Political News

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University students enrolled in spring semester 2008 will be able to use their student identification cards to vote in Tuesday’s (May 6) Indiana primary, thanks to the university’s Registrar’s Office and the Tippecanoe County clerk.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday voted 6-3 to uphold Indiana’s law, one of the nation’s strictest, requiring individuals to present picture identifications at the precincts in order to vote. The law also requires expiration dates on the identifications, and no expiration date is contained on the Purdue ID card.

“We have some students who do not have driver’s licenses or other forms of ID that wouldn’t have been able to vote on Tuesday,” said Rich Wells, assistant comptroller of collections.

Purdue and Tippecanoe County Clerk Linda Phillips came up with a solution for Tuesday. The registrar’s office, which controls student information, will provide a disk to the one polling precinct on campus — in Room 118 of Purdue Memorial Union — and three other precincts near campus. The clerk’s office will have laptop computers at each of these sites to verify student information. The students must have been enrolled during spring semester 2008.

A disk also will be sent to the clerk’s office, which will allow students to use their Purdue ID cards at any polling site in the county. Poll workers at those sites would call the clerk’s office to verify information.

“The disks Purdue will provide contain directory information that does not include sensitive data,” Wells said. “Students who have asked that their directory information be restricted will not be included.”

The other West Lafayette precincts at which laptops will be placed are: at Morton Community Center, 222 N. Chauncey St; Federated Church, 2400 Sycamore Lane; and the Klondike branch of the Tippecanoe County Public Library, 3062 Lindberg Road.

Polling stations open at 6 a.m. Tuesday and close at 6 p.m.

WASHINGTON, DC — With its primary on May 6, Indiana’s 2007 population of about 6.3 million includes a higher percentage of the non-Hispanic white-alone population and a lower percentage of Hispanics than the nation as a whole, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics. About 59 percent of Indiana’s voting-age citizens cast a ballot in the 2004 general election. The national rate was 64 percent.

These and other statistics about Indiana’s population on topics ranging from language spoken to commute times can be found in the American FactFinder section of the Census Bureau Web site http://factfinder.census.gov/. More information about the nation’s voting record can be found in Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2004 at http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/voting.html.

Highlights include the following:

Source: U.S. Census Bureau Total Population Estimates (2007), State Population Estimates by Characteristics (2006), American Community Survey (2006).

WASHINGTON, DC — The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law issued a statement today expressing disappointment that the Supreme Court rejected a facial, constitutional challenge to Indiana’s voter identification law in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. However, the Lawyers’ Committee notes that the Supreme Court left the door open for future constitutional challenges to voter identification laws.

“We remain committed to ensuring that laws which restrict the ballot to traditionally disfranchised voters without any evidence of in-person voter fraud will not go unchallenged,” stated Jon Greenbaum, director of the Lawyers’ Committee’s Voting Rights Project. “This is not the end of our fight to ensure that elections are open to all eligible citizens.”

The Supreme Court found that a voter identification law may place such a burden on groups of disadvantaged voters that the law would be unconstitutional, but that the plaintiffs fell short in developing their evidence of how the Indiana law burdened voters. Greenbaum cautioned that “state legislatures considering voting restrictions must consider the effect of those restrictions on minority, elderly, poor, disabled and homeless voters before enacting them.”

Unfortunately, during this primary season in its administration of the Election Protection program, the Lawyers’ Committee has already seen instances of the purpose of voter identification requirements being misunderstood by poll workers or applied in a discriminatory manner.

As part of its mission to protect and uphold the rights of traditionally disenfranchised voters, the Lawyers’ Committee will continue to combat unnecessarily restrictive voting laws, including photo identification and proof of citizenship requirements.

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (LCCRUL), a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, was formed in 1963 at the request of President John F. Kennedy to involve the private bar in providing legal services to address racial discrimination. The principal mission of the Lawyers’ Committee is to secure, through the rule of law, equal justice under law, particularly in the areas of housing, community development, employment, voting, education and environmental justice. For more information about the LCCRUL, visit www.lawyerscommittee.org.

LAFAYETTE, Ind. — According to a blog post by CBS News’ Maria Gavrilovic, Barack Obama has begun a three-day bus tour of Indiana that will focus on the economy. Obama’s first stop is Gary, and he has several retail stops scheduled before he ends the evening in Lafayette.

Hillary Clinton holds single digit leads in most state polls, and will campaign in Indiana on Saturday.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The inability of pollsters to predict the New Hampshire primary highlights a lack of understanding about forecasting elections, a Purdue University professor says.

Surveys just before Tuesday’s (Jan. 8) New Hampshire Democratic primary showed Barack Obama leading Hillary Clinton by as much as nine percentage points. Clinton won the primary with about 39 percent of the vote, and Obama finished second with about 36 percent.

“The surprise and inconvenient truth is not that the polling surveys do not accurately make predictions sometimes, but that they are ever accurate,” says Richard Fienberg, a consumer psychologist and director of the Center for Customer Driven Quality at Purdue. “The surveys used are very standard marketing and consumer behavior techniques that my colleagues and I use all the time.”

The most frequently used technique to predict primaries and elections are telephone surveys, which are done as the day of voting draws closer. The numbers in the surveys are tracked and used to gauge a candidate’s strength. The accuracy of those surveys depends on three things, Feinberg says: Timing, samples and events.

“Asking people three weeks before an election day and assuming that they will actually vote may not be valid,” he says.

Surveys’ samples and how representative they are of the population is the second factor.

“If the people who answer the survey are not representative of the people who actually vote, then the results of the survey are probably not going to be accurate,” he says. Read the rest of this entry »