Ballot Box

Thousands of police stormed a polling place in Seoul early today and evicted 2,000 people to recover a disputed ballot box that opposition groups said was stuffed with fraudulent votes during Wednesday's presidential election. The protesters had prevented election workers from opening the disputed ballot box at a voting place in a district government office building in the Kuro section of Seoul. About 4,000 police firing tear gas and backed by a dozen fire engines shooting water at the protesters stormed the building at 6 a.m., witnesses said.

Since the last time the All-Star ballots were counted a week ago, Phillies catcher Darren Daulton completed a streak during which he hit seven home runs in seven starts and took over the National League lead in RBI. San Diego's Benito Santiago remained on the disabled list. During that same time, Santiago tallied more than 238,000 additional votes to hold his lead in the fan election. Daulton got less than 26,000 additional votes and slipped from fourth place to sixth among NL catchers.

Proud and defiant, Park Young Hwan stood guard late last night over the ballot box he had captured. He was surrounded and protected by thousands of other chanting, fist- shaking residents of the tough, working-class district of Kuro - irate people whose only consolation on this frigid night of defeat for South Korea's opposition was their firm belief that they had caught the ruling party in the act of stealing the election. The knee-high, yard-long, green ballot box was still next to the pickup truck in which Park had found it - hidden beneath several bundled packages of bread and apples and presumably filled with rigged ballots - at noon yesterday.

Traveling is suddenly the most critical move an NBA player can make. An estimated 423 players are eligible to travel to any of 47 regional National Labor Relations Board offices to make a stand on decertifying their union. They can make the trip today, with the polls open from 10:30 a.m. until noon and again from 3:30 to 5 p.m., or they can do it Sept. 7 at the same times. The Philadelphia office is at 6th and Chestnut streets. What's at stake is whether the 1995-96 season is delayed or, in a worst- case scenario, eliminated.

In the soothing ointment of President Clinton's words on Wednesday, one element was especially welcome to people who worry about the political giddiness encouraged, inevitably, by the civic liturgy of an inauguration. The element was the emphasis placed by Clinton, who as candidate stressed "change" propelled by government, on the autonomy of change: "Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world. " The forces to which he was referring - forces of communication, commerce, science, intellectual and religious conviction - are always doing that.

It was just before dawn yesterday when the first pop could be heard and tear gas started to fill the cold morning air. The battle of Kuro had begun. When it was over several hours later, 1,005 anti-government protesters were under arrest and scores were injured, some of them severely beaten. There also were persistent reports that several protesters either jumped from or were pushed from atop a five-story government office building that had been used as a polling place.

THE REACTION of the Daily News and the left in general to Samuel A. Alito Jr. tells me that the president picked the right man for the job. Nominees such as Alito are in the public spotlight for the first time, so I have little firsthand knowledge of their conservative credentials. That's why I watch the reaction of the left to the nominee. Their reaction is fear. The left can't get what they want through the ballot box, so they depend on the courts to back their agenda. This nominee threatens their control of the Supreme Court.

For the past several weeks, Taiwan and China have been exchanging rhetorical broadsides about how the island's political future might be decided. . . . Tuesday, President Bush essentially placed the United States on the side of the dictators who promise war, rather than the democrats whose threat is a ballot box. His gift to visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was to condemn "the comments and actions made by the leader of Taiwan" while ignoring the sanguinary rhetoric of the man standing next to him. Mr. Bush had his reasons for doing so - above all to avoid one more foreign policy crisis during an election year.

LEAVE IT TO the Christian right to again use abortion to throw a monkey wrench at health care. Abortion has been legal for decades and represents separation from church in favor of state. I, as a taxpayer, pay for many government policies with which I disagree: war, capital punishment and denial of homosexual rights being some of them. But I want to see improvements for those bankrupted by health care. I separate my pet peeves from issues that benefit the majority. I simply ask the religious right to stop using their hot-button issues to deny the majority.

  Long gone Changing his approach hasn't stopped Texas Rangers slugger Josh Hamilton from slugging the long ball. And we do mean long ball - like 468 feet long. Hamilton smacked that homer Sunday in the Rangers' last game to extend his career-best hitting streak to 21 games. It was his 47th hit this month, tying a team record. Hamilton said he is more patient this season, eliminating a toe-tap, and is trying to swing the bat more level. The result is a hitting streak spanning more than three weeks that has raised his average to .346, tied for second-best in the majors.

