Pinkø Plinko

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While protests have been popping up around the country, Join the Impact has been coordinating a simultaneous nationwide protest for Saturday, November 15th.

We had 100,000 for Obama under the Arch…I while I realize that this is a down-ticket issue in California–it’s still quite relevant even here (Missouri banned same-sex marriages in 2004) and I have a lot of hope that we can get organized and make this BIG!

Maybe not 100,000 big, but we can still be optimistic as long as we’re spreading the word!

Details at:

SHOWMENOHATE.BLOGSPOT.COM

Article 7, Section 6 of the Missouri Constitution states:

Any public officer or employee in this state who by virtue of his office or employment names or appoints to public office or employment any relative within the fourth degree, by consanguinity or affinity, shall thereby forfeit his office or employment.

Well, that part of the constitution has been invoked in Holden, Missouri. You can read some about that story here.

It seems that the question is now “can someone forfeit his office, and then return to fill his term?”. Obviously constitution-invoking nepotism occured (Missouri is fairly strict about this, which is why Funkhouser’s wife won’t be drawing a city salary anytime soon). And reading the Constitution doesn’t seem to say that one can’t return to fill their term after forfeiting their office (in the case of a county office, there’s an obvious check to stop that from occurring).

So, if a mayor forfeits his office, then wins it back. Is that constitutional, legal, or an unintended consequence of this situation?

A question for the night/morning.

Your nightly Presidential election margin

U.S. President And Vice President

Precincts Reporting 3533 of 3533

John McCain, Sarah Palin  REP 1,444,326  49.4%  

Barack Obama, Joe Biden  DEM 1,439,338  49.3%  

Bob Barr, Wayne A. Root  LIB 11,370  .4%  

Chuck Baldwin, Darrell Castle  CST 8,189  .3%  

Ralph Nader, Matt Gonzalez  IND 17,787  .6%  

Cynthia McKinney, Rosa Clemente  WI 859  .0%  

Total Votes   2,921,869

Doesn’t look like anything substansive today. Apparently 6300 provisionals are still out there. Kansas City provisionals will be counted Friday.

On the night before the election, I happened to be watching St. Louis’ KSDK evening news on TV (not my regular habit, I may add) when they ran this little doozie of a story,  the gist of which was that out of over a million registered voters, there are about 86 names in St. Louis and about 300 in St. Louis County that match Social Security’s Federal Death records. KSDK also claims to have found 56 cases where it is possible that someone may have voted in the primaries “from beyond the grave.”  They offered no details to substantiate this claim although they did cite a case where one man was caught–and convicted for–using his dead mother’s name to vote in the primary.

Given the total number of registered voters in the area, the number of matches with the federal death records is almost infinitesimally small (ca. 0.036%) and the reporters even admited that:

Of the 56 matches of people who may have voted from beyond the grave in the February primary, the I-Team could not say with 100% confidence there was more than one case.

Nevertheless, the reporters felt obliged to dress this story up with a heavy-handed overlay of sensationalism, implying, but never actually saying, that voter registration fraud is a serious problem, and that honest voters should be very worried.  Couple this with the traditional media’s uncritical response to claims that ACORN is a front for a voter registration fraud conspiracy (a welcome exception is the editorial stance of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch), and their relative silence on the topic of possible Republican efforts to suppress voting, and the effect is troubling.

So, what’s the solution?  In three words: universal voter registration.  UVR would go a long way toward putting all such manufactured controversies to rest–and make it easier for everyone to exercise their right to vote.  While voter registration fraud seems to be rare, contrary to KSDK’s breathless implications, it is true, as the FairVote Initiative notes in thier position paper on universal voter registration, that:

While no voter registration process is perfect, ours is riddled with flaws. The United States is one of only a few democracies in the world where the government does not take responsibility for registering voters.  Instead, our government leaves the construction of voter rolls up to partisan and non-partisan voter registration organizations, political parties, election officials and active citizens.

As FairVote notes, voter registration should be the “mutual responsibility of citizens and their government.”  To that end. FairVote makes the following policy recommendations:  

* Require that all residents applying for driver’s license or any other government issued identification card register to vote.

* Require all students in high school must register to vote as a graduation requirement (much like community service) or at the very least must receive a voter registration application.

* Provide each person born in the U.S and each naturalized citizen a voter ID number that can be used in all elections to vote.

If you are as troubled as I am by journalism like that practiced by the intrepid reporters of KSDK, you can contact them and let them know that you don’t appreciate their shoddy efforts to sensationalize serious issues (contact info can be found here).  If you would like to minimize the impact of claims of voter registration fraud before the Republicans make use of them in future elections, begin lobbying your congressperson now to implement universal voter registration.