With only one name on the Michigan Democratic Ballot you can get a real sense of how a candidate might do in a general election. With only 60% of Democrats favoring the one candidate you wonder what the other 40% and more were thinking. The uncommitted were probably those Yellow Dog Democrats who vote in every election regardless of candidate but who wanted to vote for another person. Also, in Michigan, it is to my understanding, Democrats can vote on the Republican ticket. So an unknown number of the Democrats voted for a Republican.
If we don't change the name our nominee for President; the Michigan results will probably apply to Oklahoma and Democrats will vote for the Republican nominee or an Independant candidate.
Lets get out there and change things!
BY MAIL
The deadline to apply for an absentee ballot to be mailed to you is always 5 p.m. on Wednesday preceding the election. [For the Okla. Presidential Primary, this would be Wednesday, January 30th.]
If your absentee ballot is mailed to you, you must return it to the county election board by mail. An absentee ballot must be received by the county election board before 7 p.m. on election day to be counted.
Voters may cast an absentee ballot in person at the county election board office from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Friday and Monday before all elections. For state and federal elections only, in-person absentee voting also is available from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday. In-person absentee voters must fill out and sign an application form when they arrive to vote.
For more information, contact:
Oklahoma State Election Board
Room B-6, State Capitol Building
PO Box 53156
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73152
(405) 521-2391
Tulsa County Election Board
555 North Denver Avenue
Tulsa, Oklahoma 74103
(918) 596-5780
http://www.tulsacounty.org/electionboard.asp
http://www.ok.gov/~elections/absentee.html
The scheduled event was merged with the Comanche County Democrat meeting. A number of Obama supporters were there and participated. John Kinslow, local attorney, gave a presentation on behalf of Obama. Bumper stickers were handed out and we answered a number of questions about where to get campaign stuff (store) and what activities were going on on a statewide basis.
i was born in west africa (lagos, nigeria) and basically raised in northern nigeria (zaria/ kano). as an infant, my parents went to malaysia so my dad (who is from barbados) could get his PhD (in lanaguage arts). my dera mom is nigerain and that is where my now deceased dad fouund her! my immediate younger sister was born in malaysia; my brother in lagos and my other younger sister in zaria. i got to know quite a bit os the muslim culture growing up in zaria. however political elements divided otherwise peace loving neighbors for personal gain (how selfish). i went on to college at the pre-eminent univeristy of ibadan and got my medical degree there. a lot of my class mates are the usa (brain drain) and most of my closer friends are actually psychiatrists (go figure). my most challenging times have been my dad passing away in '94 and a series of unfortunate events is recent times (which, thank God i am gradually and steadfastly overcoming).
i draw correlations to obamas multiethnic background and growing up in indonesia and hawaii. he also identifies with the minority class (just look at his beautiful wife Michelle) while still embodying the mainstream. his goal is real and that is to make race, religion and all the petty differences irrelevant in the progression and propulsion of America to unimaginable heights. i truly believe..........
Please join Oklahomans for Obama for Fired Up and Walking for Change! Go door to door with local Obama supporters and spread the good word about Barack Obama to local Democrats! Change can’t happen without you!
We will meet at:
Tulsa County Democratic Party Headquarters3930 East 31st StreetTulsa, OK 74135on Saturday, January 19, 2008 at 10 a.m.
For more information, email m2violin@hotmail.com or visit http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/4vqfj
going with hillary will be like making an ill advised U turn. Obama will head straight ahead without wavering. he will also bring people from the left and right together. however, he needs the green light from the American people. I have personally reached out to a few senators and governors. i also thanked Sen John Kerry for passing the democratic party mantle to Obama. the main thing is to get out of the inertia many of us were in.
I watched the interview this morning and what impressed me the most was the amount of times the words 'I, Me, Mine' were uttered by the candidate. This is one of the biggest reasons why I do not support Mrs. Clinton nor would I consider her as a second choice. (Being clear ,I do not expect to need a second choice.)
Mrs. Clinton is out of touch; she doesn't get the point that this is not about her or any other individual it is about the American people and OUR United States of America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq8aopATYyw&feature=related for Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMfUajhL24I&feature=related for part 2
http://checkthevotes.com/index.php?party=DEMOCRATS
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff01112008.html
For more information read the Antlantic free press
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/3220/81/
Could someone have messed with the vote in New Hampshire?
