Pennsylvania takes a risk, releases list of polling places

October 27, 2007

This week, in one of the more striking examples of the culture of fear run amok, the state of Pennsylvania decided not to release a list of state polling places. The rationale was simple: officials wanted to prevent terrorists from disrupting the state’s elections.

Thankfully, yesterday, the governor intervened.

Gov. Ed Rendell on Friday rescinded a state policy that had kept Pennsylvania’s list of polling places hidden from the public because of fears that terrorists could disrupt elections in the state.

Rendell’s abrupt decision came amid criticism from Republican legislative leaders one day after The Associated Press reported on the policy, which was implemented in 2004 as a result of terrorist bombings that occurred just days before Spain’s national elections.

The governor’s spokesman, Chuck Ardo, said ordering the State Department to make the list public was the right thing to do because the information is already available through county election offices. Voters can also look up their local polling places on the state’s voter-services Web site.

“The governor believes that revoking the policy will not have a material effect on Election Day safety,” Ardo said.

It seems like a safe bet.

Best of all, not only did common sense win this round, but it was a bipartisan effort.

[C]ritics said the policy runs afoul of the state’s open records law and makes coordinating statewide voter-mobilization strategies more difficult for candidates and political action committees.

On Friday, the top ranking Senate Republicans sent a letter to Rendell urging him to reconsider the policy, and House Republican Leader Sam Smith separately called on the governor to do so.

“While the government should take reasonable cautions against terrorism, we should not use terrorism as an excuse to curtail the vote,” said Smith, R-Jefferson.

See? Sometimes we can all get along.

Gov. Ed Rendell on Friday rescinded a state policy that had kept Pennsylvania’s list of polling places hidden from the public because of fears that terrorists could disrupt elections in the state.

Does he mean Republicans? They’re the only ones I’ve seen disrupting elections lately.

Don’t let Republicans find out where the voting places are. It can only lead to trouble.

  • Clearly in someone’s tiny mind Terrorist = “Brown person” and “Disrupt” = “Exercise his right to vote.” Honestly, who the fuck makes this shit up? I live in an area that is a zillion times more likely to be “disrupted” by terrorists than 99% of the places in PA and I’ve never even heard of this initiative. But maybe the Yellow Pants fRighties decided DC was already conquered by terrorists.

    Heh. Unless they realized their plan to “protect” the polls was backfiring. Only other YPfR’s believe that They Want 2 Kill Us bullshit, so making them afraid to vote meant fewer votes for the ReThuglicons.

  • The Department of State is controlled by Rendell, so this was not a Republican ploy.

    The other thing to keep in mind is that state government here in PA is corrupt and the Democrats in the General Assembly share a large part of the blame.

    I wish that there was someway to clean up Harrisburg and get honest progressive Democrats into office.

  • Best of all, not only did common sense win this round, but it was a bipartisan effort.

    Chalk this up with the list of hijinks that didn’t get off the ground because people unfortunately noticed they were going on.

  • The Department of State is controlled by Rendell, so this was not a Republican ploy.

    It’s really hard to say that with certainty just because it’s “controlled” by Rendell. Jumping to conclusions like that is the kind of practice that makes one miss things as they’re actually happening. Just try to think of a way Republicans could make something go in the Dept. of State even though it’s controlled by Rendell. It’s not too hard, and it doesn’t lead to anything that’s unrealistic or that hasn’t happened before.

  • The only “terraists” that have been disrupting our elections in the 21st century are Republicans such as Karl Rove and Republican corporations such as Diebold and ES&S. Election hacking and rigging have become the Republican tactic of choice since we have allowed insecure hackable corporate electronic voting machines to run our election processes in the last several elections.

    Dump all the electronic computerized voting machines into the nearest body of water and return to 100% hand-counted paper ballots. Slower, but infinitely more reliable. Works fine in Canada.

    Visit my web site, http://www.bottlebrushpress.com and click on the alternative media link and go to the bottom of the page to see my articles on Republican election fraud and how to end it.

  • For Swan.

