Elections 2006: Protect Your Right to Vote

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by Rebecca Trinite, Development Associate

October 24, 2006

You can hear it in Susan B. Anthony's impassioned call for justice, "Men, their rights and nothing more. Women, their rights and nothing less." You can see it in HBO's beautiful film dramatizing Alice Paul's intense struggle for women's suffrage Iron Jawed Angels. People lived and died for women's right to vote in this country and we owe it to them and to ourselves to exercise that right.

Mid-term elections are right around the corner and each and every woman who can vote needs to get to the polls on November 7—and those who can't vote should find a way to volunteer. But it is not enough to exercise the hard-won right to vote. Unfortunately, now we also have to defend it.

When voter fraud is mentioned, it often provokes accusations of "sore loser" or "conspiracy theorist." Or at least it used to. These days, with a government rife with serious ethics violations and downright criminal behavior, it is hardly a leap of logic to recognize the possibility of stolen elections.

There are numerous documented examples of election fraud and voter disenfranchisement over the past decade or so.

The 2000 and and 2004 elections were characterized by voter intimidation tactics targeting particularly African American and student voters. Police intimidation of African American voters has a long history and the 2004 elections were no exception. Who can forget voter suppression tactics in Florida in the presidential election of 2000? And then repeated in Ohio in 2004? Both states were pivotal to George W. Bush's election and re-election.

Reports of university and college students being told that it was illegal for them to vote in their school-town, even if they were registered there, were so common as to be ubiquitous.

More recently, it has been reported that Latino voters in California received a letter in the mail telling them that it is "dangerous, useless and illegal" for them to vote and threatening the possibility of deportation. The letter apparently came from a staffer of Republican candidate Tan D. Nguyen.

New Voter I.D. laws that go beyond the requirements of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which was enacted in 2002), are aimed at creating hurdles for voting. For example, six states require that voters to show a photo I.D.: Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana and SD South Dakota. This is not required under HAVA, and will likely disenfranchise elderly and young voters who do not drive, as well as those for whom the effort involved in acquiring a photo I.D. is prohibitive (for example, a person working two jobs, or someone without transportation to the nearest big city to obtain the necessary I.D. Some states, such as Georgia, have tried to enact Voter I.D. laws requiring a government issued photo I.D. which would cost the voter a fee, a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act.

There are also numerous technical barriers to voting, including lost or misplaced provisional and absentee ballots, malfunctioning voting machines, thousands of names missing from registration lists, biased purges of registration rolls, polling places not opening late on time (so that people in line must leave to go to work), and polling lines stretching around the block. There are but a few of the major deterrents to voting and can only be addressed through comprehensive voting reform.

And then there are the widespread and disturbing accusations of election tampering. With no paper trail to corroborate the accuracy tabulations of electronic voting machines, there are significant concerns that the machines can be tampered with or hacked into in order to change votes. And if people don't believe their votes will be counted, or might actually be counted for a different candidate, that is a significant barrier to convincing them to vote.These are but a few of the deterrents to voting and can only be addressed through comprehensive voting reform.

Probably the most notorious election tampering story report to come out of the 2004 presidential election took place in came from Hocking County, Ohio. Reportedly a man working for TriAd, the company that manufactured the electronic voting machines for many counties in Ohio, came to a county board of elections office and informed the workers that their TriAd-supplied computer and tabulator were malfunctioning and all the data had been lost. He said he could fix it and proceeded to take apart the computer and input information into it. The discovery of this inappropriate conduct created a small uproar as it violated quite a few provisions of state and federal law.

This is only one example of many. For more examples and in depth examination of election fraud, please see the resources below. It is clear is that we must be vigilant in protecting our votes in the coming critical election.

Here are a few things you can do:

Sign up to be a poll watcher for your political party, or an election poll worker, and report any suspicious activity that you see.
Bring several forms of identification when you go to vote.
Do NOT use a provisional ballot unless you absolutely have to. Provisional ballots are some of the easiest to "lose", and often aren't counted until after a winner has been declared.
Take your video camera and record stories of voters who have problems at the poll and who are willing to talk on camera.
Notify local press when there is an irregularity such as polls opening late, voting machines without the proper computer keycards to activate the machines, running out of provisional ballots or envelopes , etc.
If exit polling is being conducted, be sure participate and tell the exit poll researcher gathering voter information who you voted for! Exit polling is one of the best ways to identify whether the vote count reported from a precinct's electronic machines is accurate.
Research the issue of voter and election fraud and let others know what you find.

Resources:

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