Setting Us Up (a.k.a. Something’s Craw-fishy)
Last week’s article in the NY Times, Democrats’ Vote Drive in Louisiana Stirs Concern, raised a red flag, but not because of the actual topic of the article - that a Democratic sponsored voter registration drive “has raised complaints from registrars about large numbers of duplicate, invalid or incomplete applications, and has led to an investigation by the Louisiana secretary of state, Jay Dardenne, a Republican.” No, the red flag is in the subtext, a.k.a. the third paragraph:
Election officials have expressed concern that large numbers of people who believe they are registered will show up at the polls in November, only to find that they cannot vote because their application had been improperly submitted.
And so the stage has been set for another game of “blame the voter.” It’s easy to play - just open your eyes real wide, shrug you shoulders and say, “So many of you weren’t listed on the registry of active voters because you didn’t fill our your applications properly.
What’s worse is that the Times plays along:
Much of the enthusiasm, and some of the chaos, may be repeated in the months to come in other states where Democrats and liberal groups are planning similar drives in an effort to change the demographics of the electorate.
“Chaos?” It’s four months until the election, what “chaos?” The chaos of an election commission doing their job to make sure people who want to vote can? Or is this prediction of “chaos” a way to get us to accept manufactured chaos and the desired result - widespread disenfranchisement?
Registering voters is not an easy job and yes, mistakes do occur. But to label these initiatives and any subsequent mistakes as “the Dems’ phony registration drive,” which the Louisiana Republican Party chairman did, is to once again set up these massive registration movements as failures.
And that is by design.
It’s also no coincidence that, according to the Times article, “the biggest complaints about the drive have come from Republican registrars in Caddo Parish, which includes Shreveport; East Baton Rouge Parish, which includes Baton Rouge; and Jefferson Parish, just outside New Orleans.”
The registrar in Jefferson, Dennis A. DiMarco, said that about 35 percent of the 4,000 cards his office had sorted were invalid because they had no address, the applicant was already registered or was a felon, or the signature did not match one on file at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The signature did not match one on file? And who is overseeing the very subjective process of matching these signatures?
This reminds me of the 2004 election when the TV talking heads shrugged their shoulders and accepted Karl Rove’s assertion that, well, I guess the young people just didn’t turn out to vote for John Kerry after all. Problem was, they did turn out - about 4.6 million more of them. In 2000, about 42.3 percent of citizens ages 18 to 29 voted. In 2000, it was 51 percent. (Read more about the amazing power and potential of the youth vote at The Nation.)
The lesson here is, do not let the results of the 2008 election be defined by lies, manipulation, and obfuscation.
July 21st, 2008 at 4:14 pm
[…] to blame any shenanigans on that particular problem. We’ve already seen Louisiana officials singling out and blaming newly registered voters for problems that might occur on election day. But poll workers will have […]