No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

Voting Rights Endangered for Party out of Power

Martin Luther King III and Greg Palast described the dangers to voting Rights that are becoming greater.

From the article

Jim Crow revived in cyberspace

By Martin Luther King III and Greg Palast
Originally published May 8, 2003

Excerpt follows:

Today, there is a new and real threat to minority voters, this time from cyberspace: computerized purges of voter rolls.The menace first appeared in Florida in the November 2000 presidential election. While the media chased butterfly ballots and hanging chads, a much more sinister and devastating attack on voting rights went almost undetected.

In the two years before the elections, the Florida secretary of state's office quietly ordered the removal of 94,000 voters from the registries. Supposedly, these were convicted felons who may not vote in Florida. Instead, the overwhelming majority were innocent of any crime, though just over half were black or Hispanic.

We are not guessing about the race of the disenfranchised: A voter's color is listed next to his or her name in most Southern states. (Ironically, this racial ID is required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a King legacy.)

How did mass expulsion of legal voters occur? At the heart of the ethnic purge of voting rights was the creation of a central voter file for Florida placed in the hands of an elected, and therefore partisan, official. Computerization and a 1998 "reform" law meant to prevent voter fraud allowed for a politically and racially biased purge of thousands of registered voters on the flimsiest of grounds.

Voters whose name, birth date and gender loosely matched that of a felon anywhere in America were targeted for removal. And so one Thomas Butler (of several in Florida) was tagged because a "Thomas Butler Cooper Jr." of Ohio was convicted of a crime. The legacy of slavery -- commonality of black names -- aided the racial bias of the "scrub list."

Astonishingly, Congress adopted the absurdly named "Help America Vote Act," which requires every state to replicate Florida's system of centralized, computerized voter files before the 2004 election. The controls on the 50 secretaries of state are few -- and the temptation to purge voters of the opposition party enormous.

Our county has bought some of the touch-screen voting computers and tried them out in the early voting. When I used one, it was not programmed to bring up the Texas Constitutional Amendments after I voted for individuals, so I failed to vote on the amendments. I learned of the problem the next day. There is NO RECORD in hard copy showing my vote - ANYWHERE. The computer could easily be programmed to present - or not present - certain issues depending on how you already filled out the earlier part of the ballot. In this case, anyone who voted straight party Democrat was not presented the Constitutional Amendments to vote on, and the machine announced you were finished with the ballot.

The manner in which votes are counted will also depend on how the machine is programmed, and how it transmits the counts through the network. A good programmer could change the count of any vote, have the sub-routine that did it erase itself on a time basis, and no one would ever know or even know how it was done.

Paranoid? Just think Katherine Harris. She's already done it once.
posted by Richard at 1:05 AM