You have seen them on TV.
This week New York's Attorney General went to court to stop
National Collector's Mint from selling those "2004 Freedom Tower Silver Dollar"s that were allegedly "minted from silver recovered at Ground Zero." The ad has patriotic music playing in the background. It is the same outfit that markets Ronald Reagan coins.
An AP story said:
The TV and print ads include one fashioned after a news story that reads: "Today, history is being made. For the first time ever, a legally authorized government issue silver dollar has been struck to commemorate the World Trade Center and the new Freedom Tower being erected in its place ... Most importantly, each coin has been created using .999 pure silver recovered from Ground Zero!"
The dollar pieces are priced at $39 each, but sold at $19.95 with a limit of five per customer.
A company spokesman didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. On Sept. 10, the U.S. Mint issued a notice on its website that the coin "is not a legally authorized government issued" product.
Don't newspapers and TV stations have some burden to find out if these kinds of ads are true before they run them?
Voter Registration Surges
I am impressed by how many stories I have seen about a big surge in last-minute registrations. This is the best evidence I can think of that people are really interested in this election.
In Maryland, thousands signed up at the last minute. The same is true in rural West Virginia, Rockford, Ill., and Hawaii. All of these places have seen a record increase in registration.
In Weld County, Colo., there has been a 16 percent increase in registration since 2002.
Blacks are registering to vote in record numbers in San Francisco. BlackCommentator.com reported:
According to a New York Times analysis, Democrat-affiliated groups "have added tens of thousands of new voters to the rolls in the swing states of Ohio and Florida, a surge that has far exceeded the efforts of Republicans in both states."
...According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "African-Americans, who generally support Democrats, are registering in high numbers. About 32 percent of newly registered voters through June are African-American. Overall, 26 percent of Georgia's registered voters are black."
Fake Voter Registrations
I am alarmed by how many of these stories I have seen in the last few days. Could you do stories to help people find out if they are really registered before Election Day?
It is especially important for the folks who just signed up to vote. In some places, you can just go online, like this, to check.
From Denver to Michigan to Ohio I have seen stories about people who have signed up fake voters, who have signed up to vote repeatedly, and I have seen stories like this one from Deborah Sherman at KUSA in Denver that said the root of the fraud are voter sign-up drives that paid people according to how many folks they registered.
KUSA reported:
Some of the registration drive workers earn $2 per application or about $10 an hour. One woman admitted to forging three people's names on about 40 voter registration applications.
In Michigan more than 9,000 registration forms are under review. In Tennessee, phone scammers are posing as voter registration volunteers to get access to people's personal information.
In Ohio, many voter applications turned out to have fake addresses on them.
In Las Vegas, one company collected thousands of registration forms from citizens, then threw some -- it's unclear how many -- in the trash, unbeknownst to those citizens.
One of the oddest voter registration stories comes from Jackson, Miss., where folks held a voter registration drive in the county jail. The AP story says:
There is a widely held misconception that all felony convicts lose the right to vote, (said Derrick Johnson, the Mississippi NAACP president). According to the Mississippi Constitution, only those convicted of rape, murder, bribery, theft, arson, perjury, forgery, embezzlement, bigamy, or obtaining money or goods under false pretense are disenfranchised.
Some people in county jails are awaiting trial and have not yet been convicted of any crime.
Johnson said registering inmates began as a pilot project in Pike County in 2002.
Pike County Circuit Clerk Robert Graves said if he gets a request, he'll allow county jail inmates to go to the courthouse to vote Nov. 2.
Out-of-State Students Sway Local Elections
Students from non-battleground states may register in battleground states and sway the election.
This is a very interesting story sent to Al's Morning Meeting from Gregg Hennigan of Cityview (Iowa). Hennigan tells me:
It appears that many out-of-state students in Iowa, and I would suspect elsewhere, are planning on voting locally this November, which in closely contested states like Iowa could determine the outcome of the presidential election. Representatives from student political groups, such as the College Democrats and Republicans, that I talked to told me they are encouraging students from non-battleground states to vote here. The only problem: It's difficult to get a sense of how many students from out of state will vote here because they register by their college address. Most of the evidence was anecdotal. But it won't take many to affect the elections in Iowa, a state decided by 4,144 votes in 2000.
How long must a person have lived in your state to vote there? In Iowa, for example, a person must only have a local address to vote. A freshman from, say, California, could vote in Iowa even if he or she has only lived in the state since school started.
Elderly Polling Place Judges
Al's Morning Meeting Jim Sweeney spotted this:
This story on election problems from the Rocky Mountain News has a startling statistic about two-thirds of the way down: "More than 70 percent of election judges in Denver are over the age of 70."
Reporters could look into the situation in their own areas, see how hard it is to get people to work the polls. I bet it's not an isolated problem.
Drink, Drive, Lose Your Car
In lots of places you lose your license if you drive drunk. The Detroit Free Press says in one Michigan county, you lose more than that.
The Free Press reports:
Here's how it works: You drink and drive, you could lose your car.
Drunken drivers arrested for a first offense -- when they have a child under 16 in the car -- would pay $900 to retrieve a vehicle.
A second offense results in a $900 to $1,800 retrieval fee.
A third drunken-driving offense results in forfeiture of a vehicle, meaning you cannot get it back.
The story says that a similar law in Ohio cut the repeat offender DUI rate by 35 percent in two years.
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts, and other materials from a variety of websites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed, and a link will be provided, whenever possible.
Voter registration drives became so intense in Washington County, Ohio,...
