Ballot Access News
October 1, 2012 – Volume 28, Number 5
| This issue was printed on white paper. |
Table of Contents
On October 19, a U.S. Air Force transport plane crashed as it was trying to land at Shindad Air Base in Afghanistan. Aboard was 4,700 pounds of mail meant for U.S. troops. The military has contacted every election administration office in the U.S. and explained that any absentee overseas ballot sent recently to zip code 09382 should be replaced. See this story. Zip code 09382 is one of the U.S. military zip codes, sent to state “AE” (Armed Forces Africa Canada Europe).
Mail absentee ballots always require that the voter sign the outer return envelope, which will protect against any duplicate ballots being voted on by any particular voter. Thanks to Bill Van Allen for the link.
On October 20, Al Jazeera-English TV ran a 25-minute segment about the Commission on Presidential Debates. See it at this link. Especially notable is the interview with George Farah, who mentions details about the Commission that are not generally known. The segment also contains a fairly lengthy interview with Jill Stein.
In 1990, the United States signed the Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE. Among other things, the U.S. promised to “provide that no legal or administrative obstacle stands in the way of unimpeded access to the media on a non-discriminatory basis for all political groupings and individuals wishing to participate in the electoral process.” United States laws prop up the Commission on Presidential Debates, which are sponsored for the most part by profit-making corporations. The expenses are tax-deductible, meaning that the U.S. government is indirectly subsidizing the Commission. People in the world outside of the United States are interested in comparing U.S. rhetoric with U.S. reality.
Ballot Access News editor Richard Winger appeared on Russia Today’s news interview show to comment on the presidential debates.
~ Eric Garris
On October 26, by apparent coincidence, both Yahoo!News and Salon carried columns condemning the arrest and incarceration of Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala on October 3, at the first presidential debate for the two major party nominees. Here is the Yahoo!News commentary, which is by Tom Bissell. Here is the Salon commentary, by Greg Olear.
