On September 14, the Asian American Action Fund and its Democratic allies in the D.C. metropolitan area held a major voter registration drive in the Falls Church area of Northern Virginia, where many immigrant communities live. Over 100 volunteers received training at the local Obama headquarters in registration techniques, and well over 200 volunteers spoke to shoppers at area schools and malls.
With the goal of more Democratic registrants, the volunteers were told that Republicans, independents and people of any background should be encouraged to register and vote as well. Some shoppers stopped to fill out the forms, aided by volunteers who spoke Vietnamese or Chinese, while others took the forms home. Still others took forms allowing them to file for absentee ballots.
All across the country, similar efforts are being undertaken by Republican, Democratic and other party organizations, and volunteers are needed. If you have not taken a few hours to speak to your neighbors about the importance of voting, today would be a great day to start.
The deadline for voting in this year’s presidential election is right around this time in most states, so if you have not yet registered, go to this link and find out how and where to register in your area: tinyurl.com/52xvpz. Be sure to remind your friends and family to register as well.
Republicans (tinyurl.com/4gqctq), Democrats (voteforchange.com) and independents or members of other parties (register-vote.com/) all have websites where registration can be done easily and quickly. There is no excuse to not register and vote this year if you are eligible.
Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean’s “50 State Strategy,” combined with an exciting race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama this spring, has led to a huge surge in Democratic voter registrations. According to the Associated Press, Democrats have added 2 million registered voters nationwide since 2006, while Republicans have lost 344,000.
Despite these large Democratic gains, the presidential campaign has stayed closer than some pundits had predicted. The reason for this is due to several factors including faulty polling methods and tampering with voter rolls.
When listening to polls, be sure to ask yourself who conducted the poll and how was it conducted. Polls become more accurate when they have larger numbers of participants chosen at random, but many polls undercount independents and third party candidates, miss the population that uses only cell phones and do not account for the greater number of recent Democratic registrants.
A powerful new film, Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections, describes in shocking detail the ways in which the Republican Party used dirty tricks to undermine Democratic voters in recent elections. The old notion that everybody cheats in elections does not begin to address the way that Republican operatives blamed individual voters for retail levels of voting problems (such as voting twice) while carrying out wholesale levels of disenfranchisement, such as purging voters from inner-city voter rolls, distributing false voter dates in minority neighborhoods and allocating an inadequate amount of voting machines in Democratic-leaning districts.
The big elephant in the room for this 2008 election is that the voting machine problems experienced in the 2004 and 2006 elections have not been fully addressed. No voter should be allowed to vote on an electronic machine that does not allow for a paper ballot to be recounted if fraud is alleged or a recount is needed. Every bank teller machine gives you a paper receipt, and voting machines should be able to do no less.
Uncounted shows how vote totals can be flipped at the central tabulators after an election is completed, completely reversing the will of the majority.
To address the potential for election theft, consider serving as a poll worker on Election Day or helping the nationwide election protection effort being coordinated at 866ourvote.org/
The Uncounted website also has a good list of things you can do and resources you can use to help guarantee free and fair elections. And if you are unsure if your voter registration has been tampered with, you can check at votepoke.org.
No matter who wins the election on November 4, the first order of business in 2009 has got to be setting up nationwide standards so that no voter is ever disenfranchised again. But the first order of business in the next 47 days is for all of us to get registered, to make sure our votes will be counted accurately and then to vote on November 4!
Dear Sir or Madam,
You are right to point out this travesty of justice against Republicans, and we all should work to stop it. Likewise I condemn the hacking of Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account (which she was using to conduct confidential Alaska state business) and any other illegal action against candidates, officials, or voters.
The point I was making in my article, which is still valid, is “The old notion that everybody cheats in elections does not begin to address the way that Republican operatives blamed individual voters for retail levels of voting problems (such as voting twice) while carrying out wholesale levels of disenfranchisement.” Check out the “Uncounted” website yourself and you will see what I mean.
Every act that prevents or in any way inhibits someone from voting must be stopped immediately. One-person-one-vote democracy cannot survive for long if we do not do some major fixes.
Thanks for your feedback, and please join me in condemning any and all attacks on democracy.
Phil
I think the article reflects how things are 180 degrees out of whack. For busloads of people brought over from one state to another to vote, black panthers turning away voters in Philly with baseball bats, Illegals being alowed to vote and total agressiveness and intimidation when someone does not go along with a Democrats view then I believe the Democrats are kings of vote fraud. Try voting in the Bronx sometime when you are the only white person and you hand in your ballot and they look at it and toss it in the garbage and look at you like you stole their money. Please, sell it to your kids, they will be paying the price. Lets put facts on the table, you don’t have a clue.
The argument goes this Obama wants to get in touch with a demographic that wouldn’t normally vote in midterm elections except if the candidates performed screeching, off-key insures of Whitney Houston sounds. Wasn’t it just a week ago that the media had been slamming Obama for “demeaning” the office on the President of north america by appearing on the particular Daily Show? I can’t wait for you to hear what the pearl-clutchers from the media have to say concerning this latest GOTV effort by the President.