Same-day voter registration would go national under Ellison bill

Given what Minnesotans have experienced in the last election, how can Ellison have the gall to sponsor such legislation. With the justified attacks on ACORN, this appears to be a liberal backup plan, in case ACORN goes down, to wreck the voting systems across the country.

Gall? The contested ballots we were waiting around for so long in Franken/Coleman were mostly absentee ballots, not day-of ballots like the ones that’d be affected by Ellison’s proposal.

Paul is right that the issues in the senate race were with absentees. Every case I heard of where voter fraud might actually have happened entailed absentee ballots, and even then it was parties mysterious producing ballots, not individual voters.

Moreover, the people ragging on ACORN forget that their registrations were pre-registrations, not at the polls, which would seem to support Ritchie’s point that registration at the polls involves seeing the registering person, not just a card. Above all, the opponents of election day registration can’t show any evidence of fraud, just their suspicion of ACORN. That’s not proof of anything.

Show actual fraud made possible by election day registration, and maybe you’ll have a point. Until then, you’ll keep getting asked the question, if there’s so much fraud, why can’t you find any?

Not a single ACORN staffer has ever been arrested for their work activities or has been found guilty of any crime.

I see the first two commenters obviously did a cut-and-paste from FOX News here. ACORN is the right wing’s favorite whipping boy. Of course, Ellison’s bill has absolutely nothing to do with ACORN anyway. But the desperate and frustrated GOP has arrived at the conclusion that “if you can’t win an election, you can rig the next one” and so they are on a mission to mislead the public about the outcome of McCain/Palin’s colossal defeat last year.

Your party didn’t lose because of voter registration practices. They lost because they are the party of no ideas.

[...] Minnesota Independent reports that Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) has introduced a bill that would allow Election Day registration for federal elections across the country. The Same Day Registration Act would let people register [...]

The Constitution give the federal government no role in telling states how to handle their voter registration. This is no business of the federal government, much like most of what Washington does is no business of the federal government.

Well just have congress pass a law that mandates voting. Just like the healthcare bill. That will fix the problem won’t it?

Dennis: Check out this CalTech/MIT study on same-day voter registration. http://www.vote.caltech.edu/drupal/files/working_paper/vtp_wp5.pdf

Of note:

“[I]n the six states that currently use election day registration, there is not an unusually high number of cases of voting fraud. In particular, we have interviewed local election officials in Minnesota and Wisconsin, especially in Minneapolis-St. Paul and Milwaukee areas, and have found only a handful of cases of fraud involving a very small number of votes over the last decade. This in our opinion is due not to the unique political cultures of these six states, but instead to the fact that these states have made substantial investments in minimizing the risks associated with election day registration.”

Via the Washington Independent: http://washingtonindependent.com/65719/ellison-introduces-national-same-day-voter-registration-bill

More Fraud, Waste and Corruption at it’s finest, via Acorn, Obama & his Czars and the Democrates in charge. Can’t wait until the 2010/2012 elections to clean them all out of Washington and take back our Country.

Half the people on here are idiots that obviously do not live in the wonderful state of Minnesota, or if they do – probably would vote for a lunatic like Michelle Bachman! I have been an election judge several times and it is a great experience! We take our jobs very seriously, and same day registration is great. I think putting restrictions on it, making people register months in advance, etc. is treating it more like a priveledge than a RIGHT! I’ve been waiting for Ellison to introduce this bill for a long time and so glad he did! And yes, I think the gov. that righties seem to hate so much, only when they disagreee with it of course, has a right to pass a law about FEDERAL elections. Notice, it did not say anything about local elections.

Why dont people register now? Theyve got over a year to register for next years election! Why on earth would anyone wait until the day of the election to register if they really want to have their voice heard? The only people that would do that are mostly those who would be open to corruption and bogus last minute promises.

And all of you ACORN supporters out there….ACORN got what it deserved…defunded and out of the lives of Americans who want corruption out of the election process. Americans also dont like tax payer supported orgs. endorsing prostitution!…. but hey, I guess theyre just out of touch, and need to git wit da program!

The point of having a cutoff date for registration is so that the states can prepare for the election. Same day registration is like having a wedding announcement in the paper and not knowing how many guests will come.

Same-day registration needs to have provisional ballots cast. The ballots should not be counted until the people are verified as being valid voters.

Also, government-issued photo ID would need to be required.

…Isnt Ellison a muslim? Just curious!… does anyone see a pattern here? Am I guilty of profiling? OMG!

I hope not!…not like Obama’s Homeland Security Czar Janet Napolitano did by inferring that if you are a member of an active conservative group that opposes abortion, favors strict immigration enforcement, lobbies to protect Second Amendment rights, protests big government, advocates federalism, or represents veterans who believe in any of the above that youre a “Right Winged Extremeist”

I wouldnt want to do that!

