Update
From the link:
and
From this article in the Sarasota Herald Tribune
My question would be, why the problems with casting votes in just that one race in Sarasota County?
If there was a problem with a delay before recording votes, wouldn’t it have affected voting in that county in races up and down the ballot? But as I showed above @10, the House race was the only one affected. It got two and a half times as many undervotes as the freakin’ Ag Commissioner race.
So I can’t see how that explains anything.
Not that arcane.
They send that card to Wendell Wagner’s 1975 address. The guy living there looks at it and says, “Doesn’t live here” and sticks it back in the mailbox. It then goes back to the return address - coincidentally the person/organization that registered you as an absentee voter.
How yours got where it got? Don’t know.
-Joe
Merijeek, I think you’ve misunderstood what I was saying. The scenario you’re describing would be even more arcane than the one that happened. As far as I know, nobody sent any political advertisement postcards to me at the last address I lived at in Sarasota. I left there in early June of 1974, incidentally. I have no idea if the house that I lived in then even still exists. I’ve only been back to Sarasota three times in thirty-three years, and I didn’t try to find that house any of those times.
When somebody gets a political advertisement postcard that they aren’t interested in, they don’t stick it back in the mailbox. Nearly all the time they would simply throw it away. I’m not even certain that the U.S. Mail will return such a postcard to the sender. It’s the equivalent of junk mail. In any case, only the rare nitpicker like me would look at the card and say, “Why would I possibly get this card?” and then try to find out what happened.
I lived in Sarasota from approximately early September of 1971 to early June of 1974 when I was an undergraduate at New College, except for the summers when I lived with my family in Ohio. As far as I can determine, there’s no reason why I should be on any state list of people who lived in Sarasota, let alone a list that someone might have kept. I didn’t vote there, since my legal residence was in Ohio. I lived in the dorms the first two years. The third year I moved into a house with three other students. My name wasn’t on the lease. My name wasn’t in the phone book. I paid taxes based on my family’s address in Ohio, so I’m not listed as living there with the IRS or any state tax bureau.
The postcard I got last year just before the election was addressed to me at my address in Maryland. It wasn’t forwarded from anywhere. It was a postcard from a political candidate for a state office in Florida. It said that I was registered to vote absentee. In other words, it claimed that my legal address was in Sarasota, while I was temporarily living at my real address in Maryland. I called the State Board of Elections in Florida, and they said that according to their records I wasn’t registered to vote absentee. They had no records of me at that address or any other. They said that they did give the names and temporary addresses of people who were registered to vote absentee to political candidates so the candidates could send political advertisements to all potential voters, but they had no idea why a political advertisement would reach me, since I wasn’t registered to vote absentee.
If this was voter fraud, the people committing the fraud had to make a whole lot of fixes to the voting system to pull it off. They would have to put my name and address on the list of absentee voters, but then they would have to create a second list of absentee voters without my name so that when the people at the State Board of Elections checked it, my name wouldn’t be on it. They would have to grab the absentee ballot with my name on it before it was sent to me and fill it out. They would then send it in, but they would have to make sure it was read by some person or machine with access to the absentee list with my name on it. They would have to screw up somehow so that the absentee list with my name on it got sent to political candidates for their use in sending political advertisements. I don’t understand how voter fraud this complicated would work, but then I don’t understand how a simple mistake this complicated would work either.
It’s possible, I suppose, that regardless whether this is a matter of voter fraud or some weird mistake, it’s purely a coincidence that I happened to live in Sarasota a long time age. That’s possible, I suppose, but I’ve only lived in eight counties in my life (and one of them wasn’t in the U.S.). It’s odd then that this postcard was from a political candidate from one of those counties.
Watch for further developments.
Update: House task force has voted (along party lines) to refer the 13th District election for further investigation by the Government Accountability Office. Chairman Charles Gonzalez (D-Texas) says he hopes to see results within 45 days.
Challenges to the contested results of four other House elections, however, have been unanimously dismissed by the House Administration Committee.