[EL] secret ballot

Tue Dec 27 08:00:03 PST 2011

This is a sensible proposal for all states.  I think such information 
should be collected for every voter who approaches to vote and is turned 
away for any reason other than because their voting district is 
elsewhere in the same room (e.g., a school gym that serves multiple 
precincts).  This would capture not just people turned away due to 
identification issues, but those turned away because their registration 
has not been input, or has been deleted, or is turned away because a 
poll worker feigns the inability to find their name in the registration 
books, or because of accessibility failures, or any of a myriad of 
reasons.  It also makes remedies (whether in the nature of a recount, a 
civil proceeding, discharge of poll workers for inefficiency or 
ignorance of provisional ballot laws, or a criminal prosecution) much 
easier to pursue.  Advocates in NJ have been urging the creation of such 
a list, for a number of years, without success.

Flavio Komuves

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 9:42 AM, Dan Johnson wrote:

  I wish poll workers (election judges in Illinois) were required to 
document incidents when citizens ask whether they may vote but are 
turned away due to registration or identification barriers imposed by 
the government. I witness it every election cycle when i am working a 
precinct for my candidates, but there is no data collection to 
systematically document it.

On Tuesday, December 27, 2011,  < JBoppjr at aol.com 
<javascript:parent.wgMail.openComposeWindow('JBoppjr at aol.com')> > wrote:
> A big lie repeated over and over again does not become true:   "we 
> should also realize that in the U.S., the secret ballot was widely 
> used, as the voter identification measures currently are, to 
> disfranchise poor, uneducated people, especially African-Americans in 
> the South."   When put to the test, the Plaintiffs in Indiana could 
> not come up with one person who was disenfranchised.  No not one.  Jim 
> Bopp   In a message dated 12/26/2011 5:23:32 P.M. Eastern Standard 
> Time, kousser at hss.caltech.edu 
> <javascript:parent.wgMail.openComposeWindow('kousser at hss.caltech.edu')> 
> writes:
>    In relation to Mark Scarberry's post, we should also realize that 
> in the U.S., the secret ballot was widely used, as the voter 
> identification measures currently are, to disfranchise poor, 
> uneducated people, especially African-Americans in the South.  By 
> disfranchising African-Americans, it also greatly diminished the vote 
> of the party to which they overwhelmingly adhered at the time, the 
> Republicans, and partisan and racial purposes, then as now, could not 
> be easily disentangled.  As the (Democratic) Little Rock Arkansas 
> Gazette wrote after the first election (1892) in which the secret 
> ballot was used in that state:
>    The Australian ballot works like a charm:    It makes them think 
> and scratch.    And when a negro [sic] gets a ballot,    He has 
> certainly met his match.
>    That was two years after the longest Senate filibuster in history 
> up to that time had defeated the second strongest voting rights act 
> that Congress considered before 1965, the Lodge Fair Elections Bill.  
> (The strongest, in most respects, was the Enforcement Act of 1875, 
> also defeated by a filibuster.)  If the Supreme Court were to strip 
> voters of the protection of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the Shelby 
> County case, a potential South Carolina voter id case, the Kinston or 
> Alabama or Arizona or even Texas cases, then future election "reforms" 
> might more overtly target their racial and partisan objects, as the 
> secret ballot did more than a century ago. Morgan
> -- 
> Prof. of History and Social Science, Caltech surface mail:  228-77 
> Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125-7700 phone 626-395-4080, fax 626-405-9841 
> home page:<  http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~kousser/Kousser.html 
> <http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~kousser/Kousser.html> >    . . . without 
> the clarity that makes doubt productive, historians will never be able 
> to fulfill their highest moral responsibility, to build a better world 
> . . .                        -- from "The New Postmodern Southern 
> Political History"    Perfection . . . in any institution is a 
> dangerous myth; there is only the repeated correction of 
> imperfections.  As long as there is discrimination, there will always 
> be more work to do.                         -- from "The Strange, 
> Ironic Career of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act"
> _______________________________________________ Law-election mailing 
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-- 
Dan Johnson

Attorney at Law
111 West Washington, Suite 1920
Chicago, Illinois 60602

312.867.5377 (office)
312.933.4890 (mobile)
312.794.7064 (fax)

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