Print

[Frenchfry]

DYSON--ARY: The Word That Defines Romney's Campaign -- 'ob·fus·cate'

[Frenchfry]

5 Million Votes at Stake as The GOP -- a Party on its 'Last Gasps' Tries To Steal 2012

5 Million Votes at Stake as The GOP -- a Party on its 'Last Gasps' Tries To Steal 2012

[Professor H]

Obama hasn't done enough to continue that "energy" he started last election among his supporters...
He will likely benefit from what I will call the Granholm effect - do nothing but talk a good game and you probably will get re-elected by the straight ticket voters

That was the theme for last election, this year those same pollsters who noticed the increases, have already started to adjust for the Apathy that will re-appear.

The Surprising Trends That Suggest Young People Won’t Vote in 2012
Cheryl Russell
February 15, 2012

For many, the 2008 election wasn’t just a victory for Democrats—it was also the long-awaited return of young adults to the voting booth. Now Obama supporters are hoping that, come Election Day 2012, young adults will once again turn out in droves. But 2008 probably didn’t signal a permanent resurgence of the youth vote. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that young people will vote in significantly lower numbers this time around.

It has long been a puzzle why so many young adults do not vote—and why their already low voting rate has generally fallen over the decades. In 1972, 53 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds went to the polls. By 2000, the figure had fallen to just 36 percent, a historic low. (In contrast, the voting rate among people aged 65 or older rose five percentage points during those years, to 68 percent.) There is no doubt that the Obama campaign of 2008 energized the under-30 crowd, boosting their voting rate to 46 percent. But even then, fewer than half of 18-to-29-year-olds went to the polls compared with more than two-thirds of people aged 65 or older, according to the Census Bureau.

So why don’t young adults vote? That’s a vexing question political campaigns have been asking for decades. The most likely answer is that young adults do not vote because many are still—in a sense—children, without adult commitments or responsibilities. The data suggest that three factors consistently make a difference in voting rates: money, marriage, and homeownership. Those are the adult commitments that give people a stake in society; to protect and expand their stake, they vote. Take a look at money and voting: The gap in voter participation between the highest and lowest income groups is a stunning 26 percentage points. For marriage and homeownership, the gaps are 16 to 17 percent.

Recent years have seen Americans in their twenties delay starting careers, getting married, and buying homes—and as the road to adulthood has lengthened, voting rates among the young have generally fallen (the notable exceptions are 2004 and 2008). Now, the bad economy is exacerbating these trends. For the nation’s young, the Great Recession has turned money, marriage, and homeownership into an impossible dream.

Let’s start with money. Among 18-to-29-year-olds in the labor force, fully 44 percent are unemployed or underemployed, according to a Gallup survey—that’s more than any other demographic segment. The financial consequences are not pretty. Householders under age 25 lost more ground than any other group between 2008 and 2010, according to the Census Bureau, their median income falling by 13 percent after adjusting for inflation. Those aged 25 to 29 had the next highest decline, with their median income falling five percent.

This economic climate has led twentysomethings to put off another traditional marker of adulthood: marriage. Young adults are not just postponing marriage—they are shunning it, and it’s not hard to figure out why. Being holed up in your parents’ basement with creditors pounding on the door does not impress the guys or girls. That scenario, playing out in communities across the nation, explains why 64 percent of men aged 25 to 29 were still single in 2011, up from 59 percent in 2008. Among women in the age group, the never-married share grew from 45 percent to just over 50 percent. Without financial security, marriage is increasingly off the table.

Not surprisingly, homeownership rates have similarly plunged among young adults. Historically, homeowners become the norm in the 30-to-34 age group, when the homeownership rate rises above 50 percent. This has been the case in every year of the Census Bureau’s data series, which began in 1982. A 53.5 percent majority of householders aged 30 to 34 owned their home in 2008. By 2011, however, only 49.8 percent were homeowners—the first time the figure has fallen below the 50 percent threshold.

It’s true that the economy has shown signs of recovery in the past few months. The number of jobs is growing, and unemployment is down. But the nine months between now and Election Day are not enough to gestate a generation of youth and turn them into voting adults. It takes years to catch up. Studies show that those who graduate from college into a bad economy experience long-term wage losses—particularly after being underemployed—with lower earnings even six years after recovery. Those wage losses will likely continue to have an effect on marriage and homeownership rates, which will in turn have an effect on voter turnout.

