Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Voter Fraud?

So I was voting yesterday (Feb 5th), at Hope School, about a mile from my home. A short middle aged hispanic woman came into the precinct - she didn't speak a word of English in the 5 minutes I was there, and apparently couldn't read either. She displayed a printed voter pamphlet that showed her polling place to be at Gutierrez St, which is 5 miles away from Hope School. Or at least she had someone's printed voter pamphlet with a polling place other than mine. She had no clue that you had to go to a specific polling place and just couldn't waltz in and expect to vote whereever. She didn't have an attitude, but was clueless. I thought a) it is a legal requirement to have a basic knowledge of English to become a US citizen and b) you have to have basic civics instruction (like how to vote) to pass the citizenship exam required before you become a citizen. So was she a naturalized citizen? Probably not. The Spanish speaking poll workers were helpful to her, and I did my best to follow the conversation, and I speak enough to get these facts correct. Did this woman get to vote? I hope not at precinct 2232. I didn't even have my cell phone with me to take her photo. Duh!

So this is all suspicion and I don't know the actual end of the story. A provisional ballot is the best I can see this woman getting, the worst is handcuffs. What do you think? I wrote a letter to the editor of my local paper, and when they called I had them spike the story. Why? I had no proof. Suspicions, yep. Valid suspicions. Something wasn't right about this. There are few plausible explanations that I can think of for this set of facts. Maybe you can enlighten me.

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