I got forwarded the following article from the Herald-Times. This is scary and fucked up. Keeping elections up to board is fine, not discussing your tactics and motivations is shady. <\/p>\n
Voters may face challenges
\nMonroe County GOP plans to check on voters at polls
\nBy Katy Murphy, Hoosier Times
\nOctober 31, 2004<\/p>\nRepublicans in Monroe County plan to assign challengers to the polls on
\nTuesday, GOP county Chairman John Shean said Saturday.<\/p>\n“We’re going to have people trained to look for people who might not be
\nproperly registered,” he said.<\/p>\nThe news distressed Monroe Democratic Party Chairman Dan Combs, who fears
\nthe challenges will target low-income and homeless voters.<\/p>\n“If it happens, it will be appalling,” he said. “It is really the lowest
\ntechnique there is.”<\/p>\nEarlier in the week, Shean said he planned to conduct an audit of the
\n12,000-some newly registered voters before deciding whether to use
\nchallengers.<\/p>\n“If we believe that there is a real potential for voter fraud, then we
\nwill probably have challenges,” he said on Thursday.<\/p>\nThat evening, however, Shean said he had not begun the audit and that he
\nhad not determined how party activists would go about looking for “red
\nflags.”<\/p>\nShean would not comment Saturday on the methodology to be used to identify
\npotentially invalid voters, such as non-U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n“I’m not going to discuss that,” he said. “I don’t see the wisdom in
\ndivulging all of that to a reporter.”<\/p>\nPoll challenging is not a new practice, but it has come into prominence in
\nmany swing states across the country amid an exceptionally tense and
\npolarized presidential election.<\/p>\nRepublicans, who are organizing the bulk of the challenge campaigns, tend
\nto see it as a way to protect the integrity of the system, while Democrats
\nsay it is merely a way to suppress the vote of low-income or minority
\nvoters.<\/p>\nWhile the presidential race is hardly close in Indiana, many state and
\nlocal races are competitive and contentious. Kip Tew, chairman of the
\nIndiana Democratic Party, said Democratic volunteers and attorneys will be
\nstationed in polls statewide, especially in parts of Marion County, to
\ncounter what he sees as vote-suppression efforts.<\/p>\nCombs earlier in the week dismissed the practice by local Republicans as
\nunlikely. On Saturday, he said he had heard rumblings that low-income and
\nhomeless voters who list the Shalom Center or other shelters as an address
\nwill be targeted.<\/p>\n“The people most susceptible to challenges are new voters, low income
\nvoters,” he said.<\/p>\nWhile the Democrats don’t plan to challenge voters on Tuesday, Combs said,
\nthey do plan to post poll watchers and pollbook holders at each site. The
\nparty’s volunteers are equipped with cellular phones, he said, which they
\nwill use to contact party lawyers if anything out of the ordinary is
\ntaking place.<\/p>\nCombs said the Democratic volunteers would not interfere with voting or
\nany challenges made, but that they will follow challenged voters outside
\nand make sure they were given provisional ballots.<\/p>\nIndiana law gives any citizen the right to challenge the election process.
\nIt also entitles each political party to station at each polling site a
\npartisan challenger who is credentialed through the party chairperson. In
\nMonroe County, the clerk receives a list of challengers and other party
\nvolunteers on Election Day.<\/p>\nWhen someone has reason to believe that a voter is under 18, lives out of
\nthe district or isn’t a U.S. citizen, among other qualifications, they
\nfill out an affidavit provided by the election staff that indicates their
\nsuspicion.<\/p>\nIn Monroe County, bipartisan election staff (a Republican inspector; and a
\njudge and a clerk from each party) would then give a challenged voter a
\ncounter-affidavit, in which he or she swears to be a legitimate voter.
\nThen the person casts a provisional ballot, and the county’s bipartisan
\nelection board must decide by Nov. 8 whether it should be counted.<\/p>\nThat process would likely require the voter \u2014 and the challenger \u2014 to
\nreturn to the election offices later that day or week and present evidence
\nto the election board, said Steve Hogan, the board’s president. Depending
\non the number of provisional ballots cast, that could mean that close
\nelections might remain open for nearly a week.<\/p>\nWhile many Democrats, like Combs, see challenging as a suppression tactic,
\nRepublicans who support the practice say it is important for the system’s
\nvalidity.<\/p>\n“We know that voter fraud can and does happen,” Shean said. “I agree: I
\nwant everyone who’s qualified and registered to vote, to vote \u2014 once.”<\/p>\nHe added, “I don’t accept the premise that properly registered voters
\nmight be intimidated that there might be a challenge at the polls. It’s
\ntypically only those who are breaking the law that are intimidated by the
\nprocess.”<\/p>\nClarence Gilliam, president of the Monroe County chapter of the National
\nAssociation for the Advancement of Colored People, expressed concern that
\nvoters will become intimidated if confronted. He said his organization
\nadvises voters to stay calm and “see what the remedy is” in the event of a
\nchallenge.<\/p>\n“It’s going to be very important that every vote counts,” Gilliam said.<\/p>\n
Although registered voters cannot be required to show identification at
\nthe polls, Gilliam recommended that people bring a photo ID and proof of
\naddress, such as a utility bill, bank statement, or a number of other
\ndocuments.<\/p>\nMonroe County Clerk Jim Fielder, the nonpartisan member of the election
\nboard, initially downplayed concerns about challengers. But later, he
\nsaid, “That would certainly complicate things a great deal if we had a
\nmajor challenge campaign this fall. Hopefully, that will not be the case.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I got forwarded the following article from the Herald-Times. This is scary and fucked up. Keeping elections up to board is fine, not discussing your tactics and motivations is shady. Voters may face challenges Monroe County GOP plans to check on voters at polls By Katy Murphy, Hoosier Times October 31, 2004 Republicans in Monroe… Continue reading Scary voter intimidation tactics<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wnIz-ax","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}