Maine has same day registration, and there are cases of people voting in 3 or 4 towns or coming back to Maine to vote in highly controversial elections like gay rights after they have been away for years. The scary thing about this, how many illegal and legal aliens will vote after this. With tepid support of Obama after the election, I sometimes think that that is how he got elected – 12 million illegals in this country and God knows how many legal aliens voting. Watch them try to pass immigration reform next year – and grant the vote to “guest workers”. Then watch us get inundated from Canada and Mexico every November. Same day registration and you have legally stuffed the ballot box. The destruction of Athenian Democracy with a Despot took place when they broadened the sovereign franchise (vote) from landowners over 30 years of age to everybody. Within in a few years the rabble elected demagogues who became despots that drove Athens to ruin and ultimately servitude under Macedon. The franchise should be restricted as much as possible but we will never learn.

There are those who will take issue with restricting voting – but everybody believes in some restriction – 18 is a restriction. Frankly, I don’t see where a middle class 14 year old who is an honor student is less qualified to vote than a senile person whose hand is moved by the volunteer for the democratic candidate ( I have witnessed this in Nursing Homes)or the homeless guy who is 40 and has a mental illness or a 25 year old with Down Syndrome. At one time, if you took welfare, you took a paupers oath that you would not vote in the election. I am not saying I condone any of these things, I just want to point out, the Republic was better off before we became a warm-bodied democracy. Look at the last election, people voting for Obama saying that Obama would pay their rent and make their car payments. My God, a person that stupid should not be allowed to vote.

Jennifer: idiots?… who voted in Jesse Ventura and Al Franken? Enough said.

You cannot say that the only problems were with absentee ballots. A neighbor went in to vote before work and someone had already voted for him. Someone had forged his name and stolen his vote! Without a photo ID there was no way that the judges knew who that person was. Now you can count all of the voters that voted on election day that have been counted as a fraudulent vote. Those that voted in the wrong precinct, those that voted even though they were not a citizen, those that voted in multiple places, those that voted even though they lived in another state. Thank God we have same day registration so that we can’t find this out until after the election has passed. We don’t want anyone’s vote not to count, over and over and over again.

Obviously, the supporters of this travesty do not live in a state overrun by illegals, most of whom sport stolen identies up the ying-yang. In CA and the southwest states, it would be a disaster.

Hey, at least SOMEBODY still likes ACORN enough to give ‘em another shot at not getting caught the next time… !

Jennifer, it gives me so much more confidence in your objectivity as an election volunteer, to see you white wash conservatives as ‘righties’ and calling Rep. Bachmann a lunatic. Let’s see, wasn’t it an ACORN worker who came up with 500 ballots for Frankenstein AFTER the vote recount started?? (oh, I nearly forgot…he found them in the trunk of his car, and of course they were ‘all legit’..you just can’t make this stuff up!!!nobody would BELIEVE YOU!!). Ms. Bachmann is truly a breath of fresh air, and all I can say is ‘God forgive Minnesotans for ‘electing’ Frankenstein to a seat in Washington, on the public dole, a job he can finally retire with, and of course he now has the last laugh…how very sick.
And you think ‘righties’ are wrong and lefties are RIGHT??? Give me a Franken break!!! (but I would turn it down..I do have my self respect..)

On the matter of same day reg. I don’t particularly have an issue with it, but with people like partisan Ritchie and Jennifer in charge of handling the votes, I DO have issues with that!

I agree with Joel. What we should strive for isn’t the quantity of voters but quality. If someone disagrees with me politically but has an opinion that is thought out and considered fine. Unfortunately a great many of the voters brought to the polls by a ACORN bus and the promise of a few bucks probably couldn’t identify even one policy stand of Obama. They just knew he was tall, slender, and black and that was good enough for them.

Jason: Thirty-two — not 500 — ballots were said to be an election director’s car trunk, however the story is totally false. The ballots were never in the woman’s car. And ACORN wasn’t involved at all.

PS, in case you did not find my comment on Facebook,I had NOT dismissed the MIT report, I had ignored it. NOW that I have read it, I DISMISS IT!

Regarding voting fraud, “In particular, we have interviewed local election officials in Minnesota and Wisconsin, especially in Minneapolis-St. Paul and Milwaukee areas, and have found only a handful of cases of fraud involving a very small number of votes over the last decade.” Following to the footnotes, I found that only THREE Minnesota election officials were interviewed. This “evidence” does not even BEGIN to justify the statement in the report.

The report DOES go on to state measures that can be taken to reduce the possibility of fraud. For example, “Simply by requiring that those who are registering on election day provide some form of valid identification is one important safeguard.” The report fails to reveal that, in Minnesota, at least, NONE of these measures are employed!

As it exists in Minnesota, EDR is a joke that allows groups like ACORN to place a clown into a very important office.

Yep. I saw your FB comment.

The MIT study is Bullcrap – it is from 2002 and it doesn’t take the voting rolls from after the election and compare them to actual voter’s claimed home addresses. In Wisconsin they are having issues after election having to clear the voting rolls of people who voted that are not real Wisconsin voters – they call them travelling voters – especially from Illinois.. If MIT wants to do a real study take the damn voting rolls including absentees and find out how many of those people that voted actually exist in the place they claimed to live. THIS HAS VOTER FRAUD EXPANSION ALL OVER IT!!!!