Something you CAN rage against:

Voter purging and voter suppression.

I feel with my last post I took away a great American opportunity to be angry about obstruction of democracy. Now I offer you an alternative.

Voter purging is when state and county boards of elections go through lists and removed voters who have died, moved, or have committed a felony. However, there are no national standards for this nor any oversight, and many voters are mistakenly removed. Citizens are supposed to be contacted when this happens, but, of course, many are not. If you get to the voting booth on November 4 and are wrongly told you cannot vote, CAST A PROVISIONAL BALLOT AND CALL A VOTER HOTLINE.

National Voter Assistance Hotline: 1-866-Our-Vote
Democratic National Committee: 1-888-DEM-VOTE
(The GOP doesn't offer a hotline, otherwise I would put it here. I did find some help for Republicans voting abroad here.)
UPDATE ON 10/31: The GOP has offered a hotline. 866-976-VOTE. They want you to call and report voter fraud. WTF? It is also available for you to complain about electioneering, intimidation, and violence. Just don't make it up or you'll get caught and look stupid.

Voter suppression, purging being a part of it, involves making it harder for people to vote. Most often you'll hear of such suppression against minorities and lower income voters, who often vote Democrat. For example, a Republican fund-raiser in Ohio sued Ohio's secretary of state to make her verify all of the new registered voters - all 700,000 of them. The U.S. Supreme Court quickly and unanimously stopped this suit. A new law in Florida requires that new voters provide a driver's license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number on a registration form, which is cross-checked against government databases. Not a bad law per se, but one in which human error (aka typos) play a huge part. Who suffers? African-American and Latino voters, whose names are often hyphenated and with nontraditional (aka non-WASP) spellings. From the St. Petersburg Times: "Of the rejected registrations, 2,403, or 27 percent, said they were Hispanic; 2,382, or 27 percent, identified themselves as African-American; and 1,727 listed their race as white. A total of 1,902 did not disclose their race. Nearly half, 4,383, were Democrats, while 1,136 were Republicans. Most of the rest identified with no party." Whether it was the law's intent or not, it clearly prevents many Democrats from voting.

The Republican "uproar" over alleged voter fraud and subsequent investigations into registered voters in order to "protect democracy" is, in my opinion, a clever guise to do the exact opposite. In their defense, I don't think Republicans target minorities because they don't want non-whites to vote - they aren't being racist - they just don't want Democrats to vote, and many minorities just happen to be Democrat.

As much as I would like to mail a card to every registered Republican telling them that election day has been changed to Wednesday November 5, I would much rather have everyone who can vote and win fair and square - or not win fair and square.

For more info on voting rights, visit the People for the American Way Web site.

And for ACORN's response to allegations that they are a radical left-wing organization trying to commit voter fraud, watch this video: