Tag: Election Protection

In Colorado, the state with the longest ballot in the country, 215,000 new voters have signed up since January. The woman in charge of the state elections department, Holly Lowder, resigned just weeks ago, after her cozy personal relationship with the beneficiary of several state election-related contracts surfaced. Lowder's boss, Secretary of State Mike Coffman, is himself the target of longstanding ethics complaints and is overseeing an election that he is also running in — to replace retiring Congressman Tom Tancredo. And, oh yeah, Colorado could be the deciding state for the presidential election. Hold on tight. It could be a bumpy ride.

Registration deadlines loom and there are many obstacles. From reading tests to ID challenges, felon disenfranchisement laws and the endless purging of voter rolls the U.S. is almost alone among industrial world democracies in having no uniform federal voting law. Live From Main Street examines voting rights problems leading up to the Nov. 4 election.

Breaking news on a GOP voter disenfranchisement plot from our sister site, Michigan Messenger. The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee have filed a lawsuit in federal court in Michigan over the Michigan GOP’s plan to use foreclosure lists to challenge voters at the polls, as first reported by the Michigan Messenger.

Our Michigan Messenger colleague Eartha Jane Melzer follows up on her blockbuster news story last week on a plan by the Macomb County Republican Party to challenge residents' voting eligibility in predominantly Democratic neighborhoods hit hard by foreclosures. Now, a veteran Republican activist and author of Confessions of a Republican Operative: How to Rig an Election spills the beans on how "holding down Democratic turnout is a key part of Republican strategy for victory in November."

More Election Day shenanigans are revealed by our colleague Eartha Melzer at Michigan Messenger in this breaking news story on the latest dirty disenfranchisement tactic by a Republican operative to challenge voters at the polls on Nov. 4 and how the McCain campaign stands to benefit.

Robert Kennedy Jr. had a pretty good excuse for skipping his scheduled appearance with investigative journalist Greg Palast to promote their latest project, “Steal Back Your Vote” — a report on voting irregularities and fraud in the 2008 election.

UPDATED 5:01 PM MST: John Hickenlooper on Channel 7 "This is an outrage." Encouraged people to go to FairVote Colorado to find polling locations...