U.S. Curtails Federal Election Observers (fortune.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Federal election observers can only be sent to five states in this year's U.S. presidential election, among the smallest deployments since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 to end racial discrimination at the ballot box. The plan, confirmed in a U.S. Department of Justice fact sheet seen by Reuters, reflects changes brought about by the Supreme Court's 2013 decision to strike down parts of the Act...

Attorney General Loretta Lynch said on Friday the Justice Department's ability to deploy election observers had been "severely curtailed" by the Supreme Court's decision... Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Voting Rights Project, said federal observers are especially needed this year because 17 states have tightened restrictions on voting since the last presidential election.

Comments

WTF?

[blindseer]

[quote]In Sandoval County, New Mexico, federal observer reports showed that Native-American voters had difficulty getting voting information in their native languages during the decade between 1994 and 2004, according to a 2011 court order in a case the United States brought against the county.[/quote]

To me "Native-American" means that this person descends from a people that lived on the land now known as America before it became known as America. America has since the beginning been a place where English has been spoken. Any place that is now America is a place that has been speaking English for decades, if not centuries. In America the road signs are in English, the schools teach English, television and radio broadcasts are in English. Every product sold in America will have English labels, manuals, etc. While I'm certain that certain local newspapers might be in some language other than English the regional and national ones are in English. Someone not capable of reading and/or speaking English will be largely ignorant of what is going on in the world unless someone is there to translate for them.

I find it very difficult to believe that someone that has lived in America for so long has failed to grasp enough of the English language to perform as simple of a task as to identify the people they wish to vote for on an English language ballot. Even so, there should be someone they trust available to translate for them. If neither are true then can someone explain how they would even know who to vote for? Or, even know an election was happening?

I have to wonder what language these Americans were speaking while living inside America for so long? What sort of a bubble did they live in where they isolated themselves so much from the American culture that they did not care to learn the language and yet connected enough to the nation at large that they cared enough to vote at all?

I call bullshit on this.

Re:Probably Trump

[ChrisMaple]

Ask Jeb Bush how effective trying to persuade people to vote for him (using money to buy advertisements) was. He spent about $150,000,000.00 and got 286,634 votes. That's $523 per vote.

By way of contrast, pay a bunch of people on welfare $20 each, load them onto a bus, and cart them around to voting centers where the staff is all friendly. With a bit of planning, they might each vote 10 times in a single day.

Everything in life affects the poor and minorities disproportionately.

Lumping together "poor" and "minorities" shows that you're just parroting the standard leftist line, and not thinking. U.S. citizens of Asian heritage tend to be more intelligent and more polite than the average citizen, and consequently most people treat them better. They're a minority.

Re:Let's send out Independent Election Observers.

[dywolf]

oh don't worry.

the tea baggers will be out in droves to make sure minorities feel right as home as they try to vote.