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."

Comments

!FP?

[temojen]

Why is this not on the Front Page?

Re:Non-party affiliated registration

[squiggleslash]

Perhaps it's time the parties started organizing their own elections, rather than requiring the states (and presumably taxpayers) to do so on their behalf.

As a side effect, this would mean they could do so by their own rules rather than having the states impose their own (Democrats allowed to vote in Republican primaries and vice-versa, etc)

Re:Standards?

[richie2000]

In Sweden, all citizens eligible to vote are automatically registered to vote. It's a non-issue. We're all registered. We get voter cards in the mail about a month before the election.

If you wish to wait until election day like most people do (instead of casting an absentee ballot at the local post office), you go to the designated polling place with your voter card and a photo ID, take a ballot with your candidate's/party's name on it (we normally have around ten different parties of which 5-6 or so make it into the parliament), put it in an envelope behind a screen, seal it and give it to the voting official who puts it in a strongbox while two of his colleagues (these are all local guys from different parties) watch. They then strike your name off the voter list and you're done. It's all very serious and very proper. Counting is done in parallell - again with three officials present at all times. We normally get the first solid results within hours after the last polling place closes with some of the absentee and overseas ballots being counted up to a week later.

If you want to vote in a different polling place, that's fine. If you want to vote from overseas - no problem. One person, one vote. No problems, no cheating, no confusion and we consistently get turnouts in the 80-90% range for our parliament elections.

To a Swede, it's inconcievable that the USA, one of the proudest democracies in the world, is unable to hold a general election that stands up to any kind of standard regarding voter integrity... Register for voting? 4711 different voting methods? Insane. You might as well use a pair of crooked dice to select the President.

There has to be a federal database of every citizen in the US, right? Use it for some good for once. Automatically remove all under-aged and other criteria you may want (taking away the opportunity for Jeb Bush to get rid of a bunch of left-wing hippie voters) and send voter cards to the rest. If you wish you can include ballots for all parties that got more than 1% in the last election in that letter and let the rest of the ballots be available at the polling place. Do not register party affiliation anywhere. Do not pass Go. Do not let anyone except a federally appointed multi-partisan voting commission interfere with this process, at any level at all.

It's just basic checks and balances, it's not like it's rocket science.

Oh the hypocrisy...

[mrbrown1602]

I find it funny that people are complaing about a private company tearing up the registrations of Democrats, but when Democrats in swing states register to vote 39 times and openly brags about it in the media, nobody says anything about it.