    Pedro A. Cortés was nominated as Secretary of the Commonwealth by Governor Edward G. Rendell on April 2, 2003 and was unanimously confirmed by the Senate on May 13, 2003, making him the first confirmed Latino Cabinet member in Pennsylvania history.

    If you think that there was Republican skulduggery at play, then the onerous of proof is with you.

  • Veblen, I don’t necessarily think it was Republican skullduggery, but people who did nasty things try to cover up their tracks, so being smart is looking for things those people would like to make happen, and then when those things happen, look for whether those people could be behind it. You can’t find the work of someone who covers his tracks by looking for him openly doing things!

    Anyway, there are a lot of ways an action taken by an ostensible liberal could actually be set in motion by Republicans. A trusted staffer could actually be a mole who started setting up liberal creds to do dirty work for Republicans around age 18, or he could have just lied about his past in his job application and interview. Or, Republicans could get some leverage over a real staffer. Then the staffer could suggest things to a boss who is a little out of touch, or distracted enough to sign off on things. But that doesn’t even have to be the case about the boss- the staffer could just be capable of persuading the boss that the idea is a valid one. Or, Republicans could have leverage against the boss, the real official in the department. By leverage I mean something akin to blackmail or the ability to do favors.

    I’m not accusing people of things, I’m just saying that in the context of the history of things the admin has done and Republicans have done over the past seven years, we have to be imaginative about these things to understand what’s going on. We have to be open-minded. A lot of stories came out that I’m sure a lot of us would have called people conspiracy theorists or crackpots for suggesting– before a big newspaper broke the story. All I’m saying is treat people like they really are– often enough, dishonest scumbags who screw people- and you will get a more realistic sense of the spectrum of possibilities as to any situation you are trying to figure out.

    Veblen wrote: then the onerous of proof is with you.

    Maybe you mis-typed, but this is supposed to be onus.

  • Find out where the polling places are and disrupt….hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

    Does that logic make any sense at all? Hide here come the terrorists…wait, it’s just four kids in a van.
    What happened to “..Bring ’em on”? Just pathetic.

  • Republicans have been involved in a lot of interference with voting in the past- and not just in 2000, 2004, and 2006- and I mean interference that is known about, not just irregularities that people suspect could have some Republican origin.

    So let’s give this a really mundane reading, and say if there’s a trick, the whole trick was to keep people from finding out where to go to vote (wouldn’t be a great way of changing the turnout a lot, and a determined scheme would almost certainly have more involved in it than that, but let’s just say this is all it is for the sake of making this sound realistic for the doubters, and keeping this example simple). Then, a scheme that makes the action of not publishing the polling place list fit even better in with action that’s come before is if this particular action and maybe the announcement of it as well were a weather balloon.

    Maybe the Republicans wanted to know whether people would notice it, and who would notice it, and how they’d react to it, if, to try to monkey with the voting either this November or in Nov. 2008, they got states to not publish lists of polling places. If that’s the case, and this one announcement was a weather balloon, then the very best way to do the weather balloon would be to have an ostensibly Democratic regime send it out. Why? Well let’s say you don’t like the results, and it looks like when you want to mess with polling places ahead of the election, people get real alert to that, because voting is a lot more easy to understand than other ways Republicans try to mess with decmocracy- like through K Street and tinkering with rules of the House and Senate. The story gets around real quick about the unpublished polling places list, and people really understand it, and are upset about it, whether nto publishing that list alone would in fact mess with the election a lot. Then, all the Republican regime that ordered the list to go unpublished accomplished was to make itself, and by extension other Republicans, look bad. It made the whole terrorism rationale they’ve been using for the past few years to do things look a little more suspect, too. So all the better to test it out by pushing some levers to have a Democrat order it, if you can. See how people react to the story before they know a Democrat ordered it. Then you’ll know ahead of time if you can include that as part of your vote-interfering or vote-rigging scam on election day.

  • Hiding the polling places might have prevented elections from being disrupted – by the voters. Voters can be damned inconvenient when you’re trying to steal hold an election.

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