I heard a story a few months ago that Republicans in one city (back East, I think) were complaining that their votes were being switched by the voting machines to Democratic ones. But I seem to recall in 2008 that Democrats’ votes were being switched to Republican, and the problem with the (Diebold) machines was more widespread. From voting machine problems to ‘hanging chads’ to voters not being registered with the party they registered with, why do voting ‘errors’ seem to go against Democrats so often?
I can’t find anything about party affiliation errors, but plenty about the long lines. They were so long some people were waiting 4 hours or more to vote. That’s unacceptable! This is a new “improvement”. they cut the number of polling places, but now you can vote at any one, not just your assigned one. The second is an improvement, the first definitely is not.
Seems to me it’s about time to mandate by Federal law that both parties have to have their primary on the same day using the same facilities in each and every state that wants to have a primary at all. Better yet, outlaw closed primaries.
Why would you interject the Federal government into what is clearly a state matter? Of course, I see no reason that the states should be running/paying for primary elections either - the parties should be free to choose their candidates however they want, but in no case should they expect the taxpayers to foot the bill.
One thing I DO know is in my state, when you go online to register there was a nice dropdown list of available party choices. Well, the dropdown wasn’t wide enough to display the entire length of all the party listings. And that’s the story of how I accidentally signed up for the “Independence Party” as opposed to simply registering as an independent, because all I could see on the dropdown was “INDEPENDEN”
Yeah, they can. If they have multiple candidates they can have them put on the primary ticket.
Primaries aren’t just party things. My local school board and city council - where party identification isn’t allowed on the ballot (but you can get endorsements) - if there are too many candidates to put on the election ballot and get a clear result.
The primaries for the Presidency and both houses of Congress are not a Federal matter?
[QUOTE=U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 4]
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof;** but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators**.
[/QUOTE]
(Emphasis added.)
Not in my opinion. The general election certainly is within Federal scope, but if the Democrats decide to change their rules to select a candidate by randomly selecting a name from the phone book of a randomly selected city and the Republicans select the person who can drink a 20-oz beer the fastest, that is actually perfectly acceptable.
What if the mis-registration was intentional? That would be crime. There are about 360,000,000 people in the United States. If 1,800 of them committed a crime (pick one – say, identity theft) they shouldn’t be prosecuted because they’re only 0.0005% of the population?
The lack of polling places was terrible, but unless other evidence comes out, I’d assume that the people who thought they were Democrats were just mistaken about their registration. Lots of people aren’t good at following rules, filling out paperwork, or remembering what they did in the past, and many of them vote.
That’s not even a properly constructed strawman as this is about 20 victims, not 20 perpetrators. And anyway I’d bet my left nut that more than 1,800 acts of identity theft occurred today which will not be investigated beyond “what’s your name? Here’s your incident number.”
I’m saying 0.0005% is such an incredibly slim margin of error that it’s unlikely to be fraud. Nobody looked at 20 cases of misregistration out of 4 million and said “gosh, this is an alarming trend worth investigating.” Some lazy reporter had a deadline to meet and wrote a story about vote suppression against democrats before gathering the facts and fell prey to the sunk cost fallacy after discovering that the facts weren’t there.
