Saturday, December 31, 2005

Illinoisans to be able to "vote early and vote often" until 2008

Cross-posted at Marathon Pundit.

We can't let that great tradition of vote fraud in Illinois just whither away, can we?

Not till 2008, according to AP. More from that article:

Even though they'll miss a Jan. 1 deadline to have voter fraud-busting measures in place, Illinois' top election official says current systems safeguard against abuse and authorities are making progress in complying with the federal Help America Vote Act.

The law, passed three years ago after the 2000 presidential-election snafu in Florida, requires states to have comprehensive voter-registration databases working by Sunday to ease authorities' search for duplicate names, removal of outdated registrations and other anti-deception measures.

Illinois is in a precarious position when it comes to complying with election laws, given its history. The adage, "Vote early and often" originated in Chicago, where decades of machine politics managed to get dead people to the polls and spawned the legend of thousands of votes for Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election resting at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

State Board of Elections Executive Director Dan White said Friday that a statewide database of voters was available to local election officials in 2004 so that they could compare their voter rolls to the state list. But the board still must create a two-way system, allowing counties and other local election bodies to send updated records to the state.

Of the statewide offices, all but one are held be Democrats, and all of those Dems are running for re-election in 2006. So voters will be able to fully participate in the 2006 state elections in Illinois, before the voter database is up and running two years later.

Interesting, isn't it, that this story comes out on a very low readership day.

12 comments:

Anonymous,  8:51 PM  

The partisanship is sick. Just because a Democrat wins, it must be some kind of voter fraud or disenfranchisement. If you're not complaining when Bush & friends won FL in 2000 with voters being disenfranchised, you have no gripes now.

Anonymous,  9:48 PM  

Agreed anon 8:51. Also, where are the complaints from the "fiscal conservatives" about this great unfunded mandate. My county was not given near enough money to buy new voting machines. Now, precincts will have to be combined in order to have a certain number of machines in each location. Plus, the taxpayers here had to pick up the cost of the portion the feds did not pay even though they ordered the change. But, lets pick on the Democrats who are obviously not doing this because of a great plot to make sure they hold on to the offices they now hold.

Anonymous,  9:58 PM  

I guess all those people in the Chicago cemeteries will get to vote for the Democrats again.Well at least we are remembering our dead.

Marathon Pundit 1:32 AM  

Why is it, whenever there are charges of vote fraud, it involves Democrats. Milwaukee County, WI in 2004, East St. Louis, 2004, East Chicago, IN in '03....even little Cairo, IL in just about every election

Cal Skinner 9:15 AM  

And, if you are interested in the history of vote fraud, you should probably read this new book:

"Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, and American Political Tradition, 1742-2004" (Carroll and Graf, $26) http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/local/13487993.htm

Anonymous,  11:29 AM  

When you look at the voting records from the 1960 Chicago Presidential vote, there is no record of significant voter fraud. The whole Daley stealing the election story is nothing more than an urban legend. That's not to say that he didn't win IL for Kennedy by using his massive machine that was built on corruption and patronage, but there was no evidence that the dead were voting or that ballot boxes were stuffed.

Anonymous,  1:59 PM  

The Black Libertarian is wrong
there was and still to a lesser extent massive vote fraud
all sorts of statistics, investigations, and history bear this out

Anonymous,  2:01 PM  

Early voting is prone to fraud and problems. Can you imagine the Senior Citizens in the 39th ward or the 11th ward or Dominic Longo.
Absentee Ballots, Seniors, Chinatown 1st ward
There are a lot of tricks
This early voting is silly

Should try weekend voting and moving the voting to the Spring or Summer

Anonymous,  2:06 PM  

How do you all think Early Voting will turnout?

Making The Wheels Turn 4:18 PM  

"But the board still must create a two-way system, allowing counties and other local election bodies to send updated records to the state."

That's the whole idea of the VISTA/IDEA Systems that the SBE spent a small fortune on, with a MA software firm to boot.

And it flat out sucks, if you talk to the locals who have to deal with it. The latest rumor mill is that there are local election authorities that have had it in place for about a year now that still don't have it up and running.

The whole concept was flawed from the start, and anyone with a lick of common sense would know it on sight (OTOH, we're talking about the SBE here, so I guess we can scratch that happening).

Understand, the basic concept is that each local election jurisdiction will do all their local VR work as normal, but all the locally initiated VR updates will be 'swept up' and nightly updated over the Internet to the SBE statewide VR databases.

Ok, now if I remember correctly, that's right at 108 different election authorities statewide (my #'s may be slightly off), and you definately have to have 100% updates nightly occurring for every local election authority for the sixty (60) days prior to a statewide election.

So, that's 108 seperate database updates occurring nightly from all across the State of Illinois, with the parent SBE databases having to be "normalized" after updating to integrate the new data in with the existing data. And then you've got to back up all the newly updated data in those databases. And, then do it again and again and again for sixty (60) days straight, with a 100% success rate being marginally acceptable...

Bets, anybody.......

Anonymous,  10:50 AM  

Check out vote fraud in the 11th ward, 8th ward, 29th ward and in the Hispanic HDO controlled wards
absentee ballots, people registered out of empty lots, different homes, yes dead people not purged
14th ward absentee are bizarre too
John Daley should be indicted on vote fraud

fedup dem 10:59 AM  

You shouldn't use ancient history (like the 1960 election) to prove your point. After all, it is well known that there were probably as many cows and trees Downstate that voted for Nixon in 1960 as there were dead people in Chicago who voted for John Kennedy!

However, the prospect of fraud in the upcoming Primary election is quite real. I could see a strong likelihood of fraud in areas with a large number of recently-naturalized citizens (where precinct captains will offer to help them out well before Election Day).

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