There are federal observers today at polling places in Springfield and Boston:
Federal observers will monitor polling places in Boston and Springfield Tuesday. They want to know if those cities are protecting the voting rights of immigrants, including Hispanics, Chinese and Vietnamese.
Both cities were sued by the Justice Department for alleged polling place violations and the sides settled their cases before trial.
In a sense, you’ll see a reason to vote for John Bonifaz for Sec. of State at these places. We shouldn’t be getting sued by the Feds to comply with election law. What are we, some banana republic that needs Jimmy Carter to fly in and oversee our elections? Guess so.
See also Cos’s post on Bill Galvin considering Diebold’s voting machines, which I gather are suitable for hot-rodding by ambitious folks. (Cos is the Bonifaz campaign’s in-house blogger.)
See also a post I made before I joined the Bonifaz campaign (though I was already volunteering), A Pattern of Voting Rights Violations in Massachusetts.
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I believe that there are 16 cities in the US that are under federal election monitoring this year, and 2 of them are in Massachusetts. We’re 12.5% of the national total. yay? (no GIR, that’s bad)
David made an interesting point to that previous post: that the investigations in Massachusetts could be politically motivated by the Bush DoJ seeking ammunition to counter the next cry of voting problems in Florida or Ohio.
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It is hard to get exercised about the mere existence of federal observers from an executive branch that is willing to politicize anything.
We’ve had real problems. Check the post I linked to.