Long Lines, Tall Tales, and Federalized Elections
President Obama’s State of the Union address contained a justification for more federal control over state elections. In the past, creeping federalization over state elections was properly justified by state racial discrimination, then the sketchier reason of inadequate numbers of welfare recipients registering to vote. This year, long lines at the polls served as the bogeyman for the latest federal intrusion into state elections. President Obama announced a “bipartisan” commission tasked with recommending solutions to the “problem” of long lines at the polls.
This is a solution in search of a problem, because long lines and long waits were the rare exception, and usually occurred in early voting sites, and not on Election Day. Washington, D.C., has no business intruding into state control over elections for a problem that is not widespread.
The president supported his announcement with the story of Desiline Victor. To be sure, the story of this Florida centenarian standing in line for six hours had great emotional appeal. But the president omitted a key fact about Victor’s ordeal: by choice, Victor voted on the first day of a seven-day early voting period.
Had she voted on Election Day, she would have waited only a short time.
Also, early voting is not a right. It is a convenience extended by state legislatures which could be repealed on a dime. Worse, the justification used for the expensive early voting process — to increase turnout — has failed to materialize.
As Hans von Spakovsky notes:
Early voting is a convenience, not a right, and a relatively new phenomenon. It is meant for those who for some legitimate reason cannot vote on Election Day. Voters in that position also have the option in every state to vote by absentee ballot, something that does not require waiting in line at all.
Like so many other election-process “reforms,” von Spakovsky says, early voting is a central tool of the organized left that “keeps pushing all voters to vote early, not just those who can’t vote on Election Day.”
If your voters are unmotivated low-information voters, the more time you have to roust them to the polls, the more elections you will win.
These election reformers also use tall tales. Consider Judith Browne-Dianis, co-director of Advancement Project, a group which consistently opposes election integrity measures such as voter ID and cleaning up non-citizens from the voter rolls.
Browne-Dianis told NPR: “For me, who voted in the state of Maryland, I was in line for seven hours.” Like Desiline Victor in Florida, Browne-Dianis decided to vote early instead of on Election Day. That’s too bad, because if she had voted at her regular precinct on Election Day — the Faith United Methodist Church in Accokeek, Maryland – she would have had hardly any wait.
Judith Browne-Dianis
I spoke with Harold Ruston of the Prince George’s County electoral board. He is the official who manages the Election Day precincts. He told me there weren’t lines on Election Day anywhere near seven hours long:
On Election Day, if there was a long line it was an hour wait, not much more.
Not content to take the word of the election bureaucrats in Ms. Browne-Dianis’ county, I spoke to Karen Stern, the secretary at the church where Browne-Dianis’ precinct is. She said that there was no wait of any significance to vote at the Faith United Methodist Church all day long.
I contacted other voters in Browne-Dianis’ precinct, and they all told me the same thing — voting on Election Day was a much quicker affair. For example, voter Lavette Brown told me it took her five to ten minutes to vote on Election Day at Browne-Dianis’ regular election day precinct. Of all the voters I spoke with from Browne-Dianis’ precinct who voted throughout Election Day, the worst wait came from those who got there first in the morning, and they waited only an hour to an hour and a half.
Browne-Dianis’ saga is a batch of moonshine. She could have voted on Election Day at the Faith United Methodist Church and saved herself at least six hours. The “long lines commission” must ask why voters who subjected themselves to seven-hour waits didn’t vote on Election Day, or didn’t vote absentee.
Nor have the advocates of Washington, D.C. meddling in state elections produced a single voter who quit the line and didn’t vote. If they do? Ask the voter why they didn’t vote absentee or on Election Day. We can also ask them what they did after they abandoned the line. We better hear lots of persuasive answers before we let the federal government exercise greater control over state elections, though I suspect many of the answers won’t be so compelling.
The truth is that waiting times were almost universally short on Election Day. If lines were long for early voting, then those individuals self-selected to participate in early voting, or chose to not cast an absentee ballot. The best strategy to avoid long lines simply seems to be avoiding early voting.
Here’s the other dirty secret: many of the longest lines occurred in Democrat-controlled urban areas.
