In South Carolina an interesting take on the "Voting Straight Ticket" Line

[CatBO]

I received this email that claims to be from the SC Democratic party this morning. It has an interesting take on the warnings floating about the Internet warning people to not vote the straight Democratic ticket. A perspective I had not considered before:

1) That for SC at least, these "warnings" are a scam by the Republicans
2) That the purpose is to confuse voters, and more interestingly, slow down the voting which was something I had not considered before.

So SC voters, take a look:


http://www.scdp.org

Urgent warning about Republican tricks!

Some really bad people are sending emails that say not to vote a straight Democratic ticket in SC. Some say that your vote won't count for Obama if you vote a straight Democratic ticket, or that pushing the Democratic button will cancel your vote. Some of them even pretend to come from the Democratic Party.

THOSE EMAILS ARE NOT TRUE!!

They are a scam by the Republicans to keep us from voting for all the Democratic candidates, or to confuse us and slow down the voting. Don't believe them. Voting the straight Democratic ticket is the best way to have your vote counted for Obama and all the Democrats.

I intend to vote for Barack Obama and all the other Democratic candidates by pushing the Democratic button. You should do it, too!

Please forward this email to everyone you know. Tell them to check with the SC Election Commission at www.scvotes.org to see the truth.

This election is too important for you or anyone else to fall for a trick.

Carol Fowler, Chair
South Carolina Democratic Party

[BzaDem]

1. In general, it is not a good idea to use straight-party-voting. BradBlog has good info on it.

www.bradblog.com

I'm not sure how this applies to SC; I'm just saying in general.

[spelldmilk]

2. That's interesting…

I was just at a GOTV training, where a long standing, local, outspoken, activist individual mentioned straight-party voting in this particular national election as a positive. The idea being, voting straight-party makes it very, very difficult for an error to occur in how the vote is registered.

[CatBO]

3. Well, the Party-line is....

I'm not surprised to see the 2 messages out of sync. The link above isn't affiliated with a "party" of course.

But when you think about what the Democratic party will "push", of course it's going to be a straight party-line vote. After all, they want to ensure that every single member of their party is chosen correctly.

What I have heard about this rumor, that I believe to be true, is that in some states you must vote for President and -then- vote straight-ticket for the remaining members of the party you support. In SC, it sounds like you can just choose party-line voting and it will select them all.

Either way I completely understand why the Democratic party would want to send out messaging such as this. I'm just surprised that their take on it is that it's Republican dirty-tricks, but with your post, and the original post I'm getting a clearer picture. :D

[spelldmilk]

6. I didn't get the impression that the person was pushing

a Party-line, but that the votes were recorded differently, as individuals v. party. But this may depend alot on how the vote is cast, say touch screen, paper, or different electronic record. I still cannot understand why the system has not been standardized.

[HughMoran]

4. Straight ticket voting helped turn NH 100% blue for the first time in over 100 years

Let's not forget the advantage of a guaranteed Dem vote for all downticket Dems without chance of missed vote or mistake by voter.

[tanyev]

5. I got one of those here in Texas, too.

This county is so red I never vote straight-ticket. There are a lot of races where there aren't any Democrats on the ballot. But sometimes there might be a Libertarian or Independent running against the incumbent Republican who has held that office for years.