That is what some people are wondering, after looking closely at the totals in the votes for surprise Democratic primary victor Hillary Clinton, and for Barack Obama, who placed instead of winning as all the polls had predicted he would. And thanks to candidate Dennis Kucinich, we are likely to find out. Kucinich today filed a request, and a required $2000 fee, to order up a manual recount of the machine ballots cast in the state.
Polls taken as late as the day before the Tuesday vote showed Obama up by 10 to 15 points over Clinton, whom he had just beaten the week before in Iowa, but when the votes were counted, Clinton ended up beating Obama in New Hampshire 39.4 per cent to 36.8 per cent. In a replay of what happened in Ohio in 2004, exit polling reportedly also showed Obama to be winning the New Hampshire primary.
When that's not what happened, shocked polling firms and surprised pundits, all of whom had been expecting a big Obama win, were left stumbling for explanations for the Hillary comeback from an 8 per cent drubbing in Iowa (even the Clinton campaign, whose own internal polling had predicted her defeat, were at a loss). Explanations ranged from her teary eyed final public appearance before primary day and some sexist heckling she had received, to dark talk about a wave of hidden racism in the voting booth.
But there were anomalies in the numbers that have some people suggesting something else: vote fraud.
What has had eyebrows raised is a significant discrepancy between the vote counts done by voting machine, and the ones done by hand.
In New Hampshire, 81 per cent of the voting was done in towns and cities that had purchased optical scan machines from the Diebold Election Systems (now called Premiere Election Solutions), a division of Diebold Corp., a company founded by and still linked to wealthy right-wing investors. In those towns, all voting was done on the devices, called Accuvote machines, which read paper ballots completed by voters who use pens or pencils to fill in little ovals next to the candidate of their choice. The ballots are then fed into, read, and tallied by the machines. The other 19 per cent of voting was done in towns that had opted not to use the machine, and to use hand-counted paper ballots instead.
The machine tally was Clinton 39.6 per cent, Obama 36.3 per cent - fairly close to the final outcome. But the hand-counted ballot count broke significantly differently: Clinton 34.9 per cent, Obama 38.6 per cent.
Could something have happened in those machines to shift some votes away from Obama or some of the other candidates in the race, and over to the Clinton total?
If all the votes cast had split the way the hand counts split, Obama would have won New Hampshire by over 10,000 votes, instead of losing to Clinton by about 5500 votes.
"My suspicion is that nothing untoward happened here," says Doug Jones, a professor of computer sciences at the University of Iowa and a member of the board of examiners that approved the use of the same Diebold optical scanning machines in Iowa. "But at the same time, the Diebold machines are vulnerable to viruses that can be spread through the machines by the PCMCIA memory cards, and there are other things that can go wrong too. I'd be much happier if they had a routine random audit procedure in New Hampshire."
A random audit, he says, would involve doing hand counts of some towns' optical scan ballots, and comparing those results with the results of the machine reading of those same ballots, as recorded election night.
While California does conduct such random audits as a matter of course, most states, including New Hampshire, do not. According to the New Hampshire Secretary of State's office, any recount of ballots would have to be requested by a candidate, and would have to be paid for by the candidate making the request.
An official in the press office of Obama's campaign in Chicago, contacted on Wednesday, claimed not to know about the discrepancy between the machine and hand-counted ballots. She said that there was no plan to call for a hand count of machine ballots.As Prof. Jones notes, requiring a candidate to initiate any hand count makes such hand counts unlikely, since unless the evidence of vote tampering or fraud is overwhelming, such a call would open the candidate to charges of "poor loser."
Kucinich, in making his recount request, resolved that problem.
There is good reason to be suspicious of the results. The counting of the machine totals, in New Hampshire as in all states using the Diebold machines, is handled by a private contract firm, in this case Massachusetts-based LHS Associates, which controls and programs the machines' memory cards. Several studies have demonstrated the ease with which the memory cards in the Accuvote machines can be hacked, with some testers breaking into the system in minutes.
There are, to be sure, alternative quite innocent possible explanations for the discrepancy between the machine and hand votes for Clinton and Obama. All the state's larger towns and cities, like Nashua, Concord and Portsmouth, have gone to voting machines. While there are many small communities that have also opted for machines, it is almost exclusively the smaller towns and villages across the state that have stayed with hand counts-most of them in the more rural northern part of the state. So if Obama did better than Clinton in the small towns, and Clinton did better in the large ones, that could be the answer.