The fiercest opponents of long waits should direct their fire at local election officials in their own backyard, not at Washington, D.C. The federal government is forever searching for more ways to snatch power from the states; that’s the nature of the beast. No Republicans should acquiesce to another federal power grab over state elections – dispersing power over elections means that no one entity, or person, can easily manipulate the process. The Founders knew that decentralized control over the process helps preserve individual liberty.
Of course, this explains a great deal about why President Obama and leftist academics are such fans of increasing federal intrusion into elections.
Also read:
You can’t vote often if you don’t vote early.
Any update on the FLA case? Did you see the headline go by screaming identity theft in FLA tax office over the weekend?
The 7-hour lines happened in 2004 in black districts in Ohio, where the number and location of voting machines were allocated by the state and not the locals. A lot of people are still angry about that.
Did those “angry” people somehow miss that Ohio has since enacted one of the most liberal no-fault absentee voting laws in the country? Every registered voter in the state was sent TWO absentee ballot applications by the SOS. They could have voted by mail or dropped it off at the BOE prior to the election, although as Christian pointed out, early voters flooded some BOE’s causing long waits at a handful of locations.
In Ohio, this happened in Cuyahoga County because the Democrats wanted to stage a media circus and encouraged people to camp in front of the BOE overnight (Black Friday-style) so they could be the first to vote on on the first day of early voting. In Ohio, early voting is early absentee voting, so of course, this was completely unnecessary because the voters could have much more easily dropped their absentee ballots in a nearby mailbox.
Ohio bends over so far to make sure you can vote that if you (or an immediate family member) are hospitalized on Election Day, they will send elections officials to the HOSPITAL with an absentee ballot for you!
As Christian suggested, the bar should be set very, very high and we need to see some compelling evidence that voters are truly unable to exercise their right to vote before we get the feds involved.
The 2012 ballot was several pages in many places, most notably in Miami where voters had to wade through 12 pages because of a number of local issues. It was lengthened by legislators, who put 11 constitutional amendment questions on it, some of them written out in full.
“In Miami-Dade County, the ballot read like the book of Leviticus – though not as interesting,” said Senate President Don Gaetz.
In short, “it was just too long,” Scott said late last year on CNN.
http://politics.heraldtribune.com/2013/01/09/floridas-ballot-problem/
The issue had nothing to do with race but had everything to do with an excessively long ballot that sometimes took up to 45 MINUTES to read through and vote. Most people don’t get the paper anymore so they haven’t read the ballot prior to voting. It’s that simple. It’s the reason for the long lines.
The long ballot was a DELIBERATE trick, designed to create slow voting and thereby suppress the vote.
I’ll bet that face has made life rough for lots of waiters at Applebees.
Long lines happen where elections are controlled by a Republican partisan official, in Democratic areas, where the republican party fears that high turn out will make a difference. It’s simple.
We’re the only non-totalitarian country in the whole world where partisan officials control elections!
And that’s the problem.
This is patently false. Prince Georges County MD and Miami Dade FL do not fit your description.
I’ll add my experience here. In Baltimore City my wife and I decided to try to vote early. The line would have been an hour or more. So we went home and voted on election day. No problem.
Mr. Adams, you might check into what happened here in Israel. For one ballot box (which in the States is an E.D.) the vote was over 100%. So the head of the national election comittee (an actual judge) threw out the whole thing.
Every. Single. Vote.
Here’s one case where the Leftists are right. The US could learn from the rest of the world.
Oh, and of course we require ID, although this year you could also use a passport of driver’s license i na ddtion to the national ID card.
Man! Are you naive or what? We have case after case of election fraud in this country – all to the benefit of democrats. The GOP REFUSES to protest. I’m not sure we ever have a democratic system in place any longer. If anything I believe we are already a Banana Republic with those fake elections. People BELIEVE they are voting – but the outcome is already pre-determined.
So……game over! PERIOD!
