The state would be having franchise leaks.
“If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.”
40+ years in IT suggest to me that this may be an understatement.
If you move to a new address in the same state and re-register to vote at your new address, that DOES automatically un-register you at your prior address, I think, at least in California. I don’t know how that works in other states, or if you move from one state to another.
It should, and it should be possible to pass rules/legislation to make sure it does . . . but it’s so much more to have that as an excuse to ‘purge’ the voter roles and keep the ‘wrong people’ from voting without jumping through hoops, often at the last minute.
CMC
At least when I was in, it was far more the rule than the exception to vote absentee elsewhere than your current duty station.
By law, servicemembers are assumed to retain the domicile (and state taxation) from wherever they entered the service until/unless they choose to change it to their current station. Where it will stay until they change it again or separate. Many careerists spend all 20 years voting absentee in wherever was their youthful home.
Being transferred to a state with lower income tax than you’ve been paying was usually the only thing that made folks switch states. But nearly everyone did once that happened. As a result, postings to low-tax states were extra popular.
Vehicle registration, titling, plates, and associated fees worked (still work?) the same way. So folks venue-shopped for cheap rates as they drifted around the country over the years or decades. Then snagged a lower rate whenever they could. Buying a new car in the lower sales-tax state just before or just after transfer was another common move.
Agreed. But …
I live here in So FL in the epicenter of the semi-annual migration of Northeasterners to warmer climes every winter. In my zip code about a third of our residences are part time residences. In other nearby zip codes the number is more like 2/3rds.
Many of my part-time neighbors are registered to vote in both places. And tell me they vote in both places. They consider it a natural privilege of being smart enough to have two residences.
I can sorta tolerate the idea of voting for state & especially local offices in both places. Everyone has a legitimate interest in how those governments manage the area where your residence(s) is/are. Although the very part-time vacationers are notoriously single issue: low taxes, period.
Morally speaking, voting for Federal congressmen in 2 states is getting real iffy. And voting for President twice is right out. But it appears to be commonplace.
I don’t know, but assume, that “snowbird” communities all over the US have a lot of this, just as we do here.
I don’t know the actual legalities on any of this, but I sure know the local common practice. And it stinks.
But, as @crowmanyclouds says just above, in the current climate of organized partisan voter suppression, any attempt to fix multi-jurisdiction voting at the interstate or Federal level is more likely to cause harm than good.
If they’re voting for the same election (say, November of 2020) then they’re breaking the law by voting in two places. I’ve actually never heard of anyone doing that.
Ballots are not identical. Each one has a serial number. Each ballot must be accounted for. At the end of the election, each ballot was issued to a voter, spoiled, or unused. A person seeking to stuff ballots would be discovered because his/her serial numbers won’t match what has been issued. Trump’s suggestion that some nefarious actor will submit a bunch of fraudulent ballots won’t work in my county. Numbering the ballots is a pretty basic security measure. Surely every jurisdiction does this.
What about anonymity? All the serial number does is record which ballots have been used. It does not link to a particular voter. For in-person voting, a selection of ballots are arranged on a table for the voter to choose. It is illegal for an election worker to hand the ballot to the voter – the voter must choose his/her own. For mail-in ballots, a selection of ballots is arranged and the election worker puts them in envelopes. No record is made of which ballot goes in which envelope or goes to which voter. All that is recorded is that ballot #123456 was used in mail-in voting.
Something is tracked because I can go on the county website and verify when my ballot was received.
In Illinois, at least, polling places are required to have election judges from both parties manning the place. In my experience as an election judge, it would be pretty hard to start hanging out and feeding ballots into the machine without being noticed. After all, running and watching the process is what they’re there for. This is ignoring the fact that even election judges from my own party are probably not cool with me committing election fraud. Plus the poll-watchers who come out of the woodwork to opine on whether or not we’re doing our job right.
Not here. I’ve worked the polls a few times, and my job was to hand each voter a ballot after their eligibility was verified.