Now that it's been resolved that photo IDs won't be required in the current election, can we move on to other measures that enhance, not suppress, turnout? Like allowing early voting? Or voting by mobile phone? According to the Associated Press, Pennsylvania is the largest of 10 states that don't allow early voting, online registration, or Election Day registration. Here, the voter-registration cutoff is this Tuesday, a month before Election Day. And state law allows for early voting only if residents apply for an absentee ballot through their county's Board of Elections, a process that requires them to document why they'll be unable to make it to a polling place on Election Day. Potential early voters must cite factors such as military service, professional duties, vacations, religious holidays, and illness or physical disability.

Saying America is so mired in "moral depravity" that only a mass appeal to the Almighty can save it, Christian evangelical leaders from across the country are planning a giant prayer rally for Sept. 29 in Philadelphia. The "America for Jesus" daylong gathering on Independence Mall is expected to draw at least 30,000 people who "want to turn the nation around," said Bishop Anne Giminez, chairwoman of the event and pastor of Rock Pentecostal Church in Virginia Beach, Va. "We see the symptoms of decline all around us," she said Wednesday, citing murder and abortion rates and the decline of marriage.

In 1964, the American people enacted the 24th Amendment to prevent the exclusion of the poor from the ballot box. In his recent speech at the NAACP convention, U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. wasn't indulging in election-year rhetoric when he condemned Texas' 2011 voter-identification law as a poll tax that could exclude the poor. He was speaking the hard legal truth. The Justice Department would be right to challenge this new law as an unconstitutional poll tax. The department has temporarily blocked the Texas law under special provisions of the Voting Rights Act that apply to jurisdictions, mostly in the South, with a history of discriminating against minority groups.

When he cast his lot last month with elites who want to reinvent marriage, President Obama thought he was riding the crest of history. Cheered on by the media and $15 million in campaign cash from Hollywood — both of whom consider his "coming out" on par with the Emancipation Proclamation — the president presumes "the people" are behind him. Yet in fact, the man Newsweek declared our "first gay president" has confirmed how strikingly his...

TO THOSE who think it's no big deal to require a photo ID to vote in Pennsylvania, meet Wilola Lee, 59; Gloria Cuttino, 64, and Nadine Marsh, 84, who all have voted regularly for decades. Each has been told by her native state — Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia, respectively — that there is no record of her birth. As a result, they can't get the birth certificates required to get the photo IDs now required to continue voting.   If the new Pennsylvania voter ID law is allowed to take effect at the November election, these women won't be able to vote.

WHAT ARE they afraid of? That's the obvious question that arises from yet another move by the fracking industry, and their BFFs in Pennsylvania government, to keep secret ("proprietary," if you will) the toxic chemicals that they are injecting into the earth. Act 13, the hydraulic fracturing law passed in February, already qualified as a major corporate giveaway to the natural-gas industry, giving companies the right to overturn local zoning laws and pretty much drill anywhere.

In 1984, I campaigned to be an elected alternate delegate (from Pennsylvania's Eighth Congressional District) to the Republican National Convention in Dallas. The process required that I get elector signatures for my name to appear on the ballot, solicit the party endorsement at numerous candidate screenings, and win an election at the ballot box. The world has changed, and elections should change, too. Today, Americans earn college credits online, shop online, read news online, and view school grades online.

CONAKRY, Guinea - Guinea's president narrowly survived an assassination attempt Tuesday after gunmen encircled his home overnight and pounded his bedroom with rockets, throwing into doubt the stability of the country's first democratically elected government. President Alpha Conde was sleeping in a different room when the shooting erupted outside his residence about 3 a.m. Rocket-propelled grenades landed inside the compound and one of his bodyguards was killed, said Francois Louceny Fall, a minister at the presidency who acts as Conde's chief of staff.

The census is out, and the numbers are in: Philadelphia added nearly 97,000 Asian and Hispanic residents during the last decade. But will those numbers translate to political influence in the 2011 city elections? New faces alone will not propel candidates into office from communities neither monolithic nor necessarily politically united. No one knows that better than City Councilwoman Maria Quiñones Sánchez, whose hold on her Seventh District seat is precarious. She cannot even count on unified support from her own Puerto Rican community.

  Long gone Changing his approach hasn't stopped Texas Rangers slugger Josh Hamilton from slugging the long ball. And we do mean long ball - like 468 feet long. Hamilton smacked that homer Sunday in the Rangers' last game to extend his career-best hitting streak to 21 games. It was his 47th hit this month, tying a team record. Hamilton said he is more patient this season, eliminating a toe-tap, and is trying to swing the bat more level. The result is a hitting streak spanning more than three weeks that has raised his average to .346, tied for second-best in the majors.