Unstuffing the Ballot Box

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What's sick is that you don't need a grand conspiracy to pull it off. Most of the problem is broken and hard-to-use voting machines that mangle ballots or fail to record them. To keep this million-vote Republican thumb on the scale, all the GOP
has to do is do nothing-keep the bad machines in the ghetto, on the reservations (the 'spoilage' of Native votes is scandalous), and in the barrio.

Fix the machines, dammit!

Replace them with paper ballots that a voter can check with an optical scanner right in the precinct. That system is as foolproof and cheap as it gets.

Stop the purges.

Ninety-seven percent of [those 2000 Florida voters purged] were legal voters, not 'felons,' as they were tagged. In 2004 the purges came back, with a vengeance, nationwide. What for? We simply can't find cases of people voting illegally, yet to prevent 'vote fraud,' hundreds of thousands of legal voters lose their rights-and invariably they're people of color.
So we begin by stopping the purges. A voter's sworn statement that he or she is legal, according to federal law, is enough.

Fight the new laws calling for identification to vote.

The Republicans are pushing like crazy for this, and not because they want to protect your rights. More than 100,000 voters were turned away from the polls in '04 for lack of voter ID-yet I could not find one case in the entire United States of someone having voted through identity theft. But look who lost the right to vote because of identification: overwhelmingly Hispanic and low-income voters.

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