The King County Housing Authority, in Washington state, serving the communities surrounding Seattle, sent out controversial letters encouraging people to vote recently. The offer letters were received by Section 8 and housing assistance recipients on approximately Sept. 10, 2004. The letters came with a voter registration card, and said if you filled out the voter registration card, and returned it to the Housing Authority, you would be entered in a drawing for $100. So, people began to fill out and mail the voter registration cards under this premise.

A few weeks later, in a letter dated Oct. 7, 2004 sent to clients, the Housing Authority changed the offer, even though people had already accepted and acted upon it. The Oct. letter says, “…Recently, the housing authority discovered that our offer of the opportunity to participate in a drawing for a possible prize is prohibited under federal law. As a result, the KCHA is not allowed to follow through with the planned drawing. We sincerely apologize for our failure to research this matter before making the offer to you, and hope this has not created any inconvenience for you. Thank you for understanding this matter…Ashley Lommers-Johnson, Director of Policy.� There are many problems with that. What is to stop others from offering all kinds of things for people to register to vote, and then later, saying “Oops, our wrong…thanks for the registrations, but we cannot go through with our part of the offer.� Unless the Housing Authority gave each and every voter registration they collected under that guise back to the voters themselves, this is severely problematic to me. And how do you measure what someone lost, who registered to vote for the first time perhaps, out of monetary desperation, and now found out they were basically tricked into registering to vote?

The King County Housing Authority is not the only one making mistakes, either. In Seattle, King 5 TV News (NBC) reported on Oct. 22, that people who have mailed their absentee ballots into the polls, are finding them returned in their own mailboxes. Apparently, the envelopes were designed to have the poll address on one side, and the voter’s address on the other side. The machines at the post office scan one side or the other arbitrarily, and thus these ballots are going all over the place. Empty ballots that were mailed from the polls to the voter went back to the polls empty and votes that were mailed went back to the voter, not the polls. The voting officials said that the voters who found their votes returned need to bring them in to one of the voting polls, which, to me, seems to have defeated the purpose of absentee ballots entirely. Another problem with the absentee ballots sent out recently in King County, Washington, is some of them were missing the little bubbles next to the candidates name that you fill in to indicate which candidate you are choosing. Those ballots went out with the candidates names, but no apparent place to vote for them. And in other King County cases, voters received two absentee ballots, reports King 5 News.

Voting sounds much simpler than it is. There are voting glitches in state after state right now. Buffoonery, such as the marked ballots coming back to the voter in the mail, as well as the things Florida is experiencing AGAIN right now, remind us of how laughable the idea of Americans running/facilitating “free elections in Iraq� really is. America cannot run its own elections cleanly and fairly. In King County, people (I would assume more than one person looked over the ballot sample before printing) did not *notice* that there were no selection bubbles on the ballot and ordered a printing and mailing of those ballots! And Florida has become a poster child for voting problems, and it continues on today. Is this the “free democracy� that our soldiers, and ten times that amount of Iraqi nationals, are dying for in Iraq? The “democracy� that openly and often makes fun of the widely held belief that George W. Bush fixed the last elections with his brother, the Governor of Florida. And let’s not even start talking about Reagan and his Daddy Bush’s “October Surprise� for President Carter. You remember it, don’t you? When Reagan and Bush had the Iran hostages freed the HOUR of Reagan’s inauguration as if by some coincidental miracle, on the heels of Daddy Bush’s reign as CIA director…Why would anyone think America could facilitate free elections in other countries, such as Iraq, with any efficiency and fairness, when the American voting system is in such shambles?