Good morning everyone. Thanks again to everyone who attended our conference yesterday and made it a huge success. The passion and interest in election reform was evident yesterday. We already have couple of news stories from yesterday's. Nick Anderson from
the Los Angeles Times reports on how our conference underscored the point that we need to do much more restore the confidence in our election system:
[F]orum sponsors said that widespread accounts from frustrated would-be voters showed that much remains to be done to restore confidence in a system badly shaken by the 2000 Florida recount.
"It is clear that voters still faced problems in getting to vote and having their votes counted," said Wade Henderson, executive director of the civil rights group.
Common Cause President Chellie Pingree, a onetime Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Maine, said: "Just because this election didn't go to the courts, just because there aren't fistfights in the streets and just because there wasn't a long, contested election, doesn't mean there weren't problems on election day."
And, here is AP's coverage of the conference picking up on Chellie's comments concerning the
problems with our voting process:
WASHINGTON - Despite President Bush's clear margin of victory in the 2004 presidential race, voting and civil rights advocates say the election did not go as smoothly as Americans might think.
Reports of long lines at some polling places, voting machine errors, absentee ballots that never arrived and problems with provisional ballots dominated a daylong conference Tuesday, and experts said more changes are needed to eliminate obstacles to voting.
"We learned on Election Day that our voting methods remain troubled and that many Americans continue to experience difficulty navigating a system that falls far short of our view of ourselves as the world's greatest democracy," said Common Cause President Chellie Pingree, who moderated the conference.
Registration problems were the most frequent complaint in 2004, according to a database kept by a coalition of voting rights groups. Some voters registered by the deadline but did not show up on voter lists, while others received cards with incorrect information.
We will have much more for you later.
