Don’t Vote on Election Day, February 5
The Iowa caucuses are on January 3. The New Hampshire primary is scheduled for January 8. I voted in the Utah primary today. Yes, they are already mailing out vote-by-mail ballots.
OK, you can vote on Election Day if you want to, but why wait? Register for vote-by mail. To cast your vote in the Utah primary, you must register to vote by January 7.
Because Willard “Mitt” Romney is on the ballot, a large turnout is expected, along with lines at some polling places. From an article by Ted McDonough in Salt Lake City Weekly:
[I]n Salt Lake County, election officials are trying to figure out how to persuade voters not to come to the polls. With the switch from punch cards to touch-screen voting, the county ended up with 40 percent fewer polling booths. A large turnout will overwhelm the setup, says County Clerk Sherrie Swensen.
Swensen has asked the County Council for extra money to heavily advertise early voting before 2008. Few people took advantage of the option this year, causing long lines at about 20 of the county’s polls. Along with voting by mail, early voting has worked in states like Texas, where 40 percent of voters cast a ballot before Election Day, she says.
The presidential primary in February might be a good test of what is in store next year. Utah is participating in Super Tuesday with Mitt Romney on the ballot, and Swensen expects at least 40 percent turnout. If the vote goes anything like the recent city election, it could be a train wreck.
Salt Lake County voters who insist on voting in person will notice that their polling place will change election to election as the number of polling places are expanded or consolidated to the make most of available voting machines. Voters will be notified of the location of their polling places three weeks before each election.
December 29th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
I long for the days when voting in Utah didn’t cost many millions of dollars for machinery that has never been required to be accurate, and millions more to pay extra workers to replace the ones who gave up trying to learn how to run them. Can anybody tell me one benefit we gained from buying these worthless Diebold/Premiere, (whatever), pieces of junk?
Cost of punch card unit = $40
Cost of Diebold virtual reality voting machine = $3000
Number of people in Utah who couldn’t cast their vote ON election day before Diebold = 0
The punch cards in the Florida 2000 election were designed to fail and eight people who made the cards for years were willing to stand in front of a camera and give their names to the media to bring it to light. The company that produced the punch cards also makes voting machinery, (Sequoia.) They made millions after the HAVA act passed. Congressman Bob Ney is sometimes called the father of HAVA. He now sits in prison on unrelated and less serious charges then putting our republic at risk. The democrats have participated in this travesty except for Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich. Congressman Rush Holt keeps trying to push legislation through to help with the problem, but it always falls short and sometimes appears to make things worse. He’s working on a new one now. Let’s hope something can be done in time for 2008.
Nobody in America knows the story thanks to the TOTAL BLACKOUT of all information bringing the machines into question by our government/corporate media.
Have a nice day.
December 29th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Virtual reality voting machines = assured republican majority forever and ever and ev…> > >
I’m supposing that a vote by mail is an option that circumvents the Diebold / Rebublican machinery? I’ve not used them so far (except for the test-drive before roll-out), but wonder about the paper ballots actually being counted. I do know my test-drive ballot was not counted. That was all to show the ‘electorate’ what it would feel like to stand before the modern apparatus of democratus. Flim-flam, but we’re easily hoodwinked and will gladly pick up the dollar cost as well.
December 29th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
As crazy as it sounds, (not really), I believe Americans are capable of actually hand marking and hand counting their ballots in 2008. Nothing in heaven or earth is going to prevent some fraud from happening in any election, but these machines leave open the possibility for widespread, undetectable switching of millions of votes at the touch of a button with the evidence being destroyed easily. If you’ve done the research, it’s crazy to think this hasn’t been done already. Just because you didn’t see it on TV, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
In fact, I’ll bet it would be possible to take a couple of classrooms of 12 year olds, give them thousands of identical ballots to tabulate, and see if they can arrive at the same product. If America still had civics classes, that would be a great place to demonstrate my theory.
There’s really no need to count every citizens vote where it concerns judges. If you wished to vote for or against a judge specifically, that could be counted easily. If the counting went on for days after the election because of problems, that would be fine. We don’t need to know what’s going to happen on election night. What is important is that all of the votes are counted, including the provisional ballots which usually get thrown out anyway. That’s my worry about the mail-in ones also, which will be counted by machine as things stand.
Rage against the machines, my fellow Utahn’s! As long as these nasty things are involved, the deceivers will convince us that we-the-people should stay out of things and leave it to the “experts.” It’s the oldest trick in the book.