the name of the guy next to me, or the lady who set my task list. The day this story broke, the office space rented by these sleazeballs was occupied by someone else, and they had skipped out on the rent. That he can't name his boss makes him no less credible.
The meaning of your Life is up to you. Mean well. -- Me, 9/11/2001
In Milwaukee, Kerry supporters forcibly occupied a GOP campaign HQ and disrupted all operations using a bullhorn.
In Cleveland the NAACP's National Voter Fund and "ACT Ohio" are under investigation for voter registration fraud prompting the local prosecutor to state "We've seen voter fraud before, but never on this level. I grew up in Chicago and this looks like the politics of Mayor Daley in the '50s and '60s."
Pro-democrat voter registration fraud in Racine, WI
Michigan
Florida
Denver and Minnesota are also locations of suspected fraud.
Want more?
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Interesting idea. Louisiana has an open primary - top two vote getters, no matter their party, go on to runoff. Unless one vote-getter in primary gets majority, in which case there is no need for a runoff. It guarantees that the winner of any election has a majority vote, at least.
The downside is that the top two candidates tend to be...interesting. And not necessarily in a good way. Which is why we had David Duke (KKK, Nazi) running against Edwin Edwards (unconvicted, then, but well known to be as crooked as a dog's hind leg - in jail now) for Governor four elections back. "Vote for the Crook, it's important" was a popular bumper sticker during that particular election.
And, yes, the Crook won.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Can anyone reply to my post with a corresponding list of things Dems have done?
Sure:
-Republican forms get tossed in the trash but not Republican forms...
- Democratic registration for completely fictional people...
- Fraudulent, forged Democratic registrations as well dumping a full years worth of paperwork on the registrars lap in the last minute to ensure they weren't looked at and INTENTIONALLY putting down false information for Republicans or simply not turning them in.
- Texas Democrats who Gerrymandered in their redistricting efforts... (The recent successful Republican effort was tit for tat revenge for the 1990 redistricting that The Almanac for American Politics called "The most partisan redistricting in the '90 cycle in the nation." and "the shrewdest gerrymander" of it's time. A gerrymander that resulted in a house delegation that was 17 to 15 Democratic despite 56% of the voters at the polls voting for a Republican congressman.
- CBS (as partisan as Sinclair or Fox) doing it's traditional 60 Minutes week-before-the-election hit piece early this year using obvious forgeries and giving the Kerry campaign advanced notice so they could exploit it with their operation "Fortunate Son"
-Florida 1998 -- Massive voter fraud uncovered that eventually leads to the election being overturned. The efforts during the next cycle (2000) all efforts to prevent fraud demagogued as "disenfranchising black voters" by the EXACT same people who had perpetuated the fraud.
...in California and what I was always told was that if they're registering as something other than Republican, we don't take the form - but we DO give it to 'em either blank or filled out there by them, and show them how to fold it and mail it.
That way we can't be accused of anything like this.
Now granted, something less than 100% will drop the thing in a mailbox, even though it's postage paid by the California Secretary of State. But that ain't our fault.
(I'm a Libertarian-leaning Republican, member of the Republican Liberty Caucus.)