It’s a grim picture, and it almost (but not quite) guarantees that 18-to-29-year-olds will be less likely to vote in 2012 than in 2008. This is bad news for Obama, who will need the youth vote to win in November. It doesn’t mean, of course, that he shouldn’t try to recreate some of the enthusiasm he sparked among young voters in 2008—it just means he will be facing an uphill battle.
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/100774/young-voters-election-2012

[Frenchfry]

**another lame attempt to change the topic to apathy**

The topic is about FRAUD....but I can understand why you're trying to change the subject 

[Frenchfry]

Jim Crow laws

During the Reconstruction period of 1865–1877, federal law provided civil rights protection in the U.S. South for "freedmen" – the African Americans who had formerly been slaves. In the 1870s, Democrats gradually returned to power in the Southern states, sometimes as a result of elections in which paramilitary groups intimidated opponents, attacking blacks or preventing them from voting. Gubernatorial elections were close and disputed in Louisiana for years, with extreme violence unleashed during the campaigns. In 1877, a national compromise to gain Southern support in the presidential election resulted in the last of the federal troops being withdrawn from the South. White Democrats had regained political power in every Southern state.[5] These conservative, white, Democratic Redeemer governments legislated Jim Crow laws, segregating black people from the white population.

Blacks were still elected to local offices in the 1880s, but the establishment Democrats were passing laws to make voter registration and electoral rules more restrictive, with the result that political participation by most blacks and many poor whites began to decrease.[6][7] Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, starting with Mississippi, passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements.[6][7] Grandfather clauses temporarily permitted some illiterate whites to vote.

Voter turnout dropped drastically through the South as a result of such measures. For example, Alabama had tens of thousands of poor whites disfranchised.[8] In Louisiana, by 1900, black voters were reduced to 5,320 on the rolls, although they comprised the majority of the state's population. By 1910, only 730 blacks were registered, less than 0.5 percent of eligible black men. "In 27 of the state's 60 parishes, not a single black voter was registered any longer; in 9 more parishes, only one black voter was."[9] The cumulative effect in North Carolina meant that black voters were completely eliminated from voter rolls during the period from 1896–1904. The growth of their thriving middle class was slowed. In North Carolina and other Southern states, there were also the effects of invisibility: "[W]ithin a decade of disfranchisement, the white supremacy campaign had erased the image of the black middle class from the minds of white North Carolinians."[9]

Those who could not vote were not eligible to serve on juries and could not run for local offices. They effectively disappeared from political life, as they could not influence the state legislatures, and their interests were overlooked. While public schools had been established by Reconstruction legislatures for the first time in most Southern states; those for black children were consistently underfunded compared to schools for white children, even when considered within the strained finances of the postwar South where the decreasing price of cotton kept the agricultural economy at a low.

In some cases, progressive measures intended to reduce election fraud, such as the eight box law in South Carolina, acted against black and white voters who were illiterate, as they could not follow the directions.[10] While the separation of African Americans from the general population was becoming legalized and formalized during the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s), it was also becoming customary. Even in cases in which Jim Crow laws did not expressly forbid black people to participate, for instance, in sports or recreation, the laws shaped a segregated culture.[3]

In the Jim Crow context, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of black Americans. Most blacks still lived in the South, where they had been effectively disenfranchised, so they could not vote at all. While poll taxes and literacy requirements banned many poor or illiterate Americans from voting, these stipulations frequently had loopholes that exempted white Americans from meeting the requirements. In Oklahoma, for instance, anyone qualified to vote before 1866, or related to someone qualified to vote before 1866 (a kind of "grandfather clause"), was exempted from the literacy requirement; the only persons who could vote before that year were white male Americans. White Americans were effectively excluded from the literacy testing, whereas black Americans were effectively singled out by the law.[11]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

Well that ought to make you righties salivate. Funny how the D's managed to rid themselves of those bad seeds and yet they found a home in the Republican Party and flourished

[Frenchfry]

Ohio's Broken Electoral System Worsened By Republican Rigging (1/2)

Ohio's Broken Electoral System Worsened By Republican Rigging (2/2)

[Frenchfry]

Republican Voter Suppression: PA Election Official Says 'Election Will Be a 'Mess''

[Professor H]

The topic is about FRAUD....but I can understand why you're trying to change the subject 

And yet you do the same 

Posting about 19th Century laws after the Civil War, and why you think today's potential voters can't get proof of citizenship/ID - when it really is about Apathy/Effort.   

Just because no one prosecutes it - doesn't mean it (Fraud) doesn't happen in many areas around the country.
Absentee ballots in Florida are a prime example - and everyone knows it happens "wink wink" it's part of the system - and even has it own name/terminology...
Did you forget the youtube clip of someone claiming to be a voter in DC named "HOLDER"...  no ID check necessary - just sign here 

[Frenchfry]

The ED Show - Romney's not telling the truth on Ohio early voting

[Frenchfry]

Like a 5-year-old, Secretary of State Ruth Johnson is still insisting the bogeyman of voter fraud lurks somewhere in the shadows of Michigan’s elections apparatus, even though wiser folks have told her to back off from her battle against this imaginary foe.

