A few days before the election, there was a nasty e-mail making the rounds. It said, "Due to the expected large voter turnout, all Obama voters are requested to vote on Wednesday." The e-mail went all over the country and upset a lot of people. Yesterday, it was revealed that the e-mail originated right here in Amarillo, Texas.Several people traced the e-mail back to it's original source, and found Amarillo farmer Tony Harper. Harper claims he wasn't the originator and just passed it on to a few friends and family members because he thought it was funny. He says the whole thing was just a joke.
Frankly, I don't believe him. When the FBI traces an e-mail back and says you are the source -- then you probably are. And while Harper may consider the e-mail to be just a good joke, it smells a lot more like an attempt to suppress Obama votes. If this cost even one person to lose their opportunity to vote, then it is real voter suppression and it's not a bit funny.
A couple of complaints have been filed against Harper, and he has been contacted by the FBI. They told him if even one voter was affected by the e-mail and didn't get to vote, then criminal charges could be filed. I think they should be filed anyway.
Nothing is more sacred in a democracy than the right to vote, and messing around with that right is certainly no joke. This is true regardless of the candidate or the political party. Maybe a large fine would bring that fact home to this idiot.
Jon Mark Beilue's flippant dismissal of the issue ("if someone thought it serious, they're probably too dumb to vote anyway") bothered me. Everyone knows you don't "joke" about having a bomb in the airport, and this is similar in that it had to be looked into.
ReplyDeleteI also love how JMB uncritically passes along Harper's assertion that he was told that "we wouldn't be having this conversation" if the text had been about McCain voters.
JMB is just another Dave Henry-- a former sportswriter out of his depth. The Globe-News apparently has them falling out of trees. It's apparently how they vet employees: if you can continually write stories showing the approved biases toward Amarillo High and Texas Tech, you ought to be able to graduate to more significantly biased stories.
If this had been an attempt to suppress McCain voters, Beilue would be screaming to high heaven.
ReplyDeleteI worked as a poll watcher, and this may be anecdotal, but another poll watcher notice a lot of 20 somethings, that registered through the DMV, were not registered to vote when they showed up at the polls. I know of 2 people at work that had the same thing happen, both of them 20 something year olds.
ReplyDelete