If you were looking for a fresh reminder as to why Vote-by-Mail is a terrible idea, why provisional ballots are not the same as actually casting a vote, and why there needs to be more accountability for and oversight of election officials, today’s BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio should fit the bill.
In short, we cover the election contest now pending in the race for City Council (Seat 1) in the San Diego County city of Chula Vista, CA. The certified results from the November 2014 election show a 2-vote margin between the John McCann (R) and Steve Padilla (D) in a race with some 37,000 ballots cast. McCann has been certified as the “winner”.
Trouble is, according to the lawsuit [PDF], at least 15 mail-in and provisional ballots were rejected, even though the signatures on them matched the signatures from the voters’ registrations on file. That, argues attorney John S. Moot (my guest this week, and a former Chula Vista City Council Member himself), is in violation of the law.
The other trouble is, those ballots were rejected by San Diego County Registrar Michael Vu, who was the infamous Election Director of Cuyahoga County, Ohio’s most populist (and most Democratic) county during the 2004 Presidential election, when two of his immediate subordinates were indicted and found guilty of rigging the Presidential “recount” in Cuyahoga. Yes, if you didn’t know or don’t remember, there was a partial “recount” of that election, across the entire Buckeye State, as requested by the Green and Libertarian Parties. And, yes, it was found to have been rigged in a court of law.
Vu, who was protected at the time by the Republicans who ran the Cuyahoga Election Board, was never charged and was happily hired not long thereafter by San Diego County, where elections have been little more than a joke for many years, even before Vu got there.
For the full story on this, listen to this week’s show and Moot’s commentary on the suit he’s filed on behalf of his client, a long-time poll worker and voter from Chula Vista.
ALSO on this week’s program: Accountability, finally, for an election official elsewhere (in St. Louis County, MO), and the fake “voter fraud” activist set to testify at AG-nominee Loretta Lynch’s very real U.S. Senate nomination proceedings. Plus, as usual, much more, including Desi Doyen with the latest Green News Report.
Enjoy!…
Download MP3 here or listen online below…
[audio:http://bradblog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman_JohnSMoot_ChulaVistaContest_012815.mp3]
Moot is a humorous name for a lawyer.
If all other means of voting don’t meet your standard, then a longer voting period needs to be in place. Have only part of one day to vote makes it a problem, especially with GOP slowdown methods at work. Few people are allowed to vote on company time by their employers (as mine does), so the ability to place a vote at a convenient and properly-staffed polling place must be facilitated by any and all possible means. This might even mean paying real wages for poll workers.
Dredd –
That’s debatable.
John Moot was the name of one of the best people I’ve ever known. He was a community activist in My Fair City and the sort of person who used to populate the Republican Party. One person’s remembrance of him can be read at http://cambridge.wickedlocal.com/article/20081226/NEWS/312269888/0/SEARCH. If this John Moot is an eighth of the person my late friend was, his client is a lucky person.
Blurkel said @ 2:
First, what say we do away with the illegal “GOP slowdown methods” first? Next, how about we move Election Day to Wednesday (so people are less inclined to just make a long weekend of it and go out of town) and make it a holiday, so that it’s much easier for folks to vote?
As to “all other means of voting” not meeting my standard, if one must vote via absentee — because they are gone on Election Day or can’t make it for some other reason — that’s fine. But it does decrease the odds of your vote being counted and counted accurately. So the push towards all Vote-by-Mail elections seems insane to me. But I’m interested in votes accurately counting, and being counted in a way that we can all know they’ve been counted accurately, as opposed to simply increasing voter turnout for political reasons, as tends to be the impetus for all VBM elections.
Completely concur.
Sounds good to me. Hey, here’s an idea: Instead of paying millions of tax-payer dollars to private e-voting and e-counting machine vendors every election, how about we give that money to poll workers and hand-marked paper ballot counters instead? Just a thought. 🙂