Be Sassy, not Assy!

A happy lit­tle bumper sticker is mak­ing its way around the inter­webs, thanks to those of us who are immensely dis­pleased with both McCain and Obama.

Case in point! Reports are com­ing in from Pennsylvania of Republican elec­tion judges being expelled from polling places. Let’s be clear: most of the polling judges in every polling place in the coun­try are reg­is­tered to one polit­i­cal party or another. Rules are in place for many coun­ties about the need for equal dis­tri­b­u­tion of party pres­ence. Most elec­tion judges are not aware of court rul­ings pro­tect their posi­tions. Man. At the 2004 elec­tion for which I worked the polls in Greene County (the Republic poll), my job was to ver­ify voter iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and that they were at the cor­rect polling place. Essentially, I helped the igno­rant and stopped the crooks. We had both. I stayed over­time in order to help com­plete the human count­ing process (humans count the num­ber or bal­lots received, machines count the spe­cific votes cast). Four elderly indi­vid­u­als were the elec­tion judges for that loca­tion and year. They would count up to about 50–70 bal­lots out of the hun­dreds and hun­dreds received, and then they’d lose count. They even­tu­ally accepted my “how clever!” sys­tem of count­ing stacks of 10 into 100, and then count­ing the stacks of 100. They were, for the most part, very sweet… but it’s the sort of envi­ron­ment in which a sin­gle bold indi­vid­ual can step in, take charge, and twist the process into crim­i­nal activity.

This is the elec­tion crap that hap­pens here in Latin America, folks. Do you really want it in the States? All par­ties should be deeply offended by this behav­ior, and both McCain and Obama should call for the votes in these polling places to be fully discarded.