General Election: Poor Ballot Design May Affect Election Results

  For everyone reading this post, if you can, please volunteer to be a poll worker in your community on November 4.  Contact you local election office and complete the application — please do this, it is important.

Poorly designed ballots continue to plague U.S. elections, even after Congress set aside $3 billion to overhaul voting systems to prevent a recurrence of the flawed Florida ballots that deadlocked the 2000 presidential race, a study out today concludes.

Problems with confusing paper ballots in 2002, absentee ballots in 2004 and touch-screen ballots in 2006 led thousands of voters to skip over key races or make mistakes that invalidated their votes, according to the study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

“In the big election meltdowns where thousands of votes were lost, ballot design was the primary cause,”says Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center.

Ballot designs could play a big role in mistakes made at the polls this fall because of an infusion of new voters who registered for this year’s presidential race and the introduction of new voting machines in parts of 11 states with 15 million potential voters. Since passage of the Help America Vote Act in 2002, states have spent more than $2 billion in mostly federal funds to overhaul their voting systems.

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Obama Family Resigns From Trinity United Church

  As I mentioned in our May 30 post that included the video of Father Michael Pfleger’s rants against Hillary Clinton, the Father’s antics in conjunction with all the controversy that surrounded Rev. Wright would make it easier, when the time came, for the Obamas to leave Trinity United Church.  I didn’t know that day would come this soon.

I agree with the Obamas’ decision.  Trinity United Church has been way out of control.  It would be nice for any church to be able to say, “The President and his family attend our Church when they’re in Chicago.”  But no, the idiots at Trinity United Church can only say, “The President use to attend our Church until we made complete asses of ourselves and he left.” Nincompoops!

Today, Saturday, May 31, Barack Obama and his family resigned his 20 year membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

From what I heard, the Obamas have been contemplating leaving the Church for weeks, but Father Pfleger was the straw that broke the camel’s back so they decided earlier this week to have their letter of resignation delivered today.

Trinity United Church issued a statement saying that they love the Obamas and will continue to pray for them as they get closer and closer to the White House.  The letter also said that they think that Senator Obama’s personal convictions, morals and values would make him an excellent President.

 

Paulette