Long line election day, Rio Rancho New Mexico, strangely happening in a district that favored the ‘R’ in the election -
http://www.abqjournal.com/main/2012/11/07/news/long-lines-delay-vote-counting.html
http://www.krqe.com/dpp/news/politics/rio-rancho-voter-lines-draw-governors-ire
http://www.rrobserver.com/news/local/article_4f02fa72-2abf-11e2-9d7b-0019bb2963f4.html
“Forty-eight of the county’s 86 precincts are in Rio Rancho, but that city had only five voting locations on Election Day for a population of more than 89,000 residents. By comparison, the town of Bernalillo had the same number of polling sites with 10 times fewer residents than Rio Rancho.”
Nothing to see here, move along.
Mr. Adams, how is early voting Constitutional? Doesn’t the constitution say votign shall take place on the same day thoroughout the United States? Or are they “deemed to take place on election Day”? (And so if the person dies in between, the vote should be thrown out?)
The Constitution is silent. Voting dates are set by a statute.
That same day voting refers to members of the Electoral College.
Joshua the Scholar, you should change your name to Josh the Propaganda and Socialist Misinformation troll. Democrats engage in voter fraud, and then court cases to keep Republicans from prosecuting it…
Until every voter is registered, provides photo ID and votes during the same hours on the same day, and no absentee ballots, NOONE can tell me that the vote has not been fixed. What the hell do you think those arch-criminals, the Clintons, were up to?
I’m really suspicious of these new computer voting things. They say, “You have voted successfully!”
But, for whom?
They don’t tell us. We must just trust government.
I’ll trust Smith and Wesson, first.
There is no accountability any more. That you ever served for this rogue agency, and still buy into most of their retarded, distracting arguments is very disturbing.
We now live in Stalin’s Russia. You are just too stupid to know it.
Wake up, and smell the coffee. You enabled this crap the whole time you were there, you dolt!
I believe you are correct with regards to the machines. I believe we now have the illusion of voting, but he who controls the machine determines who wins.
Affirmative action
More early voting so Democrats can vote as early and often as they want! (What left/liberals would like. It’s the Chicago way!)
I’ve lost faith in the intregrity of our voting system. I’m for a libertarian president to enact some common sense laws regarding Voting in our elections.Also concerned about “The Department of Justice” not holding acountable the Black Panthers that intimidated voters a few years ago! No motor voting, no early voting (except for military), enforce Photo ID before your’re allowed to vote.
Some kind of checks should be used before verifying vote totals. Cross-checks should be used to verify that no one voted two or more times in the same state. There are ways computers could check voters six ways to Sunday. Why aren’t Americans concerned with “cleaning up” our voter rolls and this nasty, ugly process we keep pretending is “fair”?
It looks a lot like Obama just po’d his own press corpse … I wonder if any one of those thrill seekers has the guts to call out the administration – and especially Obama – for lying with intent to deceive. We need the media; especially when our congressmen are 97% Fraidy Kat and 3% Elmer Fudd.
What takes longer, voting for President or:
1) getting a drivers license
2) getting a passport
3) getting a concealed carry permit
4) doing anything else that the corrupt and incompetent government does?
I drove around on election day — no wait anywhere. I asked the AFL-CIO goons at several places. Nope, they said cheerfully, not having gotten the memo to bewail long lines, horrific voter suppression, etc.
On the news that night, all the reporters could talk about were the waits, the long lines.
We have ceased to reside in a reality related world. Pure, seething hatred at Republicans is the only thing in the snack machines. So when we go into discussions about illegal immigration, remember the allegations of voter suppression in Florida: this is the way they will treat you when Repubs demand anything at all in tandem with mass amnesty: the only story reported will be a story about Republican racism.
And when Marco Rubio and his cheering squads at the Nat Review, RedState, etc. gear up to slap down anyone who doesn’t give away the farm fast enough, don’t be surprised by that, either. Unreality lives on this side, too.
Only the democrats can get away with accusing the Republicans of voter fraud in an election that the Republicans lost. Amazing!
The Democrats were shrieking “foul” before the election even began and called in foreign observers and UN election monitors in places. Rather than find the things the Dems were lying about, they found instead one of the shoddiest election systems in the world. Even places like Iraq required photo ID to vote and people dipped their fingers in ink so they couldn’t vote again. Here the system was so insane they wonder how it worked at all and weren’t surprised about corruption.
