Clay to city and county Election Boards: Are you prepared for Nov. 4?
U.S. Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-St. Louis, sent a letter Monday to the election boards in the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County, in which he calls for talks “to make sure the process is safe, secure and accessible for all voters.”
Clay also laid out in the letter a series of questions dealing with the handling of voter registrations, the training of poll workers, and the number of ballots and voting machines allocated to each polling place.\
Co-signing the letter was Ken McKoy, executive director of Metropolitan Organizations for Strengthening and Empowering Society and a local partner with the NAACP’s legal defense and education fund.
Clay explained in the letter that his concerns about readiness are prompted, in part, by expectations that voter turnout in the city and county could reach 80 percent. “The high turnout predicted in November…presents challenges, including long lines at polling places,” he said. “It is is important to plan…”
Clay was a major figure in the election night battles in 2000, when he warned at a rally held the day before the election that Democrats were prepared to go to court on Election Day to do battle over the city’s inactive voter list.
In 2000, that list included the names of more than 50,000 city voters who either had not voted in recent elections or whose address could not be confirmed when postcards had been sent to every registered voter in the city.
If the post office returned the postcards to the city Election Board, the person was put on the inactive list. A person on the inactive list CAN still vote, as long as they have proof of their identity or address.
The problem in 2000 came on Election Day, when polling places did not have copies of that inactive list. People who went to the polls and who were not on the regular voter rolls were told they had to go downtown to the Election Board headquarters to find out what was wrong. (The boards’ phone lines were tied up, so polling-place workers couldn’t check out the problem by phone.)
Hundreds of would-be voters jammed the Election Board headquarters downtown, prompting Clay and other Democrats to go to court to keep the city polls open an additional three hours beyond the 7 p.m. polling closing. The GOP also went to court, and got the city polls closed at 7:45 p.m.
That flap prompted the U.S. Justice Department sued, which resulted in a settlement that mandated that copies of the inactive list be at every polling place, and that poll workers have cell phones so they can reach Election Board officials if the headquarter’s lines are jammed.
The answer is early voting!
The answer is to try and suppress black voters!
Gee thanks Lacy. Is that the best you can do on your day off from Congress? I didn’t live here in 2000 but seems to me those city voters weren’t ready to vote. Proof and ID and address. It’s not rocket science.
Lacy to the election boards:
We will pack this election with every illegal vote we can find.
Oh here we go again. Republicans are already lining up the great lie as Democrats in the city will head to the polls in record numbers to vote for Obama. Actually, the story with city voting is not just the hackneyed and often repeated one-liners by Kit “Bacardi” Bond about dogs voting but also prosecutions of a those attempting to stack the decks with illegal registrations. I guess the fact that the system of checks and balances over registration has mostly worked doesn’t make good partisan chatter on the blogs.
As Al Capone said in Chicago years ago “Vote early and vote often.” (They did, STILL do, and so do we.)
preposterous. there is simply no proof that there is any coordinated campaign for double voting at this point, certainly nothing compared to the period before voter registration reforms when Butler’s Repeaters would go precinct to precinct in order to intimidate voters, stuff voter boxes and generally throw elections. most historians of the 19th century note that such occurances make voting returns entirely unrealiable.
It doesn’t mean that elected officials use other means to game the system–including “walking money,” absentee ballots, etc. Even thse sort of inducements are much reduced over the past, although the removal of campaign limits they may increase again.
However, to suggest that there are large numbers of repeat voters in the city, county or one of the exurban counties is without fact.
Most of these sort of suggestions are just part of the republican machine’s big lie that urban voters are part of some fantasy plot to steal the election. The truth is that city and probably county voters are going to swamp the polls because of the enthusiasm around this year’s candidates. For Clay to ask whether the local election boards are ready for it is a reasonable question, given the performance in other presidential elections where the capacity of the voting system has been stretched–to the detriment of people voting.
which is the point of it all…
I don’t know about the city, but can say that the County is probably not ready. The training for poll workers is poor, at best. They continue to bring back the incompetent, but get rid of those who question the incompetence (”troublemakers”).
They also must have all the pollworkers they need. I called them about a list of college students interested in becoming pollworkers. Never heard back. Called again and still waiting.