I posted a few days ago about how well the Democrats are doing with voter registration in Ohio.
Well, now the GOP is fighting back. Are they increasing their own registration efforts? No, of course not. Instead, they’ve dredged up an obsolete rule that voter registrations must be printed on 80-pound stock paper. From the Dayton Daily News:
“Our directive stands and it is specifically in place to protect new registrants to make sure the forms are not destroyed,” LoParo said.
So in order to protect new registrants from having their registrations accidently destroyed in transit by the post office, any registration on the wrong paper stock that has already made it safely to the board of elections office must be ignored.
Couldn’t they even come up with a rational sounding excuse?
The story explains that the rule is out-of-date:
The League of Women Voters of Ohio on Thursday called on Blackwell to clarify his position. League national president Kay Maxwell said she knows of no other states that are requiring the 80-pound paper stock for voter registration cards. “This is the first I’ve heard of it,” she said on Thursday in Columbus.
Teh Republicans are also trying to interpret rules on provisional ballots more strictly than federal law requires. Anything to avoid counting votes, I guess.
is there any way, other than deliberately sitting down to debate “how can we legally scrap all the voter registrations in that pile, without having to scrap too many in this pile”, that anybody could even find such an obscure and irrelevant rule? what on earth goes through the head of a person involved in such horse-trading, anyway?
That article should have included something about “desperately pawing the air” for measures to turn registered Democrats away from the voting booths.
Kip was right.
Not being an American citizen, I’d never heard of the GOP. Until today, I’d just assumed it was some collection of right wing lunatics who supported George Bush (from the things they’re reported as doing). I was stunned to find out that it was the ruling party of the most powerful nation in the world.
I should have known.
Kip Is Wrong.
Aside from the more important voter rights issue…. What a pain in the neck!
I’ve worked the polls. Do you know how absolutely aggravating it is when people who honestly think they are registered don’t appear on the list of registered voters? Obviously, you want to explore every avenue to get them a ballot. (But, of course, you don’t want to violate any law!)
Of course, there is always a line. You flip through all the possible guidebooks checking and double checking the rules. The person voting is invariable under the impression that the poll workers are full time employees who do this all the time. (NOT!) You try to call a full time person for further guidance. Needless to say, 90% of the time, the phone is busy. When you get through, they are singularly uninformative….
Luckily, when I’ve worked the polls, there were never more than 2 voters who this happened to. I can’t even imagine how frustrating it would be if it happened to lots of people. (Once, the county didn’t inform a whole subdivision that their polling location had been changed in a timely fashion. The notices arrived in most voters afternoon mail on the day of the election. What’s worse though, is that the voters came to our polling place after visiting another polling place who told them the wrong new location! And I don’t think this was done with any intention of disenfranchising people. It was just one of those “ordinary” screwups.)
And now someone wants to increase the number of these frustrated people by rejecting their applications because the paper was too thin? Yikes!