But that is why the Democrats will NEVER allow real reform: they need corrupt elections. How else could Obama have gotten over 100% of the vote in a number of precincts and in others more votes were cast than there were registered voters, or even residents of the area? But are the FBI and Justice Department out there looking into this? No. They are frantically scouring the country for mere rumors of some Republican delaying a Democrat voter for even a second to drop the hammer on them.
The Democrats have total control over most of the actual voting process and they won’t let that go.
Could you please post the names of the precincts where Obama “got over 100 percent of the vote” and where “more votes were cast than there were registered voters?” Nobody has yet been able to identify where these places are. And St. Lucie County is NOT one of them. Again, please post, because I doubt they exist.
I guess the poll worker that proudly stated she voted twice for obama and may have voted as many as 6 times, according to officials investigating the CRIME, is perfectly okay with you?
Yes, so “perfectly ok”, I’ve been blogging about it critically for 2 weeks:
http://electionlawcenter.com/2013/02/08/accused-voter-fraudster-on-camera-i-voted-twice.aspx
My request is a simple one: NAME the precincts where more people voted than were registered, or where more than 100 percent voted for Obama. If they exist, I will write about it non stop. All I want are the names.
Here you go.
http://www.punditpress.com/2012/11/good-news-obama-won-county-in-ohio-with.html
Here is a more comprehensive list.
http://www.wnd.com/2012/11/the-big-list-of-vote-fraud-reports/
The Pundit Press article does NOT say that Obama won Wood county by getting 108 percent of the total number of registered voters. THAT would be a significant story, but it didn’t happen. All it says is that Obama won Wood County, a county with actually 105 percent of CVAP registered to vote. The fact that Obama won it doesn’t have much weight. Had Obama won it with 105 percent of registered voters, THAT would be a story. Instead, it is a meow story. The fact Wood has REG/CVAP over 100 percent is why Judicial Watch is suing Ohio, a lawsuit I am involved in and a lawsuit the Secretary of State seems to have little interest in settling.
The WND story does not contain a SINGLE instance of more votes being cast in any county than registered voters in a county. The lone example to the contrary – St. Lucie County FL – is plainly in error in the WND story. I am litigating a case against St. Lucie County regarding the Allen West race and the statement in the WND article in plainly incorrect.
Again, I renew my challenge – name ONE COUNTY that had more votes cast than registered voters.
And that is why I rarely bother debating Obamabots anymore: they are totally immune fact and reason. Show them all the evidence there is about vote fraud for their Superman and they will deny it fervently. Deny all you want but it happened, these instances and the ones in Mr. Adams’ book.
Mr. president, here’s an idea for you. Have your unemployed acorn workers team up with the new black panthers and send them out with prefilled out ballots. The nbp is there to insure the voter signs the ballot envelope and doesn’t give the ex-acorn worker any trouble. Problem solved. 100% election results, 100% for your party. Just like joe biteme said, they’re gona’ put y’all in chains. Problem is, he meant those of us who dare to vote against the emperor/divider in chief/obi-i-won.
Waits in northern Richland County, South Carolina were 5-6 hours on election day,
and a lot of people gave up. We had an incompetent person running the elections (new to the job) who reduced the amount of voting machines from the previous presidential election by 1/4. Of course there was an investigation, but she was not called to account. She got her previous job back as head of voter registration with a 12% increase in pay over what she had previously earned in that job.
And she was fired by local officials. Don’t expect the problem will repeat.
She wasn’t fired. She got her old job back with a new title (deputy director of voter registration) and a 12-percent pay raise ($74,000) over what she earned in that role before. See http://www.midlandsbiz.com/news/headlines/2664/
This is the key, the central issue. The fact that the issue rots, for years, is a clear sign that our society does not trust our leaders, e.g. President, to solve real problems.
Americans can accept that election officials, both Dems and Repubs, are incompetent; incompetent people exist in every aspect of life. What can not be condoned is that it is institutionalized. In (No.4) Don 51′s third link, the election clerk stated, “….long lines on Election Day, it always happens and it will continue to happen,….I don’t care how easy you make it for people; there will always be long lines.” Her boss should have a statistical analysis of the history of wait times. If they are chronically excessive, she, and/or he(she), should be fixed, or fired.
