Thank you Barbara Boxer

[whimsicaldeb]

Thank you Barbara Boxer ... good work!
~Deb

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... AMQ1B1.DTL

Boxer delays presidential vote count with protest
Senator, colleague object to Ohio tally -- Electoral College confirmation held up
- Edward Epstein, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Friday, January 7, 2005

Washington -- California Sen. Barbara Boxer, expressing regret for failing to act after the contested 2000 presidential election, delayed George Bush's formal re-election for almost four hours Thursday in a nearly unprecedented protest of election day irregularities.

Boxer and fellow Democrat Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Cleveland, relying on widespread reports of voting problems on Nov. 2, stopped the count of Electoral College votes with a formal objection to the Ohio results. Their protest, which they said wasn't aimed at overturning Bush's victory over Democratic Sen. John Kerry, triggered a debate in the House and Senate on election reform.

"This was a hard decision, but I feel really good about this decision," said Boxer, the feisty liberal senator who easily won re-election in November to her fourth term. "We cannot keep turning our eyes away from a flawed system, particularly as we have people dying in Iraq every day to bring democracy to those people."

Boxer's move, which Capitol wags quickly dubbed "Boxer's Rebellion," made many of her Democratic colleagues uncomfortable and drew biting criticism from Republicans, particularly in the House.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas said the effort to delay Bush's victory was shameful and showed that the Democratic Party is dominated by conspiracy theorists he dubbed the party's "X-Files" wing.

"Many observers will discard today's events as a partisan waste of time, '' DeLay said. "But it is much worse than that."

Several Republicans ridiculed Boxer and protesting Democratic House members as being influenced by conspiracy theories about the November election on the Internet as well as filmmaker Michael Moore's controversial documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11." Moore's film includes a scene from the formal tally of the 2000 Electoral College vote, when several Democratic House members objected to the results of Bush's narrow victory over Democratic Vice President Al Gore in Florida. Their effort failed to stop the count because no senator would join them as required by law.

"Get over it,'' Rep. Ric Keller, R-Fla., told the Democrats on Thursday. "The very people who refuse to move on are the people from MoveOn.org and their hero, Michael Moore.''

Boxer admitted that the questions raised about the 2000 election -- although not Moore's movie -- influenced her decision to join Tubbs Jones' objection on Thursday. She said she regrets not filing a similar protest after Gore lost to Bush in 2000.

"I was asked by Al Gore not to do so. Frankly, looking back, I wished I would have. It was not about Al Gore. It was about the voters,'' she said.

Boxer had been pressured by constituents in San Francisco and elsewhere and by liberal groups to file the objection to Ohio's results. She said a letter from Tubbs Jones on Tuesday finally made her decide to sign the objection. The letter listed such problems in Ohio as voters being forced to stand in line at some precincts for 10 or 12 hours, some voters being told that the election would be held on Nov. 3, not on Nov. 2, the actual election day, and the lack of a paper trail for votes cast in electronic machines.

"We have spent our lives fighting for things were believe in,'' Boxer told reporters. "Now we must add a new fight, the fight for electoral justice. Every citizen should be guaranteed that their vote counts.''

The move was just the first challenge to a state's full slate of electoral votes since 1877. A similar objection to a single vote was made in 1969.

Kerry, traveling in the Middle East, has conceded defeat and wasn't even in the Capitol for Thursday's events.

The objection stopped the counting of Electoral College votes in a usually perfunctory quadrennial joint session of Congress. Final returns showed that Bush won Ohio by 118,000 votes and that the state provided the electoral votes to put the Bush-Cheney ticket over the top.

Republicans scoffed at the objection. Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, assailed Boxer and Tubbs Jones for "wild, incoherent, completely unsubstantiated charges.''

"I find it almost impossible to believe that we're standing on the floor of the Senate discussing whether George Bush actually won the state of Ohio,'' he added.

DeWine was one of only two Republican senators to speak during the debate in the Senate. But a procession of Democrats took to the floor, saying more changes are needed to federal election requirements to ensure that every vote is counted. None, however, voted to sustain Boxer's objection, which would have further delayed the counting of the electoral votes. Boxer was on the losing end of a 74-1 vote.

In the House, which debated the full two hours as called for by the objection, Tubbs Jones said the new Congress should make election reform a top issue.

"Surely in this Congress we can take a few minutes and step back to debate election irregularities,'' she said. "If we can help overturn an election in Ukraine, why can't we take a few minutes to debate our own election irregularities?''

The House voted 267 to 31 to reject the objection. Democratic Reps. Barbara Lee of Oakland, Sam Farr of Carmel and Lynn Woolsey of Petaluma were among those who voted to sustain the objection.

The process of counting states' electoral votes by alphabetical order started ordinarily enough at 1 p.m. in the crowded House chamber. Vice President Dick Cheney, who is president of the Senate, entered with senators and pages carrying two handsome mahogany boxes. Inside the boxes were sealed envelopes containing the electoral votes of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The counting started. "Mr. President, the certificate of the electoral vote of the State of California seems to be regular in form and authentic, and it appears therefrom that John F. Kerry of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts received 55 votes for president and John Edwards of North Carolina received 55 votes for vice president,'' California's declaration read.

But the process stopped at 1:21 p.m. when Boxer and Tubbs Jones rose to object to Ohio's vote. They were joined by about a dozen House members who rose in support, including Lee.

