Early voting has started in Ohio, and already there’s voter registration problems brewing, one of which conveniently surrounds registered voters in urban, low-income areas.
One of the lawsuits deals with a law adopted in 2005 that requires election officials to send out notices to voters 60 days before an election. As many as 600,000 of the notices were returned as undeliverable.
Michael Slater, with the nonprofit group Project Vote, says: “Mail delivery in urban areas, primarily urban low-income areas, is unreliable. So that we can’t be sure that just because someone has a piece of mail returned to them, it doesn’t mean that they don’t live at that address.”
That’s why Brunner has decided that a returned notice isn’t enough to sustain a challenge against a voter.
In 2004, Republicans challenged 35,000 voters based on returned mail. John McClelland of the Ohio GOP declined to be interviewed for this story, saying they don’t discuss political strategy.
Of course not. We wouldn’t want to show our cards, would we?
Meanwhile, similar lawsuits are being filed elsewhere in Ohio and in battleground states like Michigan, Florida, Colorado and New Mexico. See a list of other reported incidents at the Voter Suppression Wiki.
In happier news, Meredith writes in about voting issues in her family:
As a 21-year-old, this is my first presidential election. I grew up in a household with a conservative Democrat and a moderate Republican. All that changed, however, when the Terri Schaivo debacle unfolded in 2005. It drew uncomfortable comparisons for my family; my grandfather
was in a similar vegetative state, and my grandmother disobeyed his living will and kept him on life support years past his body’s capability to remain alive. It was a watershed moment for my mother, a
lifelong Republican, who had already been appalled at my grandmother’s disrespect for my grandfather.
Today, I am pleased to report that my household is full of budding Democrats. I expect to receive my ballot in the mail soon; my little sister who is a freshman in college registered to vote the moment she arrived on campus and is a proud member of her College Democrats group. (I’d like to think that my decision to lend her Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism might have helped, as all of a sudden
she’s pro-choice and pro-feminism!) My mom (a former McCain lover) now changes the channel every time he opens his mouth. My dad for some reason had announced that he didn’t like Obama; with the selection of Palin, however, I think he’s back in the fold. Even if he’s not, we still outnumber him three votes to one, and in the swing region of the Sunshine State, all our votes are critical.
Send your stories to fauxrealtho at gmail dot com with “VOTE” in the title, including your name and a link to your website, and we will publish your stories as they come in along with additional information about voting registration, disenfranchisement, and election news. Send us what you’ve got.
Meanwhile, most states still have through early October to get registered to vote in the 2008 presidential election. Some states allow voters to register through the end of October. You can find out your state’s deadline here. If you haven’t registered to vote yet, DO IT NOW.