The outer envelope is tracked. In our state it has the voter’s name, address, signature, and a bar code. The signature is scanned in and compared with the one on the registration form. The comparison is done by humans, the scanning is just to semiautomate the procedure. But once the ballot is removed from the outer envelope, it can’t be traced back to the voter. At least I don’t think it can; I don’t remember any serial number on the ballots.
Maybe now, but not thirty-five years ago. Registered parties in California can collect every two years for free, a list of the their voters. In my county we got the county list intending on using it for petitioning and donation purposes. More than two-thirds of them weren’t there any more. A couple of addresses we got, “Jeeze – they haven’t lived here in eight years.” We gave up on it as not worth the effort.
Every year in the legislature a bill would be introduced to clear the deadwood from the voter lists – the registrar would send a letter that needed to have a check box marked and returned. Every year it was shot down by the Democrats.
Rumor had it that they were afraid they’d end up with fewer registrants than the Republicans, possibly in third place behind the independents. I don’t know f that was true, though.
It’s one of those things that is a great idea in theory and is really hard to implement well in practice. You end up with a lot of people marked as deadwood who aren’t - when Ohio tried this last year, 20% of the people they marked shouldn’t have been purged. That’s quite a lot.
And while, again in theory, it sounds trivial for people to respond back to the elections board (or whoever) to confirm that they’re alive, still living in the same place, and still want to be voters, in practice if you’re not that politically active and only show up to vote once every 4 years (or less), you’re not going to be looking for that mail and you’re not going to respond to it - it’ll probably get sorted in with the rest of the junk mail and recycled. You shouldn’t lose your vote because of that.
Also, for some reason, the decision to purge voter rolls almost always seems to happen in late summer and early fall - right before an election, giving people very little time to react and respond even if they’re entirely on the ball (which they aren’t). It’s almost never in December giving people a full 11 months until the next general election to sort things out.
Gee, it’s too bad they couldn’t come up with ways around that like – just spitballing here – doing it in January of a non-election year, and running a PSA campaign saying, “Check to see if you’re still registered,” eighteen months before it counted.
The thing is, and this is more important to alternative parties than the mainstream, most of the candidacy petitions are based on registered voters, something like “The signatures of 5% of the voters registered with this party must be collected for the candidate to appear on the ballot.”
If a party has 10,000 voters registered in the county and only 3,000 of them are really there, it makes if difficult to collect even those 500 signatures.
And- so? How would you vote twice here? Absentee ballots arent forwarded. Yeah, there is deadwood, but also a lot of people just toss unsolicited mail.
All this does is disenfranchise voters.
Who said anything about voting twice? What I was talking about was collecting enough signatures to get someone on the ballot in the first place, something the mainstream parties have no issues with.
Kind of like a white guy wondering why black folk are upset at the way cops treat them.
That is a good question - why doesn’t the party that keeps proposing purging voter rolls come up with ways to truly safeguard voters from being wrongly identified and unfairly targeted? Or why don’t the smaller parties who this really effects put up a comprehensive plan?
Why should the burden be on the party (or parties) who aren’t pushing the proposal? That seems odd.
I probably should have put an emoji on that statement, but there wasn’t one ironical enough.
Oh, I dunno. Maybe so the voter rolls could be a closer reflection of reality? If the Ds figure the Rs are merely trying to disenfranchise a segment of the population disinclined to to vote for them – entirely warranted in my mind – then when the Rs propose a purge, the Ds should amend it so everybody knows they might or might not be registered any more.
Honestly, it’s been so long I don’t remember if the deadwood bills were introduced by Republicans, Democrats, or had a whole lot of cosigners from both sides on them. I just remember when they were shot down there were a lot more Democrats than Republicans on the Nay side. This was before things had become so polarized.
It is handles very differently in Canada. The poll worker hands you a ballot and records the serial number which is on a tear-off tag. You go behind a screen and mark your ballot and fold it in such a way that the tag is visible. You hand your ballot to the poll worker who tears off the serial number and hands you back the ballot which you insert into the box. Simple and apparently foolproof.
Incidentally, I vote in both Canadian and US elections. No one has ever said this was illegal, although I vote only for federal offices in the US.