Voting

[Pinch]

Have you voted yet? Do it soon if you can cause the Republicans will do anything to win this election including fucking with the voting system!

It is the Republican's last and only chance for another 4 years of absolute selfish world-destroying thinking.

VOTE
VOTE
VOTE
VOTE
VOTE
VOTE
VOTE
VOTE
VOTE
VOTE
VOTE

 

[Jim Finnel]

a note for students

i heard on cnn that false rumors have been spreading around some campuses that you can only vote where your home is. this is a lie. federal law mandates that you be able to vote where you go to school.

don't let some nazi rob you of your rights. pay attention everyone.

the election is Tuesday November 4th

Green the Machine
VOTE!

 

[Dr. 215]

Thanks for the clarification, some republican up here told me i HAD to get an absentee ballot, but i registered in my current state. November 4th is comin!!!!

EVERYONE PLEASE VOTE, YOUR OPINION COUNTS!

 

[Jim Finnel]

Safeguarding Against Voter Disenfranchisement

Four years ago students at Kenyon College in Ohio who wanted to vote in the presidential election had to wait in line up to 10 hours. Their precinct had two voting machines — one was broken — to serve more than 1,300 registered voters.

Before the 2004 election, voter participation among students had steadily declined in the years following 1972 when 18-year-olds first won the right to vote.

Flash forward to 2008. The youth vote has risen in the past three consecutive elections, and there are no signs that it will slow down, voting advocates say.

This year’s historic election is creating even more of a groundswell of excitement, particularly among this demographic. Activists say young voter turnout increased 70 percent during the primary season over what was seen in the 2004 general election.

But many of the problems students experienced four years ago in Ohio and across the country have yet to be fixed and may prove worse this November when even more new and young voters head to the polls.

Voting infrastructure, such as machines, outdated voter rolls and the number of qualified poll workers, has not kept pace with the rising number of students who want to participate in the electoral process, said Sujatha Jahagirdar, program director at the Student Public Interest Research Group’s New Voters Project. “Several barriers persist,” Jahagirdar said during her testimony before a congressional panel in September.

Add to that the likelihood many voters, including students, will have their rights challenged at precincts on Election Day, and there will be a mixture for long lines and disenfranchisement that will be nearly impossible to correct before election results are tabulated.

Jahagirdar said restrictive photo identification laws pose the biggest threat to young voters.

Nationally, almost one in five students do not possess the required state-issued identification, according to the Student Association for Voter Empowerment, or SAVE, a national nonprofit that seeks to protect youth voters and promote civic engagement among this same demographic.

“This hits out-of-state students particularly hard,” says Matthew Segal, who helped found SAVE after the 2004 election when he watched his fellow Kenyon College students and others turned away from long lines caused by too few voting machines.

“If I have a Georgia driver’s license, but I attend Ohio State University, they won’t let me use my Georgia ID, even though I have the legal right to vote in Ohio because I’ve lived there for more than 30 days and I contribute to the tax base there.”

This problem is exacerbated, advocates say, by misleading information campaigns that tell students they could lose crucial financial aid or negatively impact their parents’ tax status by registering to vote at school.

Just last month, election administrators in Blacksburg, Va. — home to Virginia Tech — released erroneous guidelines suggesting that student voters could lose their scholarships or coverage under their parents’ car and health insurance by registering to vote at school. Several students canceled their registration based on the information, according to advocates and media reports.

Once a Republican stronghold, Virginia is now considered a swing state in the upcoming election. It also has the strictest, yet most ambiguous, residency laws in the country, according to a report released by the Century Foundation and Common Cause. Both organizations crusade for effective and open government.

The report, called “Voting in 2008: Ten Swing States,” examines mostly battleground states, where advocates anticipate the most problems in November. Virginia tops the list. The report looks at other places that have a history of voter disenfranchisement and also provides an in-depth look at student voting rights.

Virginia falls under the review of the U.S. Justice Department because of its history of voter disenfranchisement and violations of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; therefore, election officials, like those in Blacksburg, should take extra care in how they interpret the state’s murky residency requirements, advocates say. Some college institutions are working to counter this brand of voter disenfranchisement created by identification laws. For example, the president of Oberlin College in Ohio, another swing state, sent every student a utility bill that reflects services already paid for as part of the student’s tuition and that can be used by students when registering to vote or if their residency status is challenged at the polls.

As for the long lines on Election Day, the 2008 voting report says that issue will be harder to track. And voting advocates aren’t as hopeful about solving this problem.

“There are no laws in place requiring the number of voting machines to be allocated according to the number of registered voters per precinct,” says SAVE’s Matthew Segal. He calls it “gerrymandering by voter machine” and finds it interesting that the long lines he witnessed in Ohio happened only in precincts dominated by student and minority voters.

Four years ago Segal worked to bring food and water to those who waited in those long lines, in order to help make sure their votes counted.

He might have to do it again this year.

Voter Resources:

The Brennan Center for Justice, at the New York University School of Law, has a Web site to let students know their voting rights: Student Voting Rights | Brennan Center for Justice. The Tom Joyner Morning Show and the NAACP National Voter Fund have partnered to launch 1-866- MYVOTE1, a voter alert line that allows people to find out where their polling places are located, register to vote and report problems at the polls. Election Protection, a coalition of legal and civil rights groups, recently announced a national voter protection initiative, including another hotline number (1-866-OUR-VOTE).



