Voting In a Different State - Part 2

In a thread from several days ago (I’ve been off the boards for too long…) ** t-keela** asked “But what would a voter need to do in order to be able to vote in a state other than the one in which they reside.”

bibliophage closed the thread, saying

I don’t want to piss off any moderators, but aside from the precise wording of ** t-keela**'s question, this is not necessarily illegal at all. What can be asked (quite legitimately) is:

“But what would a voter need to do in order to be able to vote in a state other than the one in which they ** principally** reside.”

This depends on the state voter registration laws, of course, but there is one state in particular that makes it perfectly legal to vote in their state even if you reside in another state for most of the year. As long as you spend some time in their state each year, you can legally register to vote in that state.

Coincidentally enough, that state is FLORIDA, the one state that ** t-keela**'s question seems most specifically to apply to.

Florida has many people that annually spend a couple of months there. The common term in Florida is “snowbirds,” who live up north but have a condo in Florida where they spend their winter months. For this reason, Florida, unlike most other states, allows you to keep your other state driver’s license when obtaining a Florida driver’s license.

Instead of citing chapter and verse myself, here’s a link to a website that does it for me:

http://operationsnowbird.com/

It includes links to the appropriate Florida voter registration statues, what documents are required to register to vote in Florida (apparently, all you really need is a Florida address and some sort of documentation, such as a utility bill, to prove your residency), and to state you intend for Florida to be your state of legal residence. That you happen to live in another state for 10 months out of the year is irrelevant.

The site also explains how to get an absentee ballot, etc.

Just thought the inquiring minds would want to know.

And of course, the state in which you legaly reside is not nessesarily the one you live in.

Brian

Good point…

This reminds me of one tactic a certain Gore-supporting friend of mine proposed during the election 2000 fiasco.

He pointed out that under the electoral college statutes, electors cannot cast their votes for both a Presidential candidate and a Vice Presidential candidate that are from the same state. Perhaps those laws are kind of outdated now, but they exist nevertheless. His proposition was that although Dick Chaney was listed as a resident of Wisconsin (I may have the state wrong, but that doesn’t alter the point and I don’t feel like looking it up), he was really a resident of Texas. As was Bush. Should this have been enforced, the electors would still have been able to vote for Bush for President, but not for Chaney as Vice President, thus leaving Bush with Lieberman as his Vice President.

Chaney may have been a representitive for the other state when he lived there 10 or 20 years earlier, but for the last 10 or 20 years or whatever, he lived and worked and resided in Texas (home of Haliburton).

This “protest” went nowhere, of course, as some court ruled quite easily and simply that his legal state of residence was where he said it was.

Perhaps they just didn’t want to change the election outcome on a mere technicality, but N9IWP’s point is well taken.

Cheney’s new official state of residence is Wyoming. When I talked to residents of the Jackson Hole area while I was out there this summer they said that he hasn’t spent more than two or three weeks out there in any given year for a while. But Wyoming has a strategy of making the state tax laws very favorable for people who earn large amounts of money through their investments, and they also make it pretty easy to establish residence there. Consequently a lot of rich folks who only have vacation homes in the state are still legally residents.

As an extra bit of info, Teton County in Wyoming has the highest average income of any county in the country, largely because of the tax situation. They surged past Marin County in California a few years back.

Wyoming, of course. :smack:

That’s what I meant. (At last I remembered it was a state starting with a “W”.)

I also thought of another perfectly legal, legitamite way to vote in a different state than the one you live in:

Move.

Of course, depending on the laws of the state you move to there may be a waiting period where you have to live there for a certain period of time first, but it seems Florida has no such waiting period.

Just drive to Florida, get some sort of residence where you can have mail delivered to your name, and either a Florida driver’s license (you don’t have to give up your previous state’s drivers licence to get a Florida one) or a utility bill in your name, and you can register to vote.

If you already have a Florida address (like the people the http://operationsnowbird.com site is aimed at), you don’t even have to drive. You can register by mail and then get an absentee ballot by mail.

As long as you intended Florida to be your state of residence when you apply for the voter’s registration card, it is all legal and above board. As far as I know, however, there is no law that says you can’t change your mind and move back a few days later.