Daily Show from last night

I was just watching the rerun, they did a piece on how some group was supposedly trying to get signatures for a marijuana campaign at Pitt. A few weeks later a bunch of students found out they had inadvertently registered for the republican party. Now these students are obviously morons, however this might actually be somewhat significant.

If you know you are going to rig an election (be it through "flipping" votes or simply dropping them) you want to get as large a registered republican base as possible to explain uncharacteristic vote. I know it might be a little far out there but has anyone else heard about any more of this stuff. I mean how greedy could they have gotten?

more importantly am i now paranoid?

A Tonnnnnn of reports of Repubs using deceit tactics to register people.

Only problem is I saw a few that Dems were doing the same thing, but in truth I did see Farrrrrrrr more showing deceit from the Repubs...

who knows

"Paranoia is just a precaution."

Besides - it's a loose end I would have tied up too.

It would be a nice way to hide a bunch of fraudulent votes it someone wanted to hack the results. A few thousand extra votes for * wouldn't look so obvious if you had more Rep registrations.

While it does seem like a stretch, I didn't see any reason to register people in the wrong party. So what...you can vote for anyone regardless of your party affiliation. Of course a lot of newbies may not know that.

Maybe it was just to confuse the more feeble minded voter.

Someone needed to sign the poll books, after all.

They'd lie about the content of the petition, copy one signature for multiple petitions, you name it.

There was a regular petition industry in Oregon until the unions put out their own petition to ban paying petition gatherers by the signature. (Personally, I'd ban paying them at all, on the grounds that any petition drive that can't attract volunteers is not truly the voice of the people.)

It was in Pittsburgh. I personally know people that were affected by this. It received virtually no coverage, even in the city of Pittsburgh (which is a fairly "blue" city). Our media here suck too.

Edited to say: These people (whoever they were - nobody ever bothered to try to follow up on this) went to the University of Pittsburgh, walked around campus, and asked students to sign a petition supporting medical marijuana legislation. It included a space for name, address, etc...

After the names were collected, these bastards filed changes of voter registration in these people's names. They changed their party affiliation to Republican and requested a "change of address" to change their official polling places. The change to Republican is just petty, really, but the voting district thing - if you don't show up at the right polling place, you get to file a PROVISIONAL ballot, which, as we all know, doesn't *really* count, and is likely to be rejected for small errors.

Pittsburgh is a very tough city to get around in by car or public transit, and many Pitt students don't have cars anyway because parking is a full contact sport here. It is quite likely that many of these affected students showed up at the polling place they thought they were supposed to go to and then decided they probably couldn't find or get to the polling place where their "new registration" was, and therefore had to fill out a provisional ballot. A very clever scheme that those anonymous Pittsburgh Republicans thought up. :-(

This affected probably thousands of Pitt students, most of whom voted for Kerry (I believe the final numbers were around 80-20 Democratic).

If there are any REPUKES reading this thread - too bad Pittsburgh and PA went blue anyway, assholes! Your efforts to destroy democracy in this little urban corner of the universe came to nothing. Ha!

then who cares at this point, but maybe in places like miami-dade with large uni's it could help shed some light on shaddy stuff.

What does the law say about public petitions? Is a petitioner legally required to provide ID if asked? I know this would vary from state to state.

I was thinking, I would not sign a petition these days unless at the very least I could ID the person who asked me. Too many stories of registration switches. And switching registration has got to be a felony, or at least I would hope. Some serious vote fraud.

And if they refused to ID themselves, I would call the cops.

(Switching people's voter registration w/out their permission) It sure should be! Don't know about the ID, personally, I don't like to ever be asked for my "papers". You should always, always, always! read what you are signing! Even if it's a "medical marijuana petition" handed to you by a guy with dreadlocks!

you show up at the wrong polling place and the provisional will not be counted... that was the big push in the courts just before the election – making certain out-of-precinct voters would not be accepted provisionally. Seems to all fit now…

These people are so low. The sad part is that this is just one of many "clever schemes" the repubs did this time around. And while we are trying to prove fraud, they are already looking for more ways to screw America in 2006.

"The organization whose canvassers appeared to have perpetrated the fraud, Project America Votes, belongs to Sproul and Associates, a group under contract to the GOP. It has come under fire recently in several other states where some canvassers have said that they had been told to refuse to register Democrats or to discard their registration forms after they had been completed."

I think this was mainly about switching people's polling place but who knows? Supposedly they did the same Medical Marijuana scam in Portland as well.

lets dress up in suits saying we are trying to get an amendment passed to ban gay marriage and really have it be a petition to investigate alleged voter fraud. Beat them at their own game.

I like the way you think :)

Psychologically speaking, that's the color preference of the paranoid person, believe it or not. Weird how factoids like that stick in one's memory.

But you raise an interesting question, a parallel to yours: Is it possible that the Repubs registered a lot of "down and out" people who will never show up to vote, such as "skid row" types, and then used their names to pad the books?

After all, they did pay those addicts and drunkards money to challenge voters. Would an addict ever know if his name was used fraudulently by someone who was assuming his identity and came in to vote in his place?

These may seem to be dumb questions, but I'm in Oregon and we vote by mail. When I was in Texas, I think I produced my registration card or something and I signed in. That was 15 years ago and I don't remember.

We should leave no stone unturned. Just because something at first blush appears ridiculous, doesn't mean it has no merit.

Once in Texas, now in Oregon. (And life is so much better now, isn't it?!?)

However, I'm a little ashamed to admit that I didn't vote while we lived in Texas (because really, what's the point?).

Also, I love purple and green--not because I'm paranoid but because those are the suffragettes' colors from nearly 100 years ago. (Purple, green, and white, actually.) Rock on, Susan B.!

And now we live in Oregon (THANK GOD). My question about voting by mail is, wouldn't you need an address to be able to vote by mail? That stinks for the transient-type person--and one of the things I love (well, loved) about America is that the poorest of the poor's vote counted just as much as the richest of the rich's, for at least one day every four years. (Unless, of course, in a vote-by-mail state, a fraudulent address were put down for you when you registered to vote, and a Republican at that address sent in your ballot for you. )

So like you I wonder, did Republicans register people whom they knew would never show up to vote? Hmm.... that would be pretty naughty, wouldn't it?

are different things.

My mother was a RINO for decades. Always seemed to vote democratic even though she got the Repug literature.

However, if these college students registered for the repubs when they thought they were signing up for legal pot smoking I am even more scared for our country's future than before.

Excuse me while I do another bong...ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Where are the cheetos?

Franken had a woman on the show one day whose husband, a new US citizen, had been registered to vote in Florida by a group of young people standing outside (the courthouse? Not sure about this detail). She later found out (I forget how she discovered it) that the box on the registration form had already been checked "Republican." They were doing this in Florida, too.

I'll try to find the story behind this. It happened around August, maybe early September.

I FOUND IT. Here's the link:

http://www.news4jax.com/politics/3495828/detail.html

I thought and thought hard about it and just couldn't figure it out. I kept thinking to myself that they are pointing to something, but not coming right out and saying it. I am not very fond of conspiracy things, but this last election has me very worried about the state of our democracy. Too many fingers in too many pies kind of thing.
I am just not so sure that fighting is the right thing to do at this moment in time. It will come to me.
I have been wondering, though, about that segment. I was thinking that someone may sign for a petition, but not vote. Who would be the wiser, if they "did vote?"