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McCain campaign admits mailing 1 Million bad ballots to voters in Ohio

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Good Christ Almighty, here we go again. Hot off the wire from the Cincinnati Enquirer:

About one-third of the absentee ballot applications received at the Hamilton County Board of Elections have been ruled invalid because Republican Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign printed a version of the form with an extra, unneeded box on it.

It gets even better folks!

It turns out the problem is that the McCain campaign added a box on these forms that required you to check it to confirm you were an eligible voter. Yep, that’s right- check here if you are eligible to vote. I guess the act of actually requesting an absentee ballot doesn’t qualify that. And if you don’t check it…

… bingo. You get the picture. And the McCain campaign has sent out over a MILLION of these forms. The State of Ohio and the local election boards, understandably, don’t want to pay to fix the mistake on this- how much d’you want to bet the McCain campaign wants to pay to fix it?

Over seven-hundred and fifty absentee applications have been rejected so far. If we’re counting on absentee and early voting to help us mobilize our GOTV effort, then this is a clear and present danger to it.

It looks like these were sent to the general public, meaning all Ohio voters would be affected. And again, remember, these were the applications for absentee ballots… but if you’re going to be gone, and there’s a process to have to do everything all over again… how many votes are we going to lose, especially with a million in the pipline?

We need to get the word out! Make sure our boys and girls on the ground know about these sorts of shenanigans, and can take action to fix it! Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio Secretary of State is already involved, but we need to get the media’s attention on this one. We’re gonna need every single vote we can get this election cycle. We can ill afford another debacle like Florida, and we all know the shenanigans that were played in Ohio the last go-round.

Spread the word!

UPDATE:

From the comments, thanks to Chumley at Kos, seems like this is the tip of the iceburg:

See HERE.  

Quote:

Just listening to the substitute host, Lee Rayburn, on the Thom Hartmann show:

“Misleading” absentee ballot applications are being mailed out by the McCain campaign to registered Democratic voters in purple states. The return addresses are inaccurate, as well as other information. “Misleading, lying” mailers are going out in Florida and other purple states. It’s a caging tactic.

Calls are coming in verifying that this is happening in small towns, as well as larger ones.


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/ 13 Comments

13 comments

  2. John Allen

    Someone needs to get a list of zip-codes that were targeted. It’s very possible that they were mailed to areas that have large numbers of minorities. It shouldn’t be hard to get someone that was involved in this effort to make a copy of the zips. People that would do this would sell their mother for a few dollars. Someone needs to spread some money around.

  4. John Allen

    Apparently, from what I’ve been reading, these were mailed mainly to registered Republicans as part of a GOTV effort. That would mean it is not caging. Let’s hope that turns out to be true.

  5. fogiv

    …but this gave me GREAT pleasure, so I wanted to share the wealth:

    Paul Krugman HAMMERS the McCain campaign in tomorrow’s New York Times.

    And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

    What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

    Check out the article.  Has the press finally grown a pair?

  6. semiquaver

    Maybe I missed something, but why are political campaigns mailing out absentee ballot applications?  They shouldn’t even be allowed to handle them, much less mail them out.  

    Voter registration is the job of the state for exactly this reason.  

    How is tampering with an official form anything less than election fraud?  Is anyone going to be blamed for this?

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