Lawsuits, Machine Malfunctions, and Missing Absentee Ballots Among Voting Rights Issues Facing Jittery Election

The election is less than a week away and the battle is on for voting rights. Early voters across the country are reporting long lines and problems with electronic voting machines, including vote flipping. Republicans meanwhile continue to file lawsuits that could stop thousands from voting because their registration information does not exactly match government databases.

Legal rulings in Wisconsin, Nevada, and Ohio have rejected these challenges and the US Supreme Court also dismissed a case earlier this month relating to 200,000 new voters in the battleground state of Ohio.

But last week, the White House got involved and asked the Department of Justice to investigate the integrity of these 200,000 new voter registration forms. Ohio Democratic leaders as well as the ACLU have sent letters to Attorney General Michael Mukasey urging him not to intervene in the election dispute in Ohio.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, more than 11,000 voters in Denver have not received absentee ballots because of a mistake made by the company Sequoia Voting Systems. Sequoia was supposed to have delivered 21,000 ballots to a Denver mail processing facility on October 16, but the company only delivered about half of the requested ballots.

Harvey Wasserman, Senior Editor of the Ohio-based “FreePress.org”=freepress.org and co-author of “What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election” and "How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008.”

Brad Friedman, independent journalist and commentator on election issues. He is the creator of “The Brad Blog”=www.bradblog.com and has reported extensively on vote-rigging.

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