Are you suggesting that Republicans don't have the right to put poll workers in every precinct? Or are you saying the AFL-CIO and the NAACP doesn't do Get Out The Vote drives? Or are you suggesting that you would rather not have the people that are voting for your candidates monitored since you realize that some of the activities are fraudulent and will cost your candidate votes?

Most poll workers are little old men and women. If some little old lady asking for your driver's license intimidates somebody, they have a real problem.

Chad- when the "poll watching" is cloaked in discussion of combatting "black militancy" in the south, it sure-as-hell sounds like the old southern rhetoric of looking to promote voter intimidation.

See here and here.

And this proposal isn't being promoted by some civic group-- it's from the construction industry looking to protect its economic special interests.

So this whole "controversy" boils down to them using the word militant to describe the black trade union.

No one seriously thinks that one white person is going to walk into a precinct and start intimidating people. Who do you think they are planning to send, Arnold? Arnold would get his butt whipped in Louisville.

No, what they don't like is being watched. When I guy comes in without any identification, the poll workers don't won't to be watched. When they black guy comes in and says something like "well, Jimmy gave me $10 to vote for xxx.", they don't want anyone there to hear it. And they want to intimidate people into not coming.

Is there really any comparison between Louisville where people lived in integrated communities, but white people ran everything and the current black communities we are talking about? There is seriously no way one old white lady is going to intimidate anyone. Now, one old white lady could be a witness however to voter fraud and irregulaties that should not be swept under the table.

Heck, this is voter disenfranchisement if you allow black people to not be monitored and then they cheat the process, because someone's vote in a district that doesn't cheat won't mean as much as it should.

Republican poll watchers should be allowed in these districts, Democratic poll watchers should no what is allowed(Kentucky already has strict guidelines on what is and isn't allowed), and everything is fine. Democracy lives.

Umm, these aren't "little old ladies." We're not talking about the people who are working at the polls; we're talking about the people who are sent by the GOP for the very purpose of challenging voters. After Florida 2000, I think it's quite rational not to think the GOP has the "integrity" of the system and fraud prevention as their objectives when they go in and disenfranchise black voters; the number of blacks wrongly disenfranchised in 2000 dwarfed all the nonsense about hanging chads.

So go on and invent stories about vote-buying and voter fraud, without bothering to find out if there's any evidence that these things actually happen in Louisville, or that black folks are congenitally more likely to engage in them; it's not going to dissuade anyone who's been paying attention from saying exactly what the GOP's agenda is in dispatching its poll watchers exclusively to black precincts.

this is voter disenfranchisement if you allow black people to not be monitored

Are you suggesting that Republicans don't have the right to put poll workers in every precinct?

You also seem to have misunderstood what the GOP is doing. It's not that they're putting poll watchers in every precinct, and then the NAACP and others are saying they should stay out of the black precincts. The GOP is sending poll watchers only to black precincts. Not even all Democratic-leaning precincts (which is something the parties have ample data on); just the precincts that are mostly African-American.

Now, given the historical experience of black would-be voters, some of which is within the personal experience of the NAACP leadership in Louisville, can you not see why this would strike some folks as a bit troubling?

Honestly, the only precincts that are going to be so idealogically one sided that they can't find one Republican or Democratic poll watcher are these black districts. Why? Name another group that votes over 90% for either the Republican or Democratic candidate in the last Presidential election.

I do see why people would think that it's troubling, but when you actually look at the facts on the ground, it just isn't.

In my opinion, the potential black disenfranchisement occurs in districts that have white people running things. The potential black voter fraud occurs in these black districts which explains what type of monitors you need in both types of communities.

Chad Peterson:

Florida, 2000. That's how things actually work in the real world, as opposed to how you think they work in the real world.

Chad,

While Bill Rehnquist may be a little old man now, he was strapping young buck back in the days when he was practicing voter harassment in Phoenix.

Why don't annoying trolls like you go to freerepublic or something? It must be because you're all bored by your pathetic groupthink.