What we can not accept are crooks running our elections. I see no reason why we war against those who seek our national destruction by killing them in battle, while we tolerate those who corrupt our basic way of continuing our democracy. Any intentional cheating in the election process should bring the hammer down hard. The obvious ways are permitting ineligible people to vote, hacking the electronics, or preventing eligible voters access to the ballot. This is not a complex process; banks do this every day when people vote with their money. There is no excuse why this issue dogs our nation.
Federalize election, federalize control, federalize vote machines, federalize vote count.
“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes”.
“Democracy is like a street car; you ride it as far as you need, and then you get off”. Someone wants to get off.
59 of the most contested counties did not tally one single Romney vote. If that isn’t voter fraud, nothing is. Do we really need to Nationalize the fraud.
J. Christian Adams said:
“And she was fired by local officials. Don’t expect the problem will repeat.”
You mean the problem the Dems swear up and down doesn’t exist?
You’re blowing smoke up our collective backsides JC.
No wonder there are long lines. That woman in Ohio voted six times… that’s gotta slow things down since she was a poll worker!
I stood on one of those long lines and ended up voting by affidavit. It was so long because the election officials weren’t allowing the line to move so that they could tell everyone that if you voted for Obama you had to vote straight Democrat for all the other electoral positions or else the machine would spit out your vote. It was basically to screw the Working Families Party candidates and it was a joy to behold. 6 voting machines in a row formy voting district and only one being used sporadically.
I do have to hand it to these thieves they create problems via corruption and “solve” it through more corruption. They will force us to hang them and we might as well get the job done now!
Long lines occurred in Florida because the ballot was unusually long. Rather than the more typical one side of one card, it was 2 sides on 2 cards, with lots of fine-print constitutional amendment proposals written in shei ster double-talk (and that was only the court-approved summaries) I wish they’d issue booklets with the full text, though I’m not a fan of California’s phony filtered pro & con which distort the issues and leave out important concerns. In Florida they issue a court-approved booklet of summaries available at the Dept. of State Division of Elections, at the county elections offices, and 3-4 copies at each polling place.
At our precinct, we looked at the clock and the morning rush lasted maybe an hour (from the massive influx of people entering the building, waiting in line to be vetted and sign in and get a ballot, waiting in line for a privacy booth, scanning the cards and the crowd cleared out), but people in the precinct have later sworn to me that they waited in line for over an hour. We did get additional privacy booths, and a couple privacy shields so that people could mark their ballots while sitting at a table, but that was after the initial swarm was through.
There were a couple counties where it was worse (St. Lucie comes to mind, where 4 hour lines were reported). I can see how they might not have had the extra privacy booths on hand to be more flexible, might have under-estimated the expected turn-out, etc.
The total hours of “early voting” were not changed in Florida, according to what I read in the local pet-cage-liner; it stayed at 96 hours, as I recall. What changed was how many days those 96 hours were in 8 days of 12 hours instead of 12 days of 8 hours, which, to me, would suggest they were open earlier or later in the day. I’d expect that to be more convenient for most citizens. I have, a time or two in the past, since I was going to be within a few blocks, gone to the court-house for early-voting, and found a long line stretching out the door and around the building. But it was a temporary back-up caused by a malfunction which was quickly cleared.
I also get the strong impression that it’s totally political posturing rather than anything of substance.
If Republicans didn’t succeed in keeping the wrong sort of people from voting, it wasn’t from lack of trying. I’m amused by the way that you tried to reinstate Jim Crow before the election and now act innocent about your transparent intentions. You are cynics without the strength of character to admit your own cynicism to yourselves.
You’re the guys who go around telling each other that this is a republic not a democracy and that Democratic presidents aren’t legitimate because they are elected by the votes of the urban masses. I guess you have to believe, against all the evidence, that voter fraud is rampant in the country since to doubt that article of faith would require you to recognize your own fundamental hostility to democracy.
never thought about it, how extending the voting period makes it easier to marshal forces to get more people out to vote, and we already have the stories of low information voters telling us they voted more than once and see nothing wrong about it.