So Tuesday, before I got my ballot to vote, the precinct worker stopped and asked me if I was a citizen.

Now, you have to be a citizen to register to vote. Everyone knows that. And you have to be a citizen to vote. Everyone knows that, too.

Moreover, in July, Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed a Johnson-backed bill that would have required people to affirm their citizenship a second time at the polls. He said it could lead to confusion at the polls.

But Johnson insisted on keeping the citizenship question atop the voter application forms you fill out before voting. And she sent a confusing message to poll workers, telling them that if people refused to answer the question, they were to be told that citizenship is a requirement for voting. And then given ballots.

Huh?

So the governor was right — all this just meant unnecessary confusion at the polls Tuesday. Voter advocate groups got calls all day asking about the citizenship issue. I’ve heard from people who didn’t see the question on their ballots and weren’t asked, and from others who did see it and were told to fill it in. Rich Robinson, who heads the Michigan Campaign Finance network, got turned away from the polls when he refused to answer the citizenship question.

And that’s how voter intimidation works. You create laws that are unclear and unnecessary, and you enforce them randomly and unevenly.

Congratulations, Madam Secretary. You’ve made Michigan 2012 just a little more like Mississippi 1963.

Intentionally or not, Johnson managed to erect an illegal barrier to balloting at polling places throughout Michigan. If I did the same, by scaring people away from voting stations with intimidating signs and by screaming at them, Johnson would probably prosecute me.

Johnson’s “crusade” against voter fraud has been the low-point of her tenure since being elected in 2010. She spearheaded a package of pretty sweeping reforms that she said were intended to tighten up gaps in election laws that made it too easy for voters to cast fraudulent ballots. Of course, she neglected to mention that her own review of voter impropriety in Michigan surveyed some 1 million registrations and found all of two violations.

Snyder thought better of it before she got completely out of hand, and vetoed the citizenship affirmation requirement as well as a provision that would have made it harder for third-party groups such as the League of Women voters to conduct voter registration drives.

It’s all about politics, likely. Republicans benefit when fewer people vote, as evidenced by the GOP tide in 2010, when some 300,000 fewer voters showed up than in 2006, the previous mid-term election.

But it’s wrong. And it’s a shameful nod to this country’s pretty horrific history of voter disenfranchisement.

When the poll worker asked me if I was a citizen Tuesday, I got a little panicked. I didn’t have my birth certificate on me. And I couldn’t immediately think of another way to prove that I was born here — although I was voting in the church where I attended pre-school, in the neighborhood where I lived most of my childhood.

For a second, I felt a twinge of doubt about how I might assert my own right to vote, to be counted.

It’s a lousy feeling. And if it can affect me — someone with a big public voice and the means to correct any injustice I might have encountered — imagine how other citizens might feel.

I told the poll worker I was a citizen. She checked the box for me on the voter application form, then handed me a ballot. No real harm done.

But Johnson ought to be clear in November. Take the question off the voter application form.

Stop the crusade against made-up voter fraud, and turn your attention to things like the kind of election fraud where fake candidates are paid to put their names on a ballot.
http://www.freep.com/article/20120807/COL33/120807094/Stephen-Henderson-lousy-feeling-Election-Day-thanks-Secretary-State-Ruth-Johnson

[Pax]

[Frenchfry]

The ED Show - Blocking the vote in Ohio

[BigRedDog]

I saw this very interesting article in the Midland paper yesterday...

there are more registered voters in the county than there are people eligible to be registered...

and several other counties in the state too...

and the majority would be what I would consider to be "lily white" counties

http://www.ourmidland.com/news/article_c405075c-e091-11e1-803c-001a4bcf887a.html

[Frenchfry]

I saw this very interesting article in the Midland paper yesterday...

there are more registered voters in the county than there are people eligible to be registered...

and several other counties in the state too...

and the majority would be what I would consider to be "lily white" counties

http://www.ourmidland.com/news/article_c405075c-e091-11e1-803c-001a4bcf887a.html

The article states: "the county has a population of 84,063, of which 65,409 have registered to vote."

And:
"that the two counties have more than 100 percent voter registration"
Not sure how they figured.

[BigRedDog]

The article states: "the county has a population of 84,063, of which 65,409 have registered to vote."

And:
"that the two counties have more than 100 percent voter registration"
Not sure how they figured.

Their math didn't make sense to me either...

I guess anyone can sue for anything like that though