voting

Tomorrow is the day. It's often said that if you don't vote you've not bought the right to complain.  More importantly, if you don't vote you have given up all opportunity of participation in the democratic process. There are many important elections up for grabs this time around.   School board and other local elections are of enormous importance, and can affect you most of all right where you live. Likewise city government elections.

It's also a vitally important election for the State Surpreme Court.  I won't tell people who to vote for, but personally I am voting for Ed Fallone because I think he stands the best chance of making the Surpreme Court system more functional, and less swayed by big money (Let's get the big money out, but that's an argument for another day).

Also state-wide we have a choice for Superintendent of Schools - pitting someone with a long-term record of working for better schools in the state against someone who frankly seems to have a plan to destroy the public school system. Your choice. Again, I won't tell you who to vote for, but I'm voting for Evers.

But most importantly - go out and vote. It's your right, and a lot of people in the state are trying to make it harder for you to exercise your right. Take it seriously, make it count.

In an interesting and disturbing development, Waukesha County's county clerk has apparently found 7582 Prosser votes that were never reported, at least not to the AP.  There is a news story on this at the Journal-Sentinel,  

This is a bewildering and unfortunate development.  The county clerk in question, Kathy Nickolaus, has been called on the carpet previously for election secrecy and keeping voting totals on her personal computer.

The county is holding a press conference at 5:30 PM.  We'll try to keep up with what is going on, but this all sounds extremely peculiar.

UPDATE -- LIVE VIDEO STREAM at http://www.channel3000.com/localvideo/index.html?v=live

UPDATE -- Press conference has ended.  Kathy Nickolaus apologized, and said that the majority of the vote change was due to human error --- one of the spreadsheets did not get imported into an Access database on her computer, and she thought it had.  Because of this, they were not reported with the unofficial vote total, and the missing votes were not noticed until they started the canvas process yesterday (Wednesday). 

The press asked multiple questions on this, and how the votes could have been missed until the canvas.

We'll be doing further looking into the normal process and how that  should have worked. 

It’s been a few days now since we began a conversation that addresses the issue of how frustrated some number of LBGT voters are with the Democratic Party this cycle; this because they find themselves either frustrated at the lack of progress on the civil rights issues that matter to them, or because they see both the Democratic and Republican Parties as unreliable partners in the struggle to assure equal rights for all.

In an effort to practice some actual journalism, I assembled a version of an online “focus group” at The Bilerico Project (“daily adventures in LBGTQ”), with the goal of gathering some opinions on this subject in the actual words of those frustrated voters.

Part One of this story focused on “stating the problem”, and today we’ll take on Part Two: in this environment, with Election Day staring us in the face, what is an LBGT voter to do?

As before, there are a variety of opinions, including a very informative comment I was able to obtain from a genuine Member of Congress, Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania’s 8th District, and that means until the very end you won’t hear much from me, except to help “set the stage” for the comments that follow.

WITI-TV reports:

The Voter Fraud Hotline in Milwaukee County was staffed with police and prosecutors on Tuesday. They were ready to pounce on any voting irregularities.

But even as the phones rang throughout the day, the questions and issues being posed were considered easy to assess and handle.

Election officials say the day went extremely smoothly. The hotline was relatively quiet which indicated a smooth election.

Good thing we had that highly-touted Election Integrity Task Force or whatever Atty. Gen. JB Van Hollen keeps bragging on, with all sorts of cops and DAs across the state mobilized.

About 850,000 people voted. Did anyone get caught trying to vote twice, or in someone else's name, or while on probation? Even one? If so, we have not heard a word about it.

There is no widespread "voter fraud," as the right wing likes to claim, and what is used as the excuse for the kind of voter caging and suppression tactics exposed this week. It's always in the name of preventing "voter fraud" that they try to take away people's votes.

Remember that when the next wave of hysteria hits in late October.

You may be asking yourself why the Republican Party is filing voter fraud complaints all over, getting people like Van Hollen in Wisconsin, and the Colorado secretary of state to file crazed lawsuits to purge voter roles, and making the incredibly big stink over and over again about ACORN, when they keep losing the lawsuits, and when it hasn't seemed to have a big effect on the public? I asked myself this very question, and the answer I came up with is disheartening.

Personally I think they're intentionally poisoning the well, and preparing for a massive legal assault against the outcome of the 2008 election. After all, if you can't disenfranchise as many people as you need to to win the election, then the next best thing is to raise doubts over and over and over before the election in hopes of having your lawyers, talk radio hosts, and anyone else you can enlist to raise questions after the election.  

I expect that there's a good chance that the aftermath of this election (if it is ANYTHING like close) will make the "hanging chad, Sore Loserman, stolen vote" debacle of 2000 look like a cakewalk.

All the more reason to go out and vote even if you're in a non-swing state, or you think that the outcome is a done deal.  It can only be a done deal if the results are overwhelming.  Help make it so.