NEWS: Florida: I Can't Get No, Clean E-lec-tion.

POLITICS: Florida: I Can't Get No, Clean E-lec-tion.

What is it about Bush, Florida, and Election scandals?

Ffrom the BBC:

Reaction from Jacksonville's election supervisor has been sharply critical, even as local Republican party officers fail to deny the plan. But that's not all...

wonderful.....

if your gonna pull this again, wouldn't you go for a diffenent state.. maybe one thats not under a microscope because of stuff you pulled last time??

"Ion Sancho, a Democrat, noted that Florida law allows political party operatives inside polling stations to stop voters from obtaining a ballot."

Ion Sancho is the best name I have ever heard.

ahhhh. shit like this pisses me off. especially when im drunk. i fear for tuesday. i fear the outcome. i fear another four years. bush is about scaring america, and it seems to be working on me

We're all fucked. I vote for guerilla war.

?????

Somehow this just makes me picture a dude who has some voyeuristic voting fetish sitting in his car wearing nothing but a trench coat (you know, like a private eye...) and lustfully filming people file into and out of the polling place.

Edited to mention that I'm not trying in any way to mock a very serious problem. It's just that all the important bases had already been covered.

[Edited on Oct 30, 2004 2:22AM]

This story is talking about 2 very different items so lets break them down:

1 - The list of names/addresses

This is very disturbing. It was sent to the Florida executive director and the national director of research. It could be a list of newly registered voters that came through a suspect source. It could be a challenge list. We don't know enough at this point to really know what it is.

2 - Filming voters during early voting.

If you're filming every person who enters/exits the polling place during early voting how is that going to be used to intimidate voters? By the time the film is passed up the chain those people have already voted. If EVERY voter is being filmed as the enter/exit the polling place then how can you claim a racial bias? This one is strange, but not a smoking gun of some type of overarching plan for voter intimidation. It could just as easily the product of someone trying to get voter footage for a film.

From inside a vehicle?
With blacked-out windows?
And not getting a consent form signed?

What exaclty is the deal with voter registration anyway? Im an auzzie so i dont know how it works for you guys but out here, we register our name on the electoral role, go to a polling booth and get our name ticked off a huge list and are given ballot papers which we fill out and stick in a little box. And for an early vote we get a ballot paper from a post office, fill it out and mail it off.

From everything that I have read, Im under the impression that it doesnt work that way in the U.S otherwise all this electoral fraud couldnt happen so readily. Am i correct in this assumption?

Just remember we will need our guns for this. Don't vote away our guns!

It's different from state to state, and we have 50 states with different voting machines, different rules, and different voter registration requirements, methods and deadlines, so you can imagine what a clusterfuck this is.
There are also different rules for absentee ballots, early voting, and challenging voter registrations.

Florida has the largest electoral votes of any swing state, it's also historically picked the winning candidate most every election. If you were to ask any Presidential candidate what state they'd want most, it'd be Florida. At any cost.

Privacy laws vary between states, but in general, it isn't against the law to photograph someone in public.

As for racial bias, I don't see why they would be racially biased. Are they just feeling spiteful this year? It makes a lot more sense to interpret this as the Republicans targeting neighborhoods that are most likely to go against them.

Wow.
No wonder elections are such a chaotic and easily manipulated event.

One school of thought says it's harder to manipulate the elections here since evrey state is different.

Not sure if I believe that one...

Chaotic? Oh yes. Just you wait and see what a clusterfuck the aftermath of Tuesday's election is going to be, mark my words.

If it isn't a landslide, things are going to suck here.

holy shit, negroes

good lord.

what?

Hahaha, yeah I have to laugh when I see people advocating guerilla warfare. Not only because it would be wildly ineffective and counterproductive, but who do they think has all the guns?

You don't need any consent to film people in public. The only time consent would even come into the picture is if you were on private property, or you were planning on publishing the media in some way.

My best guess about the filming is that they're trying to establish whether people voted multiple times, but I'm not sure how they'd do that using film from outside.
As for intimidation, if their filming from a car with blacked out windows, how are the voters even supposed to know that it's there in order to be intimidated (this isn't to you Akira, just a question in general).