House Repubs At it Again

House GOP Votes Against Fair Allocation of Machines and Poll Workers

In another astounding display of political hubris, today every single Republican voted against a Conyers-Waters amendment to provide that states provide a minimum required number of functioning and accurate voting machines and poll workers for all precincts.

The purpose of the amendment was simple, and one would have thought, non-controversial - to avoid the misallocation of voting machines and poll workers that led to lines of ten hours or more in the Ohio presidential election and disenfranchised tens of thousands of thousands of minority voters. (The amendment was offered in the context of an arcane continuity bill, providing for expedited elections in the event of an attack on Congress -- so for procedural reasons, it was limited to the special elections).

What did the Republicans have to say about this common sense proposal to protect and preserve the right to vote - essentially, nothing. Rep. Candice Miller (R-MI) said there are a lot of election reform bills out there, and we'll deal with them in due course - of course you could say that about every single legislative proposal known to man. Next, none other than the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, said we needed to pass the continuity bill to strike a blow against terrorism - basically, he was saying lets just have the special elections, and the hell with whether or not they are fair.