All this talk about voter fraud, and its baselessness, makes me wonder how the homeless vote.
Seems to me there’s nothing on the books about being required to have a permanent abode to be able to vote. If I’m an American citizen, I could choose to live in my car, or to ride the rails, or to live on the street, or be an itinerant worker, moving around and doing odd jobs, without surrendering my right to vote.
But I can also see where a municipality might say, “You may be able to vote somewhere, but you don’t live here, and you don’t get in OUR local elections.” I ask, “Why not?”, though. As long as I’m not voting anywhere else (and the burden should be on the municipality to prove I am), why can’t I as a homeless person vote in your municipality if that’s where I happen to find myself on election day?
They register and vote like any other qualified citizen. In NC the voter registration form includes a blank space for voters without a street address to draw a diagram of where they live. This would determine which district they are registered in and so they would simply go to the polling place and vote. No ID required here.
So if I’m homeless, what’s to stop me from registering in all fifty states? (Apart from prosecution.) Or every precinct in the country. Couldn’t I argue, “Hey, I have no idea where I’ll be from one November to the next”?
Do you seriously think that people who are so broke that they can’t even afford a place to live will be able to travel around the country registering in every state and then travel around on election day voting in all those states (or be able to afford to send in absentee ballots)? If they did such a thing, they would be in violation of the law for voting more than once. The same thing is true for people with a home, who might be more likely to do this. Being homeless is one step above starvation. You don’t have time to pull off a complicated voting scheme.
What’s to stop you from doing that now? The homeless are just as trackable - they access all sorts of services that need an address, and they are allowed to provide the address of any shelter that they may be using. In the extremely rare case that they’re not utilizing any sort of shelter, they can indicate where they sleep on any voter registration form. For homeless that live in states that require voter ID, I believe all of those states require identification to be offered for free (and again, they can use the address of a shelter for that).
It should be noted here that Canadians who are not on the voters’ list can register to vote (at least in federal elections) at the polling place, and also that we have both advance polls (what you’d call early voting, I think – voting for three days on the weekend before election day) and voting by special ballot (either by requesting a mail-in ballot, or by voting at the returning office of your or any other electoral district, at any time from about one week after the election is called until one week before the election).
Incidentally, Monty, when more restrictive ID rules came in in Canada, there was an outcry from rural residents who often don’t have house numbers as people in cities do; this was causing problems with voters’ lists. I believe Elections Canada subsequently applied the rules more flexibly in the case of areas without house numbers, although I’m having some trouble finding out how right now.
I’m not interested in the “complicated voting scheme,” Wendell–quite the opposite. That’s why I included the phrase “As long I’m not voting elsewhere.” It seems to me that, as a homeless person, if I found myself in a city where I had registered to vote years before, on a previous swing through city, maybe, or even at a time when I had a place to live, I should be able to vote easily at that place.
All this talk about “voter fraud” seems misplaced to me in that they’re focusing on challenges at the polling place on Election Day. If you make it incredibly easy, just knowing your name and passing a signature-recognition test at the polling place, and put the burden on the government to prove that this person had double-voted elsewhere, that should take care of voter-ID problems. I’m raising the issue of why multiple-registrations are a problem, as long as you don’t actually vote multiple times. You enforce strict laws for anyone who does that, and even stricter laws for anyone who organizes others to do that, and give voters the benefit of the doubt on Election Day. A few well-publicized five-year terms in the federal pen for voter fraud should be sufficient to discourage anyone from voting twice.
At my very first registration, I was bemused by the section that was clearly designed for homeless voters, including a section where they allowed registrants to draw a picture.
Then I became homeless. Oops! I provided the address of the store parking lot where I regularly parked, as well as the requisite visual diagram. Didn’t even know my zip code. Never had a problem, and I voted in two general elections and one primary during that time. Not sure if every state has a mechanism like Indiana did for the homeless, but their system was set up from the start to accommodate folks who had no regular address.
Well, that’s just where I started, thinking about the insistence that you have to prove your address.
As to the homeless’s mobility, I’m sure most of them are not so mobile–but itinerent workers by definition are, and people who move around a lot, living out their cars, never establishing a long-term residence, would fit into this category of “American citizen, no fixed abode, very mobile” as well. Hell, when I was in grad school and just before and just after, I lived in six cities (NYC, Boston, Baltimore, Denver, Syracuse, and Albany) in ten years–I was probably registered to vote in only three or four of them.
How many different polling places, how far apart, could someone hit - especially if they have to wait 3 hours in line at each place?
When I was involved in teh Conservative Party in Canada, there were always rumors that those %^## NDP were taking busloads of Indians from poll to poll. In fact, the poorer natives lived a very nomadic lifestyle, no fixed address, crashing for days and weeks at a friend’s place. They voted where they were on election day. The “busloads” always happened “somewhere else, so I heard”. In fact, much like rumors in the USA, there was never any proven organized effort to stuff ballot boxes using homeless types voting illegally. The closest I saw to this was that party organizers would be “getting the vote out” much as is done all over North America.
Not many, which is another reason we don’t need to monitor WHERE people are registered, or if they’re they’re multiply registered, just how many times someone votes. An ambitious homeless criminal determined to vote as often as possible could hit maybe four or five booths in a large metropolitan area, and not nearly compensate for all the homeless people who can afford to take the day off from begging, or collecting soda cans or whatever they do to keep body and soul together.
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. In NC none of tho things are required. If you’d like to look at the form, it is available here. If you don’t have an address you draw a picture; if you don’t have an ID or driver’s license you can provide the last 4 digits of your SSN if you know it.
A related point (given the disproportionate incarceration rates for the poor and homeless) is how people in prison vote; people in federal penitentiaries in Canada have had the right to vote since a court case called Sauvé v. Canada (Director General of Elections) in 2002. As you might expect, incarcerated electors vote by mail-in ballot. Elections Canada says: