Politics

Help Fight Voter Suppression from Home with the Election Protection Wiki!

By Conor Kenny

Volunteers at the Center for Media and Democracy's Election Protection Wiki have collected unbelievable reports of voter suppression nationwide in the nine days since it went online.

Among the reports on the EPWiki:

• In Colorado and New Mexico there are not enough voting booths or machines for Election Day.
• Students in Virginia are receiving probing questionnaires from voting officials falsely implying they don't have the right to vote there.
• In Ohio alone, more than 600,000 newly-registered voters are threatened with purging.
• There are reports of sometimes-illegal mass voter roll purges in Michigan, New Mexico, Florida, Georgia, Colorado and other states. Several states are even purging voter rolls of people who are "Bob" on driver's licenses and "Robert" on voter registration forms.
• Officials in Indiana are avoiding setting up polling places in areas of the state heavily populated by minorities.
• The Republican Party in Michigan planned to challenge the registrations of every voter whose home had been foreclosed on recently.
• ACORN, which has been held out as a bogeyman for voter fraud (though only 26 TOTAL cases of voter fraud were prosecuted nationwide from 2002 - 2005), has bad registration rates below the California Republican Party's and a lawsuit alleging fraud in 2004 was dismissed by a judge for lack of merit?
• And, of course, there are ongoing worries across the country about electronic voting machines.

The Election Protection Wiki (at EPWiki.org) is the only website trying to document and centralize these reports, which were found scattered across the Web by volunteers. We are trying to get everything ready so activists, advocates and the media have a central place to go on Election Day for immediate information about these issues.

We need your help to collect more reports. No experience is necessary and CMD staffers are here to help with ready-to-go simple tasks and any support you need. Please join us in protecting the right to vote - go to EPWiki.org and click on "things you can do" to begin.

Full post as published by PR Watch on October 15, 2008 (boomark / email).