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October 20, 2004

Vote free or die

More Republican "squelch out the vote" efforts are underway, this time in Pennsylvania:

A last-minute Republican effort to relocate 63 Philadelphia polling places has sparked outrage from Democrat John Kerry's presidential campaign, which says the choice of locations in heavily African American neighborhoods shows that the GOP wants to suppress black voter turnout.

But the Republicans said the real outrage is the state of the polling places they want to change - many of them in bars, homes or vacant buildings.

The challenges, filed late Friday, appear to have little chance of succeeding. Philadelphia voter-registration administrator Bob Lee said the late date of the Republicans' filing means that there is not sufficient time to post the proposed changes for the legally mandated five days before a hearing. Tomorrow is the last day that the city commissioners, who administer elections, can order a move.

Conventional wisdom states that Republican candidates do better when voter turnout is low...opposite for the Democrats. So the Republicans wait until two weeks before the election to attempt to change polling places in overwhelmingly Democratic districts.

The GOP excuse? Some of the polling places are in bars, homes or vacant buildings...and Democrats are entrenched in the districts. They want to "improve" the places where African Americans vote.

Interestingly they're not trying to move polling places from bars, homes and vacant buildings in heavily held GOP districts.

These Republicans are completely shameless. The values of fairness, equity and justice are nonexistent with this crowd. Voters must be allowed to exercise their basic right to vote in this country...and these voter supression efforts being perpetrated by the Republican Party (both on the local and national scale) are part of their continued betrayal of Americans and the US Constitution.

Posted by Carla at October 20, 2004 01:14 PM