I just voted in the provincial election here in Ontario. I used a pencil to mark an X on a piece of paper, which I then deposited in a cardboard box. Election results for the province were announced soon after the polls closed at 9 p.m., and the winning premier (the equivalent of your state governors) gave his victory speech before I went to bed. . . . Mary E. Campbell, Ottawa, Oct. 13, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The confused conundrum of voting in the United States. I’ve been trying to sort it out for ages.
There are fifty different ways of determining who is eligible to vote. State by state by state–all fifty of them.
There is also a rabidly radical faction which does not want voters to vote in the United States:
Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome — good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won [by Republicans] by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our [Republican] leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down. . . . Paul Weyrich
http://www.crooksandliars.com/...
There is also the difficulty of voting–in the United States. Voters have to vote on a weekday, a workday. They may have to stand in line for hours in order to vote, missing valuable work time. There may not be enough voting machines for voters to vote, especially in predominantly Democratic precincts.
There may be ways of threatening voters so they don’t vote: intimidating, insidious phone calls, goons at the voting places, playing shell games with voting locations, just to name a few.
It is an absolute nightmare in this country to make it easy for voters to vote. We are in the dark ages, compared to other advanced nations, as far as voting rights go.
Other nations may choose to vote on Sundays, largely a non-working day. They may make voting day a holiday. They may make it so easy to become a voter that it is impossible not to vote.
In America we are bombarded with hysterics about "voter fraud." There is a very carefully organized campaign to discredit ACORN, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, especially because the concerns of ACORN are diametrically opposed to predominant Republican interests--social justice and stronger communities for low- and moderate-income families. Blasphemy!
Oh, and ACORN actively campaigns to register new voters and has been involved in ensuring that persons displaced from New Orleans and elsewhere because of Katrina retain their voting rights–which might dash Republican hopes of turning New Orleans and Louisiana into another Republican voting enclave. To be sure, ACORN has been accused of fraulently registering voters and, in a few cases, these accusations have been justified. However, these few cases do not justify discrediting the entire organization of ACORN.
One wonders why it is so important to persecute ACORN when we turn a blind eye on who it was precisely who engineered the tortures and inhumane excesses of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Alas, the right to vote and ensuring the right to vote is only a part of the puzzle. There are the additional problems of campaign finance and election fraud and the election process itself, hopefully discussed elsewhere on this site.
If I do not find discussion of these accusations against ACORN on this site, I will attempt to post links to the pros and cons of these accusations.