watch out for your vote
by John at 8/31/2004 08:26:00 AM
Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes is facing sharp criticism for her decision to hire a law firm with close ties to the Republican Party to represent the nonpartisan supervisor's office in the upcoming elections.
Snipes, who was appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush, hired the four-lawyer firm Blosser & Sayfie in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., several months ago to represent her in any election-related litigation.
Name partner Justin Sayfie is a former spokesman for Gov. Bush and currently is co-chair of the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign in Broward County, Fla. The other name partner, James Blosser, was the local finance chair for Jeb Bush's 1998 gubernatorial campaign and is a top fund-raiser for President Bush's re-election campaign.
Intimidating black voters; uninspectable, unverifiable e-voting machines; disenfranchised "felons"; now rigging the election resolution process by hiring partisan legal representatives.
A personal aside: I had my own experience with Republican attempts to disenfranchise voters. I was a grad student at UCSB, and Santa Barbara county was about equally divided between the conservative, rural north and the liberal, suburban south. The main body of liberal sentiment in the south part of the county was the student vote - some 20,000 possible voters in a county with about 400,000 residents. Year after year, there were problems with moving polling places and incorrect voter rolls in Isla Vista, a community populated primarily by undergraduate students. Furthermore, frustrated by this liberal voting block, Republicans floated the idea that students should only be allowed to vote in the district where their parents lived, because students, by their very nature, where non-property-owning "transients" in the community and had no personal stake in local politics. Taking a quick peek at UCSB's paper, The Daily Nexus, demonstrates that this idea was still around as recently as October, 2002.
And just as I was ready to publish this, I saw this article on CNN.com. It's not just Santa Barbara county...
Yes John, it is curious...How could you have missed the scandal uncovered by the New York Daily News and The Fraud Factor. Perhaps you were watching Al Jazeera instead. Shame John, shame.
The study looked at NYC voters registered elsewhere. Its not surprising that an overwhelming number of these double dippers are Democrats simply due to the fact that an overwhelming number of NYC voters are registered Democrats. In fact, the breakdown between political parties of the double dippers (12% Republican, 68% Democrat, plus some 'others') closely mirrors the breakdown of the total electorate in New York City, based on statistics from the NYC Board of Elections (actually, its more like 11% Republicans on the actual voter rolls, but I'm not going to make an issue of the GOP's over-representation in this group).
Let me know the results when they do the same study in Colorado Springs.
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