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The Liberal Assault On Voter ID Laws -- Now We Know Why!
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| The Liberal Assault On Voter ID Laws -- Now We Know Why!
- Click HERE to go to the original thread with graphics
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| redeye |
The Don't Show Me State
People in the good state of Missouri need photo identification to cash a check, board a plane or apply for food stamps. But the state Supreme Court has ruled that a photo ID requirement to vote is too great a burden on the elderly and the poor. Go figure.
Public polls consistently show that an overwhelming majority of Americans -- regardless of age, race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status -- favor voter ID laws. And nearly half of the nation's states have passed them. Yet a string of recent court decisions has blocked their implementation in some places, thus siding with Democrats and liberal special interest groups who would rather turn a blind eye to voter fraud.
A Georgia judge ruled a voter ID law unconstitutional in September. Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked enforcement of a similar law in Arizona, only to be unanimously reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday. (While the Supremes didn't decide on the merits, their willingness to let the ID requirement be enforced in next month's election suggests some encouraging deference to state officials who want to protect the integrity of the ballot.) Also this month, a Seventh Circuit appeals panel heard arguments in a case concerning Indiana's voter ID requirements. And the Michigan Supreme Court will consider a voter ID challenge in November.
Missouri's dispute shows what's at stake and why the laws are under attack. The state passed its new voting requirements in May in response to problems at the polls in 2000 and 2004, and the IDs were made available at no charge. The law was to be implemented over a two-year period, and people who lacked proper identification would be permitted to cast a provisional vote next month.
Despite these good faith efforts to ensure legitimate ballot access, however, opponents charge that photo ID requirements are overly burdensome and tantamount to a poll tax. The Missouri Democratic Party, which challenged the law, said that while the ID itself is free, the underlying documents -- such as a birth certificate -- required to obtain the necessary identification cost money. And state judges were sympathetic to the argument.
In a 6-1 decision striking down the law as a violation of the state constitution, the Missouri Supreme Court said that requiring the "between 3 and 4 percent of Missourians who lack the requisite photo ID" to obtain one for voting purposes "creates a heavy burden on the fundamental right to vote." How so? "Specific Missouri voters testified that to acquire the requisite photo ID, at the very least they will have to incur the costs associated with birth certificates, which in Missouri costs $15."
In his dissenting opinion, Judge Stephen Limbaugh Jr. took issue with the fact that the majority opinion actually played down the existence of vote fraud. "Although the majority agrees that there is some evidence of voter fraud at the voter registration stage, they discount that evidence as if it had no connection with fraud at the polling place," wrote Judge Limbaugh. "But why else does voter registration fraud occur if not to vote persons fraudulently registered?"
That's a good question. And both the majority ruling and the political left duck it. They'd rather equate a $15 nominal fee for a birth certificate with a poll tax, which is as ridiculous as the paternalistic view that senior and minority voters are incapable of meeting simple self-identification requirements that they manage to meet in other contexts every day.
Showing ID is an incidental cost of voting, like having to buy a postage stamp for an absentee ballot, or feed the parking meter when you go to the polling booth. Poll taxes, by contrast, required a person to pay a fee every time he voted and were adopted for racially discriminatory purposes.
But there's a reason that Democrat partisans are more interested in raising the specter of Jim Crow than in protecting the integrity of the voting process. And here's a clue: While the Missouri Supreme Court was preparing its decision earlier this month, the Kansas City Star and St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran front-page stories about the thousands of fraudulent voter registrations submitted by Acorn, a national left-wing group financed in part by organized labor.
According to the Star, Acorn's voter registration drive generated some 35,000 applications, "but thousands of them appear to be duplicates or contain dubious data." The report went on to note that "near the top of the fishy list would be a man named Mark who apparently registered seven times over a three-day period using his mother's home address and phone number." Mom told the paper he hadn't lived there in six years.
