Lauren Beth Gash on Republican Voter Suppression
You know what would be something? If we had a state party that did something like this:
“We strongly condemn voter registration fraud, obviously. That said, this Illinois Republican Party lawsuit is a silly and transparent attempt to disenfranchise thousands of newly and properly registered voters in a desperate attempt to save Mark Kirk from defeat at the polls.
“The Republicans realize that they cannot win based on their ideas, so they are creating an eleventh-hour hysteria about voter fraud , when in fact the Lake County Clerk is already acting as required by law to weed out the irregular registrations that occur every election cycle. And we strongly encourage that.
“This move by the dispirited and desperate Illinois GOP is nothing more than a smokescreen that they hope will allow them to make it harder for people to vote for Barack Obama, Dan Seals and all Democratic candidates in Lake County.
“But it simply won’t work. Voters are smarter than that. We’re going to make sure that everyone who wants to vote, and is entitled to vote, gets their vote counted. 10th District voters have had enough of Republicans’ cynical Karl Rove-style tactics and they’ve had enough of the Bush Administration’s failed policies.”
“I CERTAINLY understand the desperation that Republicans must feel now, considering how voters feel about them. But that desperation is not enough to allow the GOP to damage the integrity of the election process.”
October 28th, 2008 at
Way to step up Lauren.
October 28th, 2008 at
How about “we will make sure that everyone who is legitimately registered and wants to vote gets to vote?”
From the Ill GOP Web Site
“State Republicans say this stamp on the applications prove they were taken by Citizen Action Illinois. But the non-profit group says it is not their stamp.”
Well what is the harm in going provisional if the courts think that is a legitimate approach? You still have to resolve the ballots one way or the other, it’s better than turning people away.
I guess my bigger question is, if this was some pro-life group that the Democrats had ‘concerns’ with about voter registrations if the democrats would just say ‘That’s cool, it’s all about enfranchising people and if 850 applications were turned in that were really bad that’s just fine with us’
Come on people it’s not that hard to fill out one of these things correctly.
October 29th, 2008 at
One,
On most of the forms in question, they were pre-printed based on data from magazine subscription lists, phone company records, etc. (The group that sent out the pre-printed voter registration form to Princess the Dead Goldfish, aka Princess Nudelman, got her name off a phone list after the family used her name with the phone company to avoid junk mail….)
So it’s not a matter of “filling it out correctly” — it’s a matter of computers are doing all the filling out and it’s not hitting a human checkpoint til it gets mailed to these families… and some of them, thinking it came from the County Clerk, are sending the forms back to Willy Helander up in Lake County and telling her the info is bogus. That’s exactly what the Nudelman family did with their goldfish’s reg. form (they never even filled it out… just sent it to the Clerk with a note telling her to remove the info because their goldfish was a goldfish, not a voter).
What’s over the top is the GOP reaction to something that happens on a routine basis, from both sides of the aisle (as you note).
Bad registration forms come in every year. But it’s not until Mark Kirk is 6 pts. down in polling that the GOP makes a Federal case out of it.