"I seek to object that they were not in all known circumstances regularly given,'' Tubbs Jones said of Ohio's votes.

Senators then trooped back to their side of the Capitol for their debate.

After both sides resoundingly rejected the protest, the joint session resumed at 5:08 p.m., this time with only a handful of members on hand. Counting of the ballots resumed at 5:11 p.m., three hours and 50 minutes after it was stalled, and at 5:19 p.m. Cheney announced the result everyone knew was coming.

Bush won 286 votes out of the 538-vote total, 16 more than the 270 needed. Kerry received 251, and one vote was cast for Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina for president by a Minnesota elector. Cheney won 286 votes for vice president, to Edwards' 252.
An election protest

The Constitution requires Congress, in a joint session of the House and Senate, to open the formal Electoral College votes for president and vice president and ratify the results.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, objected to the results of Ohio's 20 electoral votes, relying on federal law, 3 U.S. Code Section 15, which sets out the procedure to protest the vote of any state's slate of electors.

-- When the results of the Electoral College vote are being read, the president of the Senate "shall call for objections, if any."

-- An objection must be presented in writing and "signed by at least one senator and one member of the House of Representatives."

-- If the objection is received as proper, the Electoral College tally is stopped, and the House and Senate meet separately to consider the protest.

-- Section 17 of the code limits debate on an objection to two hours and specifies that House members and senators may speak only once and for not more than five minutes each.

-- The law requires a vote on the objection. If the objection is rejected, the challenged Electoral College votes are counted.

----
http://boxer.senate.gov/news/record.cfm?id=230450

Statement On Her Objection To The Certification Of Ohio’s Electoral Votes

January 6, 2005

For most of us in the Senate and the House, we have spent our lives fighting for things we believe in – always fighting to make our nation better.

We have fought for social justice. We have fought for economic justice. We have fought for environmental justice. We have fought for criminal justice.

Now we must add a new fight – the fight for electoral justice.

Every citizen of this country who is registered to vote should be guaranteed that their vote matters, that their vote is counted, and that in the voting booth of their community, their vote has as much weight as the vote of any Senator, any Congressperson, any President, any cabinet member, or any CEO of any Fortune 500 Corporation.

I am sure that every one of my colleagues – Democrat, Republican, and Independent – agrees with that statement. That in the voting booth, every one is equal.

So now it seems to me that under the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees the right to vote, we must ask:

Why did voters in Ohio wait hours in the rain to vote? Why were voters at Kenyon College, for example, made to wait in line until nearly 4 a.m. to vote because there were only two machines for 1300 voters?

Why did poor and predominantly African-American communities have disproportionately long waits?

Why in Franklin County did election officials only use 2,798 machines when they said they needed 5,000? Why did they hold back 68 machines in warehouses? Why were 42 of those machines in predominantly African-American districts?

Why did, in Columbus area alone, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 voters leave polling places, out of frustration, without having voted? How many more never bothered to vote after they heard about this?

Why is it when 638 people voted at a precinct in Franklin County, a voting machine awarded 4,258 extra votes to George Bush. Thankfully, they fixed it – but how many other votes did the computers get wrong?

Why did Franklin County officials reduce the number of electronic voting machines in downtown precincts, while adding them in the suburbs? This also led to long lines.

In Cleveland, why were there thousands of provisional ballots disqualified after poll workers gave faulty instructions to voters?

Because of this, and voting irregularities in so many other places, I am joining with Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones to cast the light of truth on a flawed system which must be fixed now.

Our democracy is the centerpiece of who we are as a nation. And it is the fondest hope of all Americans that we can help bring democracy to every corner of the world.

As we try to do that, and as we are shedding the blood of our military to this end, we must realize that we lose so much credibility when our own electoral system needs so much improvement.

Yet, in the past four years, this Congress has not done everything it should to give confidence to all of our people their votes matter.

After passing the Help America Vote Act, nothing more was done.

A year ago, Senators Graham, Clinton and I introduced legislation that would have required that electronic voting systems provide a paper record to verify a vote. That paper trail would be stored in a secure ballot box and invaluable in case of a recount.

There is no reason why the Senate should not have taken up and passed that bill. At the very least, a hearing should have been held. But it never happened.

Before I close, I want to thank my colleague from the House, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones.

Her letter to me asking for my intervention was substantive and compelling.

As I wrote to her, I was particularly moved by her point that it is virtually impossible to get official House consideration of the whole issue of election reform, including these irregularities.

The Congresswoman has tremendous respect in her state of Ohio, which is at the center of this fight.

Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones was a judge for 10 years. She was a prosecutor for 8 years. She was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame in 2002.

I am proud to stand with her in filing this objection.

230450

[perezoso]

I voted for Ms. Boxer (and Johnny Kerry as well). Personally, I think she is somewhat obnoxious, but her record is impressive--on enviro, education, etc. I do not think there is a chance with the Ohio thing, but it's to her credit she objected.

Yet the democrats did FAIL in not pressing the Florida recount. Gore should have fought that to his death. IN fact we still should--even conservatives should join. If the evidence shows Gore won, then he won, and the supreme court members-barons who blocked the recount---Scalia etc.-- should be indicted..

[hester_prynne]

Although i appreciate this kind of thing, I also have to laugh. It's nothing really. She yipped.
Yip, yap,
pompous crap.

Why doesn't someone, who won't go to jail for it, do something brave?

RRRRROOOOOAAAAAARRRRRRRRR!

H