CLEVELAND — "Volunteers supporting Barack Obama picked up hundreds of people at homeless shelters, soup kitchens and drug-rehab centers and drove them to a polling place yesterday on the last day that Ohioans could register and vote on the same day, almost no questions asked.
The huge effort by a pro-Obama group, Vote Today Ohio, takes advantage of a quirk in the state's elections laws that allows people to register and cast ballots at the same time without having to prove residency.
Republicans have argued that the window could lead to widespread voter fraud because officials wouldn't have an opportunity to verify registration information before ballots were cast.
Among the volunteers were Yori Stadlin and Vivian Lehrer of the Upper West Side, who got married last week and decided to spend their honeymoon shepherding voters to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections."
In Florida, over 600,000 african-Americans who had been registered never showed up at the polls to vote in the 2004 election. Massive, I mean MASSIVE efforts had been made to coax, drag, lure, and even stretcher-carry as many mostly warm bodies as humanly possible to registration sites, and the local media never did stop prattling on about how the state would surely go to the Kerry ticket. John, who served in Vietnam by the way, took southern Florida in a landslide but lost the state by nearly 400,000 votes. The moral of the story is that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him remember where it was and come back on election day.
No comments:
Post a Comment