And So It Goes

The Rhode Island Board of Elections has announced that it will open only 144 of Rhode Island’s available 419 polling locations for the upcoming April 26 presidential primary. Officials are reducing the number of sites by two-thirds in an effort to cut costs, according to WPRI.

[...]

The executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island John Marion had an alarmingly nervous way of expressing his support for this move, saying he was “cautiously optimistic” that the primaries would go smoothly.

Marion said he was mostly concerned that many voters don’t even know these cuts are happening. “I don’t think enough has been done to make sure voters know that they likely won’t be casting their ballot at the same location as they did in November of 2014,” he said.

Many are especially concerned with Cumberland, RI, which normally has thirteen polling locations in a general election. Next week it will only have three.

  US Uncut

[T]he number of voters purged equals about half of the number who got to vote. Scott Stringer, the New York City Comptroller will now audit the Elections Board--now that the election is over.

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But whether party hacks shoplifted New York or not, that’s small potatoes. Scrubbing voter rolls is not a “New York value.” It’s a nationwide epidemic, a disease eating away at the heart of our democracy.

Voting officials learned a lesson from Katherine Harris the Florida Secretary of State who purged Black voters in 2000. They learned how to repeat the purge, expand it and carefully hide it.

I’ve been traveling the nation, from Ohio to Georgia to Arizona and back—and finding the voter-roll purging machinery running at full speed.

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US Civil Rights Commission statistics tell the story. The chance of a ballot “spoiled” – not counted for one reason or another – is 900% higher if you’re Black than if you’re White.

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OK, we didn’t know about the New York purge beforehand. But I’m telling you this now: My team is uncovering an unjustified ethnic cleansing of voter rolls from Ohio to Florida to Texas.

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As I look upon the wreckage that was the New York primary, I see the prelude, the test run, for the catastrophic failure, the well-planned failure, of the voting system in November.

  Greg Palast - author of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" - to be made into a film

Why do you need to vote anyway?