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General discussion

Chicago Suppression of Republican Votes

Mar 19, 2016 6:31PM PDT

I am not surprised at the crookedness of Chicago. It's also where a large demonstation against freedom of speech, along with invasion of a paid arena for Trump rally happened.

https://photographyisnotacrime.com/2016/03/19/chicago-votes-suppressed-poll-workers-hiding-republican-primary-ballot/


"Five Chicago residents, including Olga Lory Gomez Gutierrez, wanted to vote in the Republican primary which is their choice, but the precinct judge didn’t want to give her the proper ballot, and the poll workers at her precinct did little more useful than tell her that photography is a crime to chase them away after they wasted a morning finding a ballot.

Gutierrez compiled five short videos on Facebook....One of the enraged voters said in spanish, “Democrat ballots are here, Republican ballots are hidden.”Eight-and-a-half minutes into the video, the poll workers found a republican ballot, and the crowd rejoiced. And they voted. "

Discussion is locked

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So it's "Chicago' that's doing the voter suppression
Mar 19, 2016 7:28PM PDT
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My father, born in Cook Co., tells stories of workers
Mar 20, 2016 2:09AM PDT

going door to door with small bribery amounts to encourage voters to cast ballots for specific candidates. Of course there would be no way to prevent them from just pocketing the money and voting as they wished other than fear of reprisal. Chicago was rough back then too.

This month, my wife and I voted for the very first time in a primary election. Ohio has it's own version of the open primary that sounds similar to that of Illinois. While we don't need to register with a party, we can only choose one ballot and that ballot will only contain the candidates from a specific party. I could immediately see how this could be abused. A clever and well organized campaign could divide its voters in such a way as to make certain their candidate faced the weakest opponent in the general election. On the Democrat side this year, the deck was already heavily stacked and the voters have little choice. It would be easy for them to calculate how many voters they could sacrifice in an open primary...especially a "winner take all"...by having them cross over to the other side and vote for a Republican that was a long shot to win rather than have them face the favorite. I'd considered that an undeclared voter should be able to pick a second choice even if the other was from a different party but I don't know how this could be done without also inviting abuse. I'd think the second choice would need to be weighted in some fashion but, as it is, we really don't have state-to-state consistency in how we vote in national elections. Honest people never seem to have the upper hand.

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When I worked for the county in California
Mar 20, 2016 5:09PM PDT

we used to say that Cook County refused to automate the voting in Chicago because it was more difficult to scam the system with that.

It isn't just Chicago. Florida was doing the same thing on the Democratic side. No primary ballots for Democrats. They finally found them in a box in a closet.

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when and where in florida was this?
Mar 20, 2016 9:13PM PDT

what I remember are bug-eyed voting officials glaring at hanging chads on computer cards that were used for decades, so you must be talking about something ancient in florida.