But that explanation flies in the face of logic, historic voting patterns, and most of the post election prognosticating.
If it is true that there was "behind the curtain" racism involved in people saying to pollsters that they were for Obama, while privately voting against him, surely it would be more likely that this would happen in the isolated towns of northern New Hampshire where black people are rarely to be seen. Clinton was also said to have fared better among people with lower incomes-again a demographic that is more prominent in the rural parts of the Granite State. Finally, Obama, in New Hampshire as in Iowa, did better among younger voters, and that is the demographic group that is typically in shorter supply in small towns, where job opportunities are limited. Furthermore, in Iowa, it was in the larger municipalities that Obama fared best, not in the rural towns, so how likely is it that his geographic appeal would be reversed in New Hampshire?
David Scanlan, New Hampshire's deputy secretary of state for elections, whom I contacted Thursday, said that while town election officials are required to do test runs of the Diebold machines in the days before an election, "to make sure that they are reading the ballot markings accurately," and that at that point the machines and the memory cards are sealed until the actual election day, there is no way for his office to independently conduct a post balloting test. The ballot boxes are sealed and the only way they can be opened if for a candidate to request (and pay for) a manual recount, or for a court to order one." Scanlan says that the same is true for the voting machines and the memory cards. While the sealed ballots are retained "for years," however, the memory cards will be back in the hands of the contractor, LHS Associates, in "a few months," to be erased and prepared for use in the general election next November.
Scanlan says that the state legislature is currently considering legislation to provide for routine audits of machines after elections, but that won't help this election cycle.
Scanlan said that because the machines are freestanding, there is no chance of their being hacked from the outside, but critics note that the hacking can be done in advance to the memory cards, which can pass changes to each other like a virus as each is programmed for a particular election.
Jonathan Simon, an attorney and co-founder of the group Election Defense Alliance, says that the vote discrepancies between machine and hand counts in New Hampshire's Democratic primary are troubling, and defy easy explanation.
"The trouble is, whenever you have a surprise result in an election, and it runs counter to the polls, the media always say the problem is the polling, not the counting." But he adds, "The thing is, these things always work in one direction-in favor of the more conservative candidate, and that defies the law of quantum mechanics."
This e-mail I received from MoveOn.Org has a link to a nifthy webite, VotePoke (www.votepoke.org ).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Believe it or not, you probably have dozens of friends and family members who aren't on the voter rolls. They might have moved and didn't register again, or maybe never got around to registering in the first place.Super Tuesday is coming up, the day when 24 states—including yours—will go to the polls to vote in the Democratic and Republican primaries. The next Presidential nominee may well be decided that day—but many people who could vote are not registered yet, and time is running out.
That's why we built VotePoke, a new website that lets you quickly and easily check to see whether you are registered to vote—and then invite your friends to do the same. Click here to make sure you—and your family and friends—will be able to vote on Super Tuesday, February 5: http://votepoke.org
Voter registration is public information, but states don't make it easy to access. So until now, this data has mostly been available to the political consultants, but not to real people. Now, with VotePoke, that's all changing—anyone can make sure their friends are signed up and registered.
You would be surprised at how many of your friends aren't registered—or used to be registered—or really just aren't sure. We'll be in great shape for the election next November the more new and young voters we can turn out—and you can help by taking responsibility for your own group of friends.
Research shows that a reminder from someone you know is the single best way to get someone to the polls. Click here to start the "votepoking" and make sure every vote counts on Super Tuesday and beyond.
http://votepoke.org
Thank you for all you do.
PS: Forward this to your friends in Oklahoma, as well as the other February 5 states.
Remember, in Oklahoma you must be registered as a Democrat in order to vote for Barack Obama on February 5. If you are registered as an Independent voter, or with any other party, you will not be able to vote for Barack Obama on February 5. Do the smart thing and register as a Democrat.
With endorsment of Sen. Kerry, it looks to me the long established firewall around the Northeast United States is cracking affording Obama with many opportunities for convention delegates from that area.
It is time for us to work harder for the effort. If you would lisen to some of the the TV talking heads Senator Clinton has won already.
Well Senator Obama is still in the lead and it is not over until it is over. We are going to make history before and after the election.