ALERT: Student voter suppression in Virginia = big problem

Virginia has emerged as one of the tightest swing states in the 2008 presidential election. Every vote will count.

Especially the votes of young Virginians. According to the latest state statistics, 42% of Virginia's more than 284,100 new registrants are college-aged, between 17 and 25 years old. An astounding 50,000 new voters in Virginia are 18 years old.

But new reports are showing that the rights of college students to vote in Virginia are still being challenged by election officials using an exceedingly narrow interpretation of state residency laws, potentially disenfranchising tens of thousands of young voters.

How many Virginia voters could be affected? A 2006 report found 34% of Virginians aged 18-24 are enrolled in college. However, the share of young registered voters who are students is likely higher than that, given that voter participation rises with education and income, and because of the large voter registration campaigns targeting college campuses.

If we can safely estimate that at least 50% of Virginia's new college-aged voters are students, that translates into over 59,000 college student voters. Right now, Pollster.com's averages show McCain and Obama separated by merely .2% -- about 9,500 votes. Using these ballpark estimates, that means affecting less than 20% of student registrations alone could swing the election.

Those are just estimates. Whatever the actual numbers are, you get the point -- this is a big issue.

WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?
So what's going on? Local officials are being encouraged to use their own interpretation of Virginia law regarding student registration -- which has opened the door for some to use an exceptionally strict interpretation that could deny many students the vote.

Students in Radford University recently organized to protest the actions of Radford registrar Tracy Howard, who was automatically denying all registrations from students who listed a campus address as their residence:

The RU Fair Voter Registration Alliance formed Sept. 15 after student Nikki Rampino registered using her dorm address and received a pending denial notice. After Rampino went to Howard's office and complained, her application was approved. She got her voter identification card Monday.

But the Radford registrar says he will continue to reject student registrations with campus addresses:

"If they give me only a dorm address," [Howard] said, "they will be sent something called a pending denial. It says that you need to have a street address, permanent address, in order to register to vote."

The episode brought back memories of Virginia Tech, where earlier this year students were wrongfully told by a zealous Montgomery County registar that they could lose scholarship money and coverage under their parent's health insurance. Montgomery County later "clarified" their website.

Last week, Sheri Iachetta -- the registrar for Charlottesville, Virginia -- testified before the Committee on House Administration that Radford and Virginia Tech weren't the only places where this controversy was coming up in the state:

"I have heard concerns from [other registrars] across the state that students are registering in dormitories," Iachetta said.

Despite widespread public outcry, local officials are still interpreting Virginia law in a way that could bar many students from voting. On September 30, the ACLU called on Howard to stop issuing false denials to Radford students, and encouraged them to contact the ACLU if their registration was denied. Radford's dean of students, Trae Cotton, has announced his support of the right of students to vote using a campus address.

WHAT'S THE LAW?
In his defense, Howard says that he wants the Virginia law clarified. That would be helpful -- but the reality is that Virginia law may not be as confusing as local officials are claiming.

The State Board of Election's website is fairly clear in stating that

A dorm or college address can be an acceptable residential address and does not disqualify you from voting.

But it's not automatic. A student address only works if a student declares it as their formal "residence," a category that includes two factors, according to the Board of Elections.

First, the student's address must be considered their "abode" -- the place where he or she stays (not a problem in this case). Second, the student's address must also be a "domicile." This is the source of the problem.

What's a "domicile?" According to Virginia's election website:

To establish "domicile", a person must live in a particular locality with the intent to remain there for an unlimited time.

But how many students know exactly where they're going to be living three, four or more years from now? Virginia officials acknowledge that "intent" may change, stating:

The applicant must determine and declare their residence and may change their intent at any time. (emphasis added)

And how does one measure a student's "intent" anyway? Again, the state's website acknowledges that residency "intent" involves "an assortment of factors," and the state ultimately admits that "intent" is unknowable, at least in a legal sense:

A person’s domicile is essentially a matter of subjective intent known only to that person.

Which, if you think about it, is true of any voter -- student or not. That's why several courts have held that to hold students to a different standard regarding their "intent" of residency would be a violation of the equal protection clause, as the Brennan Center noted in a 2006 brief:

A few courts have held that a state may make an additional inquiry in a good faith attempt to determine residency, so long as it does not require students to meet a different standard from any other person seeking to register to vote. However, if the inquiry is designed to elicit irrelevant information that is unnecessary to assess fairly whether the student considers the college community to be her primary residence (e.g., where the student’s car is registered), it creates a per se rule against residence in the college community, which violates the equal protection clause.

Or as the registrar from Charlottesville, Sheri Iachetta, said before the U.S. House:

"Determining a voter’s intent [to stay in the state] is not our job to decide ... You don’t want to create a special class of citizen, especially in a voting rights state ... Students are being categorized and segregated. They are young adults, it is their decision."


Source

 

[Pinch]

Is anyone else experiencing the "Howard Beale Phenomena" this election cycle?

Howard Beale: I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!'

Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: [screaming at the top of his lungs]

"I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

-Network (1976)

I voted not to take this anymore! I ask that you all will vote too! VOTE!