This is a few days old and I haven’t heard an update, but I wonder if the good people in Florida know about this. I’d been meaning to post this, but really, does anyone care? Other than the few folks who really care about democracy, that is.
(Hint: Californians are going to be screwed too)
Hold on, here’s an update, also from Palast:
[News Flash - Tuesday midnight: Theresa LePore has just lost re-election to Democrat Art Anderson. The challenger ran on a platform opposing LePore’s paperless voting machines. Wipe that grin off your face: the notorious “Madame Butterfly Ballot” remains to supervise, in her unique manner, the presidential vote in November. The following investigative report, written days before the neck-and-neck election is a cautionary tale about the dangers to the integrity of the millions of absentee ballots and paperless computer votes likely to decide the White House race. Read on …]
CrankyAsAnOldMan,
I received the absentee ballot request form yesterday. At the bottom it says: (caps and bolding are in the original)
Now, I guess one could argue that this means that you should bring your uncast absentee ballot and have it voided before voting, but I don’t see how it could mean that. What if you’ve already cast it and then, due to some change in circumstance, you are able to physically go to the polling place. It clearly and emphatically states that you must do so. So there must be a way to void it. My guess is that in Pennsylvania identifiers aren’t removed and the ballot isn’t counted until after the polls close.
Well, maybe that is how they do it. It seems to me that would delay the election results, though. Polls close at 8 pm…then every single precinct would have to contact the clerk’s office with the list of all voters who mailed in an absentee ballot but asked that it be voided. Clerk goes through the ballots, pulls those, marks them voided, and THEN counts what’s left. What a process!
Rather, I assume “void your ballot” means not ever casting it.
The directions certainly are not clear, however. The average voter probably isn’t going to think like I’m thinking.
Out of curiosity : are all the things mentionned in this thread (receiving pictures of the first lady, request for donations, prerecorded phone calls, etc…) rather standart practives during US presidential elections, or is this campaign abnormally invasive?
Also, in the latter case : everybody mention Bush. Do you get prerecorded phone calls from Kerry too, or are all these methods only used by the republicans?
But if you mail it in and subsequently become able to go to the polling place on election day, you cannot then “not ever cast it”. It’s a little late at that point for that. So that can’t be what is meant by “void your ballot”. I assumed that the unopened ballots would be distributed to their proper polling place on or before the day of the election so that they could be opened and counted when the polls closed. If you then showed up on election day it could be pulled from the files (or whatever) and voided. As far as delaying election results, I’m guessing that in the vast majority of elections a given polling place won’t have more than a handful of absentee ballots. That might not be the case this time, but accuracy and correct procedure have to come before quick results.
I don’t know if the Kerry campaign is using any prerecorded messages but I do know for a fact that it uses live callers.
All of these things have occurred in other elections but I can’t say for sure whether there’s more of it this year or not. I think we’re more aware of the election in general and might just be noticing these things more.
I guess it’s a matter of perspective. This year has seemed pretty quiet to me. Not just in regards to Bush vs Kerry, either. We’ve only gotten one call (from Bush) and I got a neato bumper sticker I’m going to put on my car to annoy one of my co-workers, but that’s about it. No mailed you should “vote for [insert person in some race] because my opponent wants to sell us into slavery/have a state income tax/brainwash the young/will outlaw beer” yet nor any like " Only a commie would vote yes on question five. You’re not a commie, are you?"; no other calls at all (in 2000 we got them once a week; only a handful of commercials, those there are are ONLY in regards to the governor slot and none of those as entertaining as a couple of years ago " Greg Benson ran a fortune 500 company into the ground. Do you want him to do the same to the state?"; no one has put any stupid signs at the end of our road (might be because people on our road “accidentally” ran over Gore signs 10 times. They kept putting them up, though)… It’s just pretty quiet. I suspect things will pick up in the next two months, and we’ll actually hear from Kerry - since there being no dems at our address didn’t stop Gore- but so far… it’s weird. I’ve heard news people call NH a battleground state, so you think Bush and Kerry would be a little pushier by now.
In Washington, there are no special conditions to be an absentee voter. I always vote absentee because it lets me fill out the ballot at my leisure, and avoid taking time away from work, standing in line, figuring out where my polling place is, etc.
I don’t know how they do it; I’m just saying I think it’s bad policy to tell people people who have already voted to show up on election day and say “Wait! I need you to cancel my absentee ballot!”
As for the number of absentee ballots, there are many more than a handful. In the precinct I worked, we had over 80, and that was a small precinct for a primary where we had 9% turnout (that includes absentees). The November election is going to have a higher number. In some precincts in my county, the absentee ballots are processed by election workers on site; in others, the clerk retains them and processes them.
Of course accuracy and correct procedure come first! But I think it’s a rotten policy to say if your business trip gets cancelled or you wake up and your arthritis feels better, you should go to the polls and try to revote. It’s an expensive and hassle-ridden way to handle absentee voting.
In a bizarre bit of synchronicity, this past Tuesday’s voting for Palm Beach County’s new Supervisor of Elections ran into some snags. The current supervisor, Theresa LePore, whose office was responsible for the now-famous “butterfly ballots” in the 2000 election, lost the race by a fairly narrow margin. Getting to the topic at hand, 31,138 people submitted absentee ballots (out of how many votes, I couldn’t find, but the population is about one million). To make it worse, approximately 6,000 of those were counted twice, thus requiring a recount of the whole batch. Really engenders faith in the upcoming election, don’t it?
I don’t know what it says about the election, but if these are the best people they could find for the job it does suggest that the entire state is full of people with math skills no better than mine and that makes me kind of sad. Doesn’t it make you sad?