Pat Dollard | Young Americans

This is a continuing abomination in this country.

If ANYONE’s votes deserved to be counted it IS our military’s.

I am so pissed about this right now … I can’t even rant on and on as per usual. I am actually sick to my stomach.

Meanwhile, every fucking ACORN instigated fraud/fake vote WILL not only be counted, but will have an army of democrat lawyers dragging them into court to have them counted.

I am so fucking pissed …

Dick Winters (Band Of Brothers): These men have been through the toughest training the Army has to offer, under the worst possible circumstances, and they volunteered for it … You know why they volunteered? Because they knew that the man in the foxhole next to them would be the best, not some draftee who’s going to get them killed … Don’t ever put yourself in the position where you can take from these men.

And so, do you think/believe if this poll were the other way this issue would be strongly addressed, and corrected?

A tussle over military votes in Virginia reveals a scrap for every single vote.

By PATRICK LYNCH - (Daily Press)

Virginia campaign officials for GOP presidential candidate John McCain are saying that some Fairfax County absentee ballots — and possibly some in Hampton Roads — from overseas service members are getting rejected due to a technicality.

But the Fairfax registrar said that he is following state law in rejecting a small number of absentee ballots that come in at the same time as the voter’s application.

McCain’s Virginia campaign officials called a press conference Thursday afternoon in Fairfax to say that a specific type of absentee ballot — the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot — was getting wrongly rejected in Fairfax, the state’s largest locality, and possibly other cities or counties. This type of ballot is used as a sort of safety net by service members who aren’t sure if the state absentee ballot they requested will make it to them in time.

One McCain campaign representative also said this might be happening in Arlington and Norfolk. But Norfolk deputy registrar John Merkel said it has not been a problem. He also said this is a rarely used absentee ballot and that Norfolk usually receives a handful of them at most.

Fairfax general registrar Rokey Suleman said Thursday that he has had to reject some of the ballots because of a Virginia law passed in 2002. That law — then called Senate Bill 113, sponsored by then state Sen. Bill Bolling — requires that when an overseas citizen wants to request an absentee ballot and cast a vote with the same paperwork, it requires not only a witness signature but also the current address of the witness.

The McCain campaign said there’s not even a space for the witness to list an address. Suleman agreed; he said the federal document was changed in recent years and the space for the witness address was removed. But the Virginia law hasn’t changed.

Suleman said he brought this issue up last month at a Pew Foundation conference on overseas voting. Now, he said, he’s getting hammered by the McCain camp as one who’s trying to prevent service members from voting.

“I can’t ignore the law,” Suleman said. “I think it stinks.”

It’s not clear how many ballots might be affected. Suleman said Fairfax has received about 260 Federal Absentee Write-In Ballots, and he was not sure what percentage of those had to be rejected. That number compares to the 50,000 total absentee ballots Suleman expects to receive this year in Fairfax.

If anything, the issue surfacing is more proof of the scrapping by both campaigns for every single vote in a state where the most recent statewide election — Jim Webb versus George Allen — was decided by 10,000 votes. Some polls show Democrat Barack Obama up 10 points on McCain, but others show the race much closer. And Obama is battling 44 years of history in presidential voting patterns in the state.

The McCain campaign is likely to be extremely concerned about every military vote. A recent voluntary Military Times poll of several thousand subscribers found 68 percent of them supporting McCain to 23 percent for Obama.

Forgot I heard THIS on Rush today:
Want to guess which voting technicality will get a pass … and COUNT?

(The Sun Chronicle)

She wanted to cast her final ballot

FOXBORO - Some people never bother to vote.

But for Dora Fitzgerald, the 93-year-old mother and grandmother of a Foxboro family, voting this fall was a life-and-death matter.

On the morning of Oct. 8, Fitzgerald scratched her signature on an absentee ballot from a bed in her North Charleston, S.C., home, where she had moved to be close to some of her nine children.

She died an hour after the ballot was mailed, said her son, Terry Fitzgerald, of Woodland Road in Foxboro.

“During the election season, she took a liking to Barack Obama and decided she would stick around long enough to vote for him in November - at least that long,” Terry Fitzgerald said. He said his mother celebrated her 90th birthday by throwing the first pitch in a minor league baseball game in Charleston, and rode in a hot air balloon over South Carolina at age 91.

But, a heart condition weakened her, and about two weeks ago, the family’s hospice counselor said she might not survive until November.

Terry Fitzgerald’s sister, Mary, sent away for an absentee ballot, “knowing that our mother really wanted to vote for Barack, but knowing she probably wouldn’t make it to the election.”

Their brother, Patrick, helped her fill out the ballot about 10 a.m. on Oct. 8. The ballot was mailed, and she was told she had successfully voted for Obama.

“An hour after she learned that they had mailed it, she left us,” Terry Fitzgerald said.

He said his mother had always been interested in current and neighborhood events.

“As she got older, she became more willing to express strong feelings about public figures, and things that were going on in the world,” Fitzgerald said. “She got saltier as she got older.”

Will Dora Fitzgerald’s vote count in South Carolina?

In Massachusetts, the absentee vote of a person who dies before election day would not count, Town Clerk Robert Cutler said.

“We won’t tell her that,” Fitzgerald said of his mother. “I don’t know that (the election) is going to come down to one vote. She can rest easy, knowing that her voice was heard.”

[ … ]