A Fair And Free Election ?

We are just a couple of weeks away from an important election that will determine whether this country moves forward, or returns to the failed policies of the past. And frankly, I have my doubts as to just how honest that election will be. For months now, the Republicans have been trying to suppress the votes of groups they think will vote against them. One of the most public ways they've done this is by passing new and restrictive Voter ID laws. Most of these laws have been overturned by the courts (at least for this election), but that hasn't ended the voter suppression efforts.

A newspaper in Pennsylvania (owned by a right-winger) recently printed an article telling voters they could not vote without a picture ID. That is false (since that law was invalidated by the courts), but that didn't prevent this attempt to discourage people from voting. In other states, similar efforts are happening. In Wisconsin, billboards were put up in the minority community only, warning people that it is a felony to commit voter fraud. In Arizona, Hispanic voters were told that the election is on November 8th (instead of the actual day -- November 6th).

Now we learn that a company controlled by Willard Mitt Romney's son has purchased controlling interest in a voting machine company. These machines are in many states, including the critical swing state of Ohio. How suspicious does that look, especially considering how easy it is for these machines to be tampered with?

And then we have a teabagger group near Houston who says they are training 1,000,000 "poll watchers" all over the country, who will be preventing "voter fraud". What they are really doing is trying to question the voting credentials of minorities and others that they think will vote Democratic. They probably can't keep these people from voting, but they can force them to have to vote on a provisional ballot -- and regardless of what you may have heard, provisional ballots are not counted on election day, and most are not counted at all.

This has me wondering just how many efforts are there across this nation to keep Democrats from voting, or to keep their votes from being counted. That's why I was happy to see a post that appeared a couple of days ago on Red State Progressive. The blogger, vjack, tells us:

 It seems that the Organisation of Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the largest international election-monitoring group, will be monitoring our upcoming presidential election after receiving complaints from civil rights groups about widespread Republican efforts to disenfranchise minority voters. Yes, the OSCE is deploying observers throughout the U.S. in an effort to promote fair elections. If you thought international organizations monitoring elections was something that only happened in so-called third world countries, I guess that gives you a sense of the trouble our democracy is in.

I don't know about you, but this makes me feel a little better about the impending election. I think we have reached the point in this country where we need some impartial outside observers to try and insure a fair and free election. Personally, I no longer trust the Republicans (especially the teabagger version) any further than I could throw Rush Limbaugh (and I doubt I could even lift that buffoon, let alone throw him).