Voting issue - Alabama (It's worse than you thought)

[LizW]

From today's Birmingham Post Herald:

http://www.postherald.com/insight.shtml

Vote counts uncertain
15 counties don't give number of ballots cast

By JAMES W. BROSNAN
BIRMINGHAM POST-HERALD

WASHINGTON — Alabama is one of 12 states that have left their residents in the dark about how many of their votes are not counted.
Four years ago, the dirty data dozen reported 26,349,619 votes cast for president, but these states did not report how many total ballots were cast. That made it impossible to know how many votes were lost because of inaccurate counting machines or other tabulation errors.

Most are still unprepared to check for missing votes in November, increasing the odds the United States will face another uncertain presidential election. Experts warn the mistakes painfully discovered in Florida in 2000 could be repeated.

(snip)

Undervote scarcely mattered in the presidential race in Alabama in 2000, when President Bush swamped Al Gore by 248,562 votes, but it factored into the governor's race two years later. Democratic Gov. Don Siegelman lost to Republican Bob Riley by 3,120 votes. Even minus the 15 counties that don't report total ballots to the state, there were 8,257 undervotes in the state.

Most counties reported an undervote of 2 percent or less, except for Clay County, where 12 percent of the vote, 716 ballots, recorded no choice for governor. What's unusual is that Clay County is Riley's home county. He carried it 3,176 to 2,094.

(snip)

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

[tnlefty]

1. Thanks for posting. I see that TN is on this list as well as some other

states that are supposed to be close. I guess I'll be making some phone calls and writing letters Mon.

[Moderator]

2. LizW

Per DU copyright rules
please post only four
paragraphs from the
copyrighted news source.


Thank you.

DU Moderator

[LizW]

3. I did

That last part, after the second "snip" is my comment, not from the article.

[DeepModem Mom]

4. And we can assume Alabama owes Max Cleland a Senate seat? n/t

[TahitiNut]

5. Max is from Georgia.

[DeepModem Mom]

6. Of course! Have raging cold and a fever -- must have affected brain!

Or it's the antihistamines --

[TahitiNut]

7. I understand. I had to look it up to make sure.

Some days I find that the simple things are difficult to impossible. I call 'em my "D'uh Days".

[AirAmFan]

8. Don't worry, this problem should be fixed by 2006!

According to the Birmingham Post-Herald article

"A federal election reform law enacted in 2002 will require Clay County and the other nine counties to have scanners in each precinct in 2006."

Democrats sure wimped out on the "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA). They gave Dubya many reasons not to worry about "re-"election.

And Jimmy Carter gave the GOP perfect cover with a Carter-Ford Commission Report that recommended no mandatory national voting standards. States with counties that can't prove less than 2 percent voting errors easily could have been excluded from funding in the HAVA, if not for Carter's willingness to compromise with Republican vote shenanigans. See http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Political_Reform/Learning_To_Count.html .

[greekspeak]

9. You mentioned it, but there ARE counties that vote for Democrats in AL

There is a wide belt across Alabama that seems always to vote democratic. Look it up on Dave Leip's site! Funny that so many of them, like Barbour County, are on that list. We do not hear much about this little belt across Alabama, because the populations of the counties are so low! Montogmery County is really the only very populated county in the belt. I think that if we could retain this belt and also get all the bigger cities go go democratic, Alabama would eventually go our way. Birmingham, Mobile and Huntsville? Is there any potential in these places for a Dem swing?

[yardwork]

10. I think that a lot of fishy things happen to votes all over the country.

Take North Carolina. The eastern counties are impoverished, with what wealth there is concentrated in the hands of a few white families. Rationally, these counties should vote overwhelmingly Democratic for president. Some do, but others don't. Why not? Some of it has to do with culture, religion, all the various tricks Republicans use to get poor people to vote for them.

But some of it is intimidation and vote-stealing, imo. In little towns with small districts, the ruling elite will know exactly how you and your neighbors voted, and they could make your lives miserable. Or they could just ditch your votes.

I don't have proof. I just have a hunch that this happens more often and in more places around the country than we would like to believe. It is in living memory that southern states used "literacy" tests and poll taxes and dogs and other forms of intimidation to keep black people away from the polls. I don't believe that the people in charge have given up and gone away.