Urgent: Protect our voting

There have been reports for months now about the potential abuses of computerized voting. Advocates have been urging people to ask that any such voting require paper receipts. But what about the process of registration that happens before you even walk into a polling place? Gregory Palast (a reporter for the BBC) has a chilling essay coming out in an upcoming Nation (May 17, 2004) where he talks about the quite deliberate efforts to “purge” the nation’s polling lists — one effect of which is to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of African Americans. Similar tactics were used in Florida in the 2000 election, and there was not sufficient outrage or condemnation of the process then. We need to wake up and stand up for the right of EVERY American citizen to participate in the process of choosing our nation’s leaders.