Vigilance

By GottaLaff

I have a feeling DKos won't mind if I "borrow" this entire post:

If you spot anything while voting or helping out that seems out of place--anything--report it. The campaign and voter protection organizations can't help remedy problems unless there's a record of it, so do not hesitate to report an issue, no matter how minor you think it may be.

Obama Voter Protection:

Call 1-877-US-4-OBAMA (1-877-874-6226) and let them know what problems you're seeing. If you can't get through, use this online form and/or call your local campaign HQ.

You can also call Election Protection, a nonpartisan organization:

• For immediate assistance, call the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline.
• To report problems to Election Protection’s state teams through Twitter, use these guidelines.
• Track incident reports received through the hotline at OurVoteLive.org
• Keep an eye on voting issues as they are reported at the OurVoteLive Blog
• Follow breaking voting news and issues at the 866OurVote Twitter account

There are a lot of problems being reported out there. This time around, we will be all over it.

Election Protection: Largest voter-protection effort in American history

By GottaLaff

With every fiber of my being, I hope this works:

A group of civil rights lawyers is launching what it bills as the largest voter-protection effort in American history, planning to raise and spend millions of dollars to station hundreds of lawyers and thousands of volunteers at polling places across the country to help voters having trouble with the polls on Election Day.

The non-partisan group, called Election Protection -- to be announced at a press conference later this morning -- is being headed up by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a legal group established in 1963 in the heat of the Civil Rights Movement.

While the group ran a similar effort in 2004, the new effort will be on a far grander scale, reflecting a growing sense that private efforts to combat the bureaucratic ineptitude and premeditated shenanigans that continue to mar the voting process just haven't been up to the task.

"This will be the largest voter protection effort in the history of the country," project head Jonah Goldman, a longtime civil rights and election reform lawyer, insisted in an interview yesterday with Election Central. The backbone of their effort is a hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE, that voters can call to have their questions answered, and to report problems. [...]

Election Protection 2008 vows to employ hundreds of lawyers and law students at call centers across the country on Election Day. "We've expanded our volume, our capacity from 2004, and we expect to be able to handle over a quarter of a million calls this time," says Goldman, who's also director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections.

On top of that, the group plans to enlist tens of thousands of volunteers to physically assist people get to their polling station. [...]

Goldman added that the group would also be taking on outright efforts to disenfranchise voters. For instance, we've seen recent allegations that the Michigan Republican Party is trying to prevent people on foreclosure lists from voting -- as well as efforts in Virginia to prevent college students from registering where they go to school.

Good. Good, good, good.