Remember in 2000 when hundreds of illegal immigrants voted for Al Gore and he won the presidency by stealing the election? If you don’t, that may be because what actually happened was that thousands of votes by Jewish voters where cast on the infamous butterfly ballots and got counted for some Christian fundie named Pat rather than Gore. Fortunately we learned from that, and stopped using oddly formatted ballots. Except for the ones they used in the same county in 2004.

There are better methods.

Remember when thousands of DNC operatives registered voters across the country and then threw away the forms if they where marked “republican”? If not, that could be because it was actually an RNC hired firm that threw away registration forms, and yet keeps getting hired, and payed, to do the same thing again, year after year. Accuse ACORN of voter fraud because they found someone committing fraud and fired and reported them? Check! Knowingly and systematically hire your own operatives to commit the same fraud on a massive scale, change the company name when caught, wash, rinse, repeat? Check!

Remember when Ohio went for the dem candidate despite polling that suggested otherwise and everyone pointed to things like the e-voting machines being linked to democratic supporters and the suspicious actions of democratic officials who took vote counts home to tally them or the precincts that had more voters for the democrat than they had registered voters?

Oops, sorry. Just run a “find and replace” in that paragraph and swap republican in for democrat. My bad.

After more than a decade of this sort of behavior, and things getting so bad that the UN has sent election monitors in to some areas, as if we are a despotic ruled regime taking our first tentative attempt at democracy, surely we the people have looked around and noticed this shit. Surely by now we have taken steps to stop this sort of blatant attempt at election theft. Surely, the people themselves have risen up in protest!

Maybe.

Pollsters and pundits have trained their eyes on Ohio, where President Obama maintains a narrow lead over Mitt Romney just days before the election. According to exit polls, Obama’s lead is even stronger among early voters. But several recent developments threaten to disenfranchise many of these voters and plunge Ohio into a bureaucratic nightmare on election night.

The Columbus Dispatch reported today that a data-sharing glitch and mistakes by election officials has caused thousands of absentee ballot requests to be rejected. While Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted maintains that this was a computer error, the Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates found an abnormally high rate of rejected absentee ballot requests in Cuyahoga County, a Democratic stronghold that includes Cleveland. The Cuyahoga Board of Elections determined that 865 ballot requests had been erroneously thrown out.

It is amazing how often reality has a liberal bias, but mistakes lean conservative…

If these voters try to cast their vote in person, they will likely be forced to use a provisional ballot, as the absentee ballot error has thrown their registration status into question. At least 4,500 registered voters across the state will be left waiting for their absentee ballots, while as many as 6,000 provisional ballots cast by registered voters could be tossed out. The provisional ballots that do not get thrown out won’t be counted until November 17, according to state law, further dragging out the confusion.

At least there is nothing riding on this vote count.

Still, benefit of the doubt and all. It isn’t like this has happened before. It is a new method of cheating mistake.

This absentee ballot fiasco is just the latest in Ohio’s dysfunctional election saga. On Wednesday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed Husted to discount ballots cast by people directed to the wrong polling station by a pollworker — one of the most common errors that led to thousands of votes getting thrown out in Ohio’s dysfunctional 2004 presidential election.

Well, it could be worse. He could be blatant about it.

Husted has become a national symbol of voter suppression after he banned early voting on nights and weekends, and attempted to defy a court order that restored early voting on the last three days before the election.

In his defense, Husted often touts his unprecedented initiative to mail absentee ballot requests to every registered voter in the state. But critics have pointed out that this measure is likely to add to the confusion that could delay the results of the election. Anyone who chooses to return the absentee ballot application but later decides to vote in person will be required to use a provisional ballot, as election officials need to verify that they did not also send in their absentee ballot. The absentee ballot initiative, then, could be a bureaucratic nightmare in disguise. With innumerable legitimate votes cast on provisional ballots, Ohio’s 2012 election could end up mirroring 2004, when the state discarded thousands of votes and tipped George W. Bush over the edge to victory by the narrowest margin.

Meanwhile, the GOP trained sheep complain about voter fraud by telling stories of people casting more than one vote or voting despite being ineligible. The number of cases of that style of voter fraud can literally be counted by my pre-k niece, and she won’t even have to use her other hand, but the republican style vote denial fraud has now reached the millions.

And we still haven’t done a damn thing about it.

There is some quote about who votes not counting, rather it is who counts the votes, but why bother? Nobody is listening anyway.

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