| cross posted at Raven's Blog
At a state senate hearing Friday about the Franken/Coleman recount, Dick Day marvelously expressed the conservative view that disenfranchising some voters is OK. It explains how they could see it as election theft to count absentee votes that were wrongly rejected. That's the breaks, too bad. Day was talking specifically about the standard for hand recounts of going by the intent of the voter. Had the machine decided of course, and wrongly rejected ballots not been counted, Coleman would have won. It's self-serving of them of course, but also their attitude that voting is a privilege, not a right, so if you don't get to vote, so what? If you can stop likely Democrats from voting, isn't that just the game?
The money moment from Day: |
| "If the stupidity is such, that there's Y's and arrows and X's, and whatever, why isn't it that we can put it in a machine, and if the machine can't read what somebody is trying to vote for, I personally don't care if they're disenfranchised or not and most of the people that I talk to don't really care because if you're educated and you can't fill an oval in, ... would it better if the machine can't read it, that's it. We just don't sit around and spend, and go through five or ten thousand ballots that somebody might wanted vote for somebody...I don't know. That seems to me just a huge waste of time, so explain to me why I'm wrong here on that."
The Uptake has the video. Senate district 26 has the embarrassment. Mark Ritchie had the answer:
"Madame Chair, Senator Day, the founders of our nation and the writers of the Minnesota Constitution did not require that the citizens only be able to vote if they can comply with the demands of the machine manufacturers. My grandmother, sharp as a tack until the day she died, shook. She could not fill in a circle. So, if the proposal is that if you can't comply with the conditions of the manufacturer of machines, wonderful machines that give us great accuracy and great, very timely results in most respects, then you don't get to vote, then that's a dramatic change from the founders of the nation and the writers of the Minnesota Constitution. It is a proposal that I've heard from many people who've been disparaging --- if you cannot fill in a circle, that breaks my heart when I think about my grandmother, and that somebody's saying she should not be allowed to vote because the machine manufactured by a company in Taiwan cannot read her vote."
Brilliant response. Maybe not the bit about Taiwan, but he personalized a core argument for the intent of the voter standard, that not everybody can mark the ballot properly, but that doesn't mean they're stupid or unfit to vote. Certainly it would be better if people with physical difficulties marking a ballot would exercise their right to ask election judges for help, but legally they don't have to, they may not know they have that right, and I can understand some people being to proud to admit they can't mark a ballot themselves. That shouldn't negate their vote. Maybe if they voted Republican then conservatives would care about protecting their right to vote, but maybe they vote Democratic because they know which party defends them and which tries to make voting harder. If anyone is in doubt, watch the video.
On a tangential note, Day's figure of five or ten thousand ballots, if that's the number the machines couldn't read, is pretty low out of 2.9 million ballots. Of course, Republicans keep telling their base that a switch of 440 ballots in a recount of 2.9 million is statistically impossible, so maybe numbers just aren't their thing.
In that same clip, Ritchie answered the question of why missing ballots get counted using the machine tally. That question was about the missing packet from one precinct in Minneapolis (if it was missing from an Republican-leaning precinct, would there still have been a controversy? I doubt it). Ballots have been missing in prior recounts, and the precedent has been that the election day tally is used if it's proven the ballots had existed. In this case, the precinct had more voters than votes, equal in number to the missing ballots, so the ballots definitely were cast on election day. |