Acorn and its affiliates have been among the most active and vocal opponents of voter ID laws in Missouri and nationwide. Now we know why. |
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| Ass Boil |
| I can't wait to read your chapter on Republican efforts to scrub voter rolls of minorities who vote Democratic.... |
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| Reverend Tyler |
| Oh please! Stopping black people from voting is as American as Apple Pie. The Republicans are merely demonstrating their proud patriotism. |
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| Ass Boil |
Electronic Voting Machines Could Skew Elections
Researchers, Candidates Have Little Confidence in Machines Designed to Make Elections Easier to Call
By JAKE TAPPER, REBECCA ABRAHAMS and EDUARDO SUNOL
Oct. 22, 2006 — - Cheryl Kagan, a former Maryland Democratic legislator, was shocked when she opened her mail Wednesday morning.
Inside, she discovered three computer discs. With them was an anonymous letter saying the discs contained the secret source code for vote-counting that could be used to alter the votes cast through Maryland's new electronic voting machines.
"My understanding is that with these disks a malicious person could skew the outcome of an election," Kagan said.
Diebold, the company that makes the voting machines, told ABC News, "These discs do not alter the security of the Diebold touch-screen system in any way," because election workers can set their own passwords.
But ABC News has obtained an independent report commissioned by the state of Maryland and conducted by Science Applications International Corporation revealing that the original Diebold factory passwords are still being used on many voting machines.
The SAIC study also shows myriad other security flaws, including administrative over-ride passwords that cannot be changed by local officials but can be used by hackers or those who have seen the discs.
The report further states that one of the high risks to the system comes if operating code discs are lost, stolen or seen by unauthorized parties -- precisely what seems to have occurred with the discs sent to Kagan, who worries that the incident indicates the secret source code is not that difficult to obtain.
"Certainly, just tweaking a few votes in a couple of states could radically change the outcome of our policies for the coming year," she said.
Worry That Elections Could Be Hacked
Computer experts and government officials have voiced serious concerns that if these machines malfunction, no paper record will exist for a recount. Even worse is the fear that an election could be hacked.
Princeton University researchers using an Accuvote TS -- a touch screen version of the Diebold machine -- showed how easy it would be to deploy a virus that would, in seconds, flip the vote of any election.
"We're taking the vote-counting process and we're handing it over to these companies -- and we don't know what happens inside these machines," said Edward Felten, a professor and a researcher at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, which ran the study.
Diebold called the Princeton study "unrealistic and inaccurate."
But many computer scientists, including cyber-security expert Stephen Spoonamore, disagree, pointing out that the Accuvote TS was used in the 2004 presidential election and is still used in at least four states -- including all machines in Georgia and Maryland. Spoonamore said the hack attacked the operating system layer of software and would affect any touch screen machine built by Diebold.
Diebold argues that the software from the 2004 elections has been updated to fix any possible security problems. But Spoonamore is not convinced, saying Diebold's "system is utterly unsecured. The entire cyber-security community is begging them to come back to reality and secure our nation's voting."
There is also the matter of computer glitches. In primary elections and test runs this year, there were glitches with electronic voting machines from Diebold and other companies.
Machines malfunctioned in Texas, where 100,000 votes were added.
In California, directions for voters with vision problems came out in Vietnamese.
And in Maryland, screens froze and memory cards went missing.
Gov. Robert Ehrlich, a Republican running for reelection, advised residents to vote by absentee ballot because he had no confidence in the machines.
"I don't care if we paid half a billion dollars or $1 billion," Ehrlich said. "If it's going to put the election at risk, there's no price tag for a phony election or a fraudulent election."
Many are concerned about how the confusing technical issues will be handled by poll workers, who tend to be senior citizens and who are not necessarily tech-savvy.
Electronic voting machines were supposed to be the solution to the paper ballot problems from the 2000 presidential election. But to many critics, America's voting system has gone out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Copyright © 2006 ABC News Internet Ventures |
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| Ass Boil |
Chicago Voter Database Hacked
Civic Group Claims It Could Have Tampered With Voter Roles
By JAKE TAPPER and REBECCA ABRAHAMS
Oct. 23, 2006 — - As if there weren't enough concerns about the integrity of the vote, a non-partisan civic organization today claimed it had hacked into the voter database for the 1.35 million voters in the city of Chicago.
