Virtual Issues

Boston – Turnout was reported to be heavy Tuesday as Massachusetts voters trudged through a light snow to choose their next U.S. senator.

Late internal polling by the campaigns indicated that the race between Democratic state Attorney General Martha Coakley and Republican state Sen. Scott Brown was too close to call.

A Suffolk University poll of three key towns Saturday and Sunday — Fitchburg, Gardner and Peabody — gave Brown a comfortable lead in each.

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Groups urge Secretary of State Galvin to take action to detect election tampering.

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Atlanta – A historic ruling earlier this month on behalf of felons who lost the right to vote could call into question the disenfranchisement of felons and ex-felons in the State of Washington and indeed across the United States.

Federal Ninth District Circuit Court Judges A. Wallace Tashima and Stephen Reinhardt ruled on behalf of several disenfranchised voters, in a 2-1 ruling. Washington’s Secretary of State Sam Reed and Attorney General Rob McKenna will appeal to the Supreme Court.

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Anyone who is in prison on the first of April, 2010, will remain there for the next ten years – according to the US census.

When the census counts prison populations, it counts them as residents of the towns in which they are incarcerated, not the communities they left and will most likely return to.

With more than 2 million people currently incarcerated, advocates say this turns prisoners, who in most states cannot vote, into phantom voters.

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Washington – The House of Representatives, in a stunning reversal, will not consider whether to give the District of Columbia full voting rights in Congress.

“The price was way too high,” explained House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., in announcing the decision Tuesday.

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Our investigation in Arizona discovered the real intent of the show-me-your-papers law.

Phoenix – Don’t be fooled. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are US citizens.

I don’t buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.

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Sixty-six percent of the inmates in the state of New York come from New York City. But 91 percent of them are incarcerated upstate, in communities where they have long been counted by the U.S. census.

On paper, this means prisoners belong not to the communities from which they’ve come (and to which they eventually will return), but to places where they can neither vote, check out a library book or attend a local school.

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"Intellectual Property" of voting systems still owned by firm linked to Venezuelan President, despite press statement to the contrary

PLUS: The election official/e-voting company revolving "oversight"door continues to turn…

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If every adult American had to vote, perhaps the extremists on both ends of the spectrum could be shushed out by the silent majority.

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The mystery surrounding a long-questioned and allegedly "fixed" non-partisan 2006 Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) bond election in Pima County, AZ continues to deepen as troubling new details have now emerged. The resolution in this matter – should it ever come – could spell trouble for supporters of paper-based optical-scan electronic voting systems, since indications are that if the election was rigged, it was done with insiders via the electronic central tabulating computers.

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