Voter Registrations Possibly Trashed
Well, well, well. The Rethuglicans are at it again. While their Xtian adherents rant about the sacred life of embryos, the Republican National Committee is disenfranchising their rivals through the most crude manner possible - destroying Democratic voter registrations
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Of course, if you colonials hadn't got so antsy back in 1776, you could have had the (relatively) decent post Electoral Reform Act approach to voting we Brits eventually let all our other colonials have. ;-) (Waves at megpie - sounds like it's much the same in Aus as here!)
In the UK, the local council maintains the electoral roll and sends a form once a year to each address. You enter (or confirm) who is registered to vote in local, national and European elections. Polling stations are manned by local council employees and a police officer has to visit each station at least once to ensure no riots are happening! We still vote by putting crosses on paper and vote counting is done as an open process scrutinised by representatives of all the parties involved. Electoral law means party workers are not allowed to ask someone how they plan to vote on the way in to a polling station (you can ask on the way out).
Candidates are generally chosen by local branches of parties (except when someone gets "parachuted in" by the national party. That's mostly been done by the Labour (allegedly "socialist") party. The Conservatives (right wing) party have been mostly implicated in the little bit of electoral fraud we have: the current scam is getting elderly people in care homes to sign up for postal votes in perpetuity and then casting their votes for them. The biggest electoral fraud we had was when a Conservative-run central London council used public money to relocate a bunch of tenants they thought would vote Labour into other council areas.
We did move to all-postal voting earlier this year in some parts of the country - which was a bit of a disaster logistically simply because it wasn't well planned. Ballot papers had to be reprinted when they had the wrong details on them or were very late being sent out. Incompetence rather than actual fraud though.
I presume the electronic voting machines were abandoned in US after the guy who owns the company went on record somewhere as telling Dubya he would do anything in his power to get him elected?
Here's hoping the election is not stolen on technicalities. And that the charming US model is not exported to countries like Afghanistan and Iraq.
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