Bob Wilson, an official with the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project -- which bills itself as a not-for-profit civic organization dedicated to the correction of election system deficiencies -- tells ABC News that last week his organization hacked the database, which contains detailed information about hundreds of thousands of Chicago voters, including their Social Security numbers, and dates of birth.
"It was a serious identity theft problem, but also a problem that could potentially create problems with the election," Wilson said.
A nefarious hacker could have changed every voter's status from active to inactive, which would have prevented them from voting, he said.
"Or we could've changed the information on what precinct you were in or what polling place you were supposed to go to," he said. "So there were ways that we could potentially change the entire online data base and disenfranchise voters throughout the entire city of Chicago."
"If we'd wanted to, we could've wiped the entire database out," Wilson claimed.
Tom Leach, a spokesman for the Chicago Election Board, tells ABC News that the problem seems to have arisen because the city's database allowing voters to locate their voting precinct once asked voters for detailed information such as Social Security numbers.
Approximately six years ago, Leach said, when the website was updated -- requiring only name and address -- city computer experts "never cut the links to the Social Security numbers and the dates of birth."
Leach said he doubted the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project could have disenfranchised voters or wiped out the database, but he and the Election Board were very concerned and had taken steps to remedy whatever problems exist, including bringing in an outside computer forensic expert to verify that the database is secure and to ensure no one had already hacked the database.
"We're also making arrangements to remove the Social Security numbers," he added, and the Election Board was also alerting law enforcement to the problem as pointed out to them.
"Even though they could hack into the Web site, they couldn't hack into the voter file," Leach said. "The Web site feeds into a copy file, not the actual original file."
Leach said the issue had absolutely nothing to do with the city's electronic voting machines, which are manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems.
But Wilson counters that this is just one hole in a system that may be full of them.
"This is a part of the entire electronic voting program that we're depending on -- computerized voter databases and electronic voting machines," Wilson said. "Any computer is subject to failure and security flaws and we have seen in electronic voting hundreds of news reports about dozens and dozens of jurisdictions where there are problems."
Copyright © 2006 ABC News Internet Ventures |
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| redeye |
| more boring, distorted, BULLSHIT from Riley "Ass Boil" Martin |
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| salafibrigades |
| redeye is a true American, questioning everything. :ps: |
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| Ass Boil |
Quote: Originally posted by redeye
more boring, distorted, BULLSHIT from Riley "Ass Boil" Martin |
bwaahaahahahaha!
what is "distorted" about it, browneye? Please enlighten us....
And no one could possibly accuse you of distorting anything, could they?
You know planet earth really is nice this time of year... you should visit us sometime. |
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| redeye |
| It has been proven, 665,000 dead in Iraq, that you don't even read you own bullshit. |
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| Ass Boil |
Quote: Originally posted by redeye
It has been proven, 665,000 dead in Iraq, that you don't even read you own bullshit. |
Umm, yeah. I'm still waiting for you to prove the science used in the study was wrong.... But nice job declaring victory for yourself - you must be learning from NCMoron...
What is "disrtorted" in the stories, idiot? |
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| NCMike06 |
Quote: Originally posted by Ass Boil
Umm, yeah. I'm still waiting for you to prove the science used in the study was wrong.... But nice job declaring victory for yourself - you must be learning from NCMoron...
What is "disrtorted" in the stories, idiot? |
Sorry…that BS study has been debunked here and many other places. Not going to bore anyone with the details. Suffice to say the 665,000 number is bogus, the study is bogus and the motivations of the lead author remain in serious question. The fact that AB still holds onto it as gospel only shows his true motivations. Hatred of Bush. He sees the result he likes, and runs with that figure, regardless of how it came about or was calculated. The only thing stronger than the hate filled rants ond conclusions of AB is his stupidity. They go hand in hand. |
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