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INSTRUCTIONS FOR PARTY 'POLL WATCHERS' INCLUDE ADVICE ON SINGLING OUT VOTERS AS ILLEGAL, THREAT TO JAIL OFFICIALS WHO DON'T FOLLOW ORDER TO BLOCK VOTE 4 November 2006 The Republican Party of Maryland has distributed an instruction booklet for party volunteers it plans to station at polling places which instructs them in how to prevent voters casting ballots. The document outlines the need to ensure that the law is followed and that no voter is denied their legal right to cast a vote, but includes language urging volunteers to tell judges they may face jail time if they do not do as asked by the Republican party voter challengers. On the 4th page of the chapter entitled "What to Watch for While the Polls are Open", in section "I. Challenging Voters." and subtitled "Your most important duty as a Poll Watcher is to challenge people who present themselves to vote but who are not authorized to vote", the manual explains what to do if an official election judge does not subject any particular voter the Republican watcher wishes to challenge to the official process. It says explicitly that the Republican poll watcher "might need to point out to the Chief Judge that if the election judges fail to follow the clear requirements of Section 10-310 of the Election Code, they would be committing a criminal offense punishable by not less than 30 days in jail." (Document appears to have been distributed with "not less than" underlined by hand.) Under the law in Maryland, voters listed as "inactive" can be asked to provide a signature and complete a form that states their address and their date of birth. The key to challenging the right of an individual to cast a ballot is to base the suspicion on their legal residency in the district or their ability to provide identification. If asked by the official election judge to provide a date of birth, the challenged voter cannot accurately state the date of birth of the person they claim to be, the challenger is supposed to pressure for a denial of the right to cast a ballot. In some cases, a provisional ballot is cast, but the Republican party manual also anticipates cases where the voter "departs rapidly". In such cases, they are asked to phone the Republican party's election operations headquarters and file and incident report, the intention of which is apparently to classify the voter's behavior as evidence of fraud. The Democratic Party of Maryland has complained that this information appears to indicate a clear intention of the Republican Party of Maryland to use the Poll Watcher system, established under state law, to intimidate both voters and election officials into reducing the number of overall voters or even preventing voters "likely" to vote Democratic from voting.
BACKGROUND: The 2000 election process gave clear evidence that the established system for running elections and counting votes in the United States is not cohesive, not fool-proof and not secure against tampering. Congress took action to reform voting standards nationwide to "Help America Vote". But that legislation suffered one fatal flaw: while promoting the shift to touchscreen ballots, it did not require that electronic balloting machines produce a paper record that could be hand-checked. Most states' elections laws require manual recounts in cases where extremely narrow margins of victory occur, or where there are anomalies or evidence of possible wrongdoing. But as the transition has been made to electronic voting machines, many states have failed to implement solutions that permit their own laws being carried out in such cases. Repeatedly over the last 6 years, spot tests, "red-team" intensive exercise testing, and scientific studies, have shown that the most widely used touchscreen machines, which lack any hard copy of the voting process, can be tampered with, altering or even erasing vote counts or candidate selections. Without a paper record, there is no way to return to the "will of the voter" —an important legal standard— to confirm what the real substance of the electoral process was. Votes literally disappear. [Full Story] TWENTY-SIX STATES HAVE PASSED LEGISLATION REQUIRING PAPER TRAILS FOR ELECTRONIC BALLOTS Since the 2000 election, voting technology has become a major issue in US elections regimens and regulations; touchscreen balloting machines, which legislatures seem to have favored as a way to record votes accurately, eliminating the 'hanging chad' problem, were designed with no paper record and have proven insecure and susceptible to tampering. Now, 26 US states have passed laws requiring paper trails, and 13 more, plus Washington, DC, have proposed laws "not yet enacted". [Full Story] SAN DIEGO COUNTY SENT VOTING MACHINES HOME WITH POLL WORKERS ON EVE OF ELECTION Reports have emerged that according to the San Diego registrar of voters, poll workers in San Diego county took tamper-susceptible Diebold voting machines home on the eve of the election. In some cases, poll workers may have had unsupervised access to the machines for a week or longer. [Full Story] TEXAS REDISTRICTING FOUND ILLEGAL BY JUSTICE LAWYERS, FINDINGS OVERRULED New documents show Justice Department lawyers unanimously found the Texas Congressional redistricting plan to be illegal. But that finding was overruled by top Justice officials and the staff involved in the research and analysis "were subjected to an unusual gag rule", this according to the Washington Post. [Full Story] |
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