panic on the streets of kansas city

Yoshitsune has a quite disturbing tale of heading down to the voting booth for the Missouri primary yesterday. it's well worth reading in its entirety regardless of your voting orientation. here's a small excerpt:

"Apparently there are groups out there who buy copies of the voter registration rolls, then send in new registrations for registered voters giving them a new address. It's really a more sophisticated version of the whole thing with the felony lists in Florida in the last election - however, people aren't being REMOVED from the voting rolls, and hence there's no red flag being raised. After all, people DO move and send in change of address, so there's no reason for them to suspect voter fraud. And there's really no way to trace this, so there's really no way to detect this. But in effect what it means is voters are removed from the rolls - after all, if you're unknowingly registered in another precinct, how can you vote at yours? I was lucky...I have the job flexibility and transportation to go down to the election board and find out the problems, but I'm betting a lot of the other people with the same problems don't. And there are a lot - at my precinct, during the period we were at the polls, which was pretty slow, there were only about five or six people in and out, including us. And of those, me and one other guy found ourselves off the rolls, and one woman said she'd had the same thing happen to her during the 2000 presidential election and had to spend the entire day down at the election board."

the right to vote is not and should not be a partisan issue. it's disheartening that the debate on this entry devolved into such, because the people who made it into that argument are possibly deflecting and/or missed the entire point, which is that such tampering is wrong, scary, and should be exposed for what it is and dealt with accordingly. voting rights and responsibilities should have NOTHING to do with political orientation, and such tampering is absolutely intolerable and inexcusable.