Gautam Mukunda wrote:
>
> --- Nick Arnett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > I'm surprised that you seem to be saying this as if
> > it were taken for
> > granted. Is the existence of this "machine"
> > documented somewhere? I
> > don't even understand how an outsider to such a
> > system could evaluate
> > its size or effectiveness. If it were so obvious
> > that outsiders could
> > make such judgments, wouldn't dozens of lawyers be
> > all over it?
> >
> > Nick
>
> I think the best _recent_ book on it is John Fund's
> "Stealing Elections". George Will talks about it in a
> column he wrote on the subject recently:
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55781-2004Oct22.html
>
> Fund is a Republican, so he focuses too much on only
> one side of the coin, but it's done fairly well. The
> existence of a wide-spread and effective practice (all
> at the local level, of course) to do such things is
> certainly well known. It's somewhat suspicious, for
> example, that (as Will notes) Franklin County, OH has
> 815,000 residents 18 and over and 845,000 registered
> voters. This is a remarkably high voter registration
> rate, to put it mildly. You also do kind of have to
> wonder why the Democratic Party in locality after
> locality will fight a war to the death to make it
> impossible to even ask for the _photo IDs_ of voters.
> This does not strike me as an entirely unreasonable
> request. How large is it? I don't know. I don't
> think anyone knows. Almost certainly not large enough
> to matter in most elections. Which is the major
> reason no one has cared about it in the past. But
> large enough to matter in this one? Quite possibly.
If I were voting for the first time in my county, I would have had to
show photo ID.
I was OK just showing up with a voter registration card.
If I hadn't found my card, showing up with photo ID giving my home
address would have done the trick. (I had to do that in 2002 because
somewhere between the post office and the person doing data entry for
the county, my voter registration application got lost; oddly enough,
Dan's, which had been mailed at the same time, got processed correctly.)
Julia
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