Don't Wear This Shirt To The Polls On November 4th!!!

I'm sure all of you have gotten this email or some variation of it about 19,283 times this week alone. Or maybe it's just me.

Please, please, please advise everyone you know that they absolutely can NOT go to the polls wearing any Obama (or whoever you are voting for) shirts, pins, hats, etc. It is AGAINST THE LAW and will be grounds to have the polling officials to turn you away. This is considered campaigning and no one can campaign within X amount of feet of the polls. They are counting on us being overly excited and not being aware of this long standing law that you can bet will be ENFORCED THIS YEAR!!!!!

They are banking that if you are turned away, you will not go home and change your clothes and return to the polls to vote. Please just don't wear ANY gear of any sorts to the polls! Please share this information with as many people as you can. If you are already aware of this, please don't take it as insulting your intelligence.

Have a great day and see you at the polls on November 4th.

One note: while this is indeed the case in many states, it's not universal!

Maryland's law states the following:

A voter may wear campaign paraphernalia (buttons, t-shirts, or stickers) into the polling place while he or she is there to vote (the voter may not linger in the polling place after voting). However, an election judge, challenger and watcher, or other person stationed inside the polling place or within 100 feet of the polling place may not wear or display campaign materials.

Different states, cities, and counties have different rules for polling place etiquette, so this email isn't entirely true.

Emails like this one, and the 8 million others I get with either somewhat or blatantly misleading info each week never cease to amaze me. I'm so conditioned to getting this sorta crap that I'm usually tempted to pull up the Snopes.com clarification and email it back to everyone cc:ed on the email I received in the first place. Such chain mail is always so overloaded with hyperbole, UPPERCASE WORDS, and exclamation marks!!!!!!! that I often wonder if the well-meaning originators realize how much they're insulting the intelligence of the eventual recipients. Then again, knowing the attention span of a typical email recipient, maybe that's why they overload the emails with such attention getters in the first place.

Cause you know how we do.

Either way, why even bother risking it? Make sure your cousins n'em who are voting for the first time evar leave the Black Men For McCain (yeah right) and Obama/MLK shirts (I have one, AverageSis got it from the RFK swap meet) at home. The last thing we want derailing this historic election is widespread Systematic Disenfranchisement because Negroes just had to floss.

BTW, Obama haters, don't wear this one neither.

Or this one.


Uhhh, I'm running outta bandwidth.


Question: Does your locale have different rules than the one mentioned above? Do you own a Black Men For McCain T-shirt? Does any black man not named Michael Steele own one?

[1] I'm just wondering here, do white folks get/receive these sorts of chain emails? If so, what are yours about, cause ours are usually some nonsense about Denzel and a soldiers home, or some such nonsense.