The NY Times ran an interesting article Nov 14 on the completion of write-in ballots by republican volunteers in several Florida counties. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/14/politics/14SEMI.html Apparently a write-in ballot is not considered legal in Fla unless it has the persons “voter-ID” number written on it, and thousands came in without it. The election officials in several counties subsequently allowed republican volunteers to come in and fill in the absent, but legally required numbers.
Can anyone explain why such ballots should not be tossed as “incomplete” and how this is NOT vote fraud ? How is it that the ballot completion committees knew when it was a voters intention to return a completed ballot, and when it was their intention to return an incomplete ballot ? Oddly the states election commissioner seems to have nothing to say on the issue.
I’ll state my credentials up front before someone starts accusing me of bias (we all know how these election threads are.) I voted for the green party candidate, but if I had a choice between the democratic candidate and the republican candidated, I would prefer that the democratic candidate be elected. Now that this is out of the way:
I’m no specialist of US election law in general or Florida law in particular. But my gut feeling is that the voters very probably intended to include their numbers, and that people that take the trouble to send in an absentee ballot would almost certainly not be attempting to invalidate it by forgetting a voter ID. Additionally, from reading the article, my understanding is that the voter ID was manually entered on the form by volunteers BEFORE the ballot was sent to the voter, not after the ballot was received. So IMHO this is not “fraud”.
I would be more concerned by this issue that I heard mentioned on NPR:
Salon magazine mentioned in an article, «Florida sent duplicate ballots overseas», that some Florida residents serving at an Air Force base in the UK received two absentee ballots, and then filled in and returned both of them. The numbers mentioned in the article are very small (three known examples), so I don’t know if it’s a big concern, but if it’s true, and since the article says that several counties may have mailed out the duplicate ballots, in an election as close as this those small numbers might result in significant gains in the presidential race at least.