I know it’s probably too late now. But what would a voter need to do in order to be able to vote in a state other than the one in which they reside. For instance, I am not voting for Bush…I will probably not vote republican in 2008 either. I live in Texas. It is a given that Texas will overwhelmingly vote for Bush. I feel like my vote and millions of other Democratic votes are wasted here. Can I apply for residency in say…Florida or perhaps another borderline (repVdem) state which carries a lot of electoral votes?
What if the millions of Democrats who live in states that are strictly Repulican were to do this? I suppose there would be legal issues, huh?
Didn’t Cheney do this in 2000? Changed his residency at the last minute so he could be on the Bush ticket?
With a little organization this could work. Get all the Dems to apply for residence in another state. Purchase a PO Box for an address…register in that state w/ the Dem headquarters…etc.
Hey, It’s just a hypothetical question but one with a factual answer.
You’d need to actually change your residency in time to register in the new state. That would entail getting some sort of address – renting or buying.
Exception: if you are enrolled as a student, you can register in either the state where attend college, or the state where you live. I think this means full time resident student – you can’t take one course in the University of the State Next Door and commute.
That’s what the answer is supposed to be, anyway. But the fact of the matter is that in the vast majority of places, voter address checking is not rigorous. If you were to grab a voter registration form for a different state, put down some fake address, and send it in, very likely you would not be caught before the election. In fact it would be fairly easy for a single person to vote multiple times in different states and probably not get caught, since there is no nationwide program for states to check their registration lists against each other.
As to what would happen if this occurred in large numbers, I really don’t know. If a million Texas Democrats were all to register in Ohio, anyone who noticed the trend would likely become suspicious. But I don’t think there’s any set procedure for getting them all booted out unless you can prove organized vote fraud, which might take a while. And if they weren’t removed from the rolls before the election, there’s no way of tracing ballots back to the particular voters who registered from another state.
Of course the point may be moot since Diebold has guaranteed us that Bush will win Ohio, but that’s another story.
Voting in a state in which you are not a legal resident is voter fraud, a crime. We do not permit threads about how to break the law, so I’ll close this thread.
bibliophage
moderator GQ