Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Texas Attorney General only charging minorities and Democrats with assisting voters


Absentee balloting has about the only current voting fraud problems, excluding many examples of GOP dirty tricks in knocking people off the voter roles. There are some exceptions, I saw a report saying the last major fraud case several years ago was of GOP county officials allowing several hundred Christian college students to illegally vote but can't find the link now. Really, there are no masses of people illegally voting, the problem is not enough people are voting.

It is amazing that Abbott charged 12 people with crimes for assisting elderly voters and mailing ballots and 11 were minorities and none were Republicans. Just part of the GOP plan to discourage, suppress and further reduce turnout of minorities.

In my own investigations of voter rolls last year I found some people with second homes in another county being registered in both places. A statewide voter database search I am sure would turn up duplicate votes in both places in elections. I am also sure that these people are much more likely to have voted in a Republican primary than a Democrat. The thing is, these are not big problems and involve very small numbers of people. Getting people to vote and not making it impossible or very difficult for them to vote is the problem. Another problem is the actual vote counting by partisan officials. In Pasadena, we had a candidate left alone with the absentee mail-in ballots for enough time to change some votes. Did he? Who knows, he is not known for integrity. And the last problem is the ease in which the black box machines and PC vote tabulators can be entered and changes to the vote made with no possibility of detection. This would have to be done with the cooperation of vote counting officials but again, these are partisan positions.


No comments: