Liptak suggests the potential for litigation if an election is close:
If the contests next month are close enough to be within what election lawyers call the margin of litigation, the grounds on which they will be fought will not be hanging chads but ballots cast away from the voting booth.The beginning of the article nudges us to think that the problem is that honest people are tripped up and disenfranchised and that states are somehow causing more people to take the absentee approach to voting and are therefore responsible for these mistakes. Liptak doesn't sketch out any legal argument that would go with that problem. And if you read far enough down in the article, you see that the real problem is fraud:
Election administrators have a shorthand name for a central weakness of voting by mail. They call it granny farming.In the end, Liptak shifts to the much-discussed topic of voter ID laws, which are aimed at in-person voter fraud — the less likely type of fraud. If voting in person becomes more difficult, more people may switch to absentee form of voting, and there will be more fraud, Liptak tells us, the opposite of what is supposedly intended.
“The problem,” said Murray A. Greenberg, a former county attorney in Miami, “is really with the collection of absentee ballots at the senior citizen centers.” In Florida, people affiliated with political campaigns “help people vote absentee,” he said. “And help is in quotation marks.”
Voters in nursing homes can be subjected to subtle pressure, outright intimidation or fraud. The secrecy of their voting is easily compromised. And their ballots can be intercepted both coming and going.
The problem is not limited to the elderly, of course. Absentee ballots also make it much easier to buy and sell votes. In recent years, courts have invalidated mayoral elections in Illinois and Indiana because of fraudulent absentee ballots.
I don't know if Liptak is going to change anyone's mind about voter ID laws — which I suspect is the main purpose of this article. But he did make me feel terrible about absentee voter fraud. Let's crack down on it! Making in-person voting easier isn't going to help much. Those nursing home targets aren't going to stop voting absentee.
Posts
27 comments:
I've always been against early voting and absentee voting except in the most legitimate cases (military service, legitimately away from the country on the voting day) I think it's a terrible idea to allow it as a convenience to those folks too lazy to wait in line for a while on a Tuesday. But I'm sure I'm in the minority here.
There's an unspoken problem here. A significant number of people in nursing homes have dementia. They can't cast an intelligent vote. But can they be told they can't vote, the way we tell some old people that they can't have a driver's license any more.
My mother-in-law gradually declined over the course of many years. It is a terrible thing. By the end, I would not have wanted her deciding who should be making laws that will bind the entire population.
There's an unspoken problem here. A significant number of people in nursing homes have dementia. They can't cast an intelligent vote. But can they be told they can't vote, the way we tell some old people that they can't have a driver's license any more.
My mother-in-law gradually declined over the course of many years. It is a terrible thing. By the end, I would not have wanted her deciding who should be making laws that will bind the entire population.
I like early voting, actually. It allows me to vote and then ignore the next few weeks of campaigning.
I seriously doubt that anything is going to happen over the next month that would make me change my mind about how I'm going to vote, so getting it out of the way ASAP really does work for me.
And yet people (Democrats and "activists") keep saying that there is no vote fraud. If pushed they will say "no significant" fraud.
And yet, as I recently learned, they think over 1000 felons illegally voted in the Coleman/Franken election. And this article cites two additional cases.
Seriously, how hard is it to have ID? And show up or have a darn good excuse to vote absentee?
-C
I voiced concern about this very subject not that long ago.
Considering early voting in NC and OH is going poorly for the Lefties, it's going to be interesting how many of those ballots get "challenged".
Why should we believe absentee voter fraud is any more prevalent or easy than in-person voter fraud?
If anything, it's harder because it is more likely to get caught by the things mentioned in the article.
Both things take some amount of organization and knowledge of who will not vote, plus knowledge about who is registered to vote.
In person, once an in-person vote is cast, there is no getting it back. No id is checked, the signature is not checked. As long as there is a registered name that matches the name of the person who shows up, that vote counts. No review is possible.
Why would people not cheat that way, I ask you. People cheat at every thing. Every single thing.
"There's an unspoken problem here. A significant number of people in nursing homes have dementia. They can't cast an intelligent vote. But can they be told they can't vote, the way we tell some old people that they can't have a driver's license any more."
Make it a serious crime to exploit these people. Go after the active party in the interaction. Get some deterrence here. That's the point of entry, not trying to judge people and cut them off from access.
Right
Horse thieves and granny farmers
Hang 'em high!
Ann Althouse said...
There's an unspoken problem here. A significant number of people in nursing homes have dementia. They can't cast an intelligent vote. But can they be told they can't vote, the way we tell some old people that they can't have a driver's license any more.
Make it a serious crime to exploit these people. Go after the active party in the interaction. Get some deterrence here. That's the point of entry, not trying to judge people and cut them off from access.
That might be harder than it appears.
In my wild and misspent youth, I spent a few years running a driver's license place and the state was absolutely petrified of going up against the old people's organizations. We could flag someone who appeared to feeble (or whatever) to drive, but that was a CYA.
If what Ann suggests could be done, all well and good, but I can see AARP getting involved...
And there's also potential for fraud — which is apparently more likely to occur by mail.
DUH!!!
It is just unbelievable that a country that prides itself on democratic procedures would allow itself to have such sloppy voting laws and rules that are so very subject to fraud and corruption.
Voter roles are full of duplicate registrations, dead people, fake people, cartoon characters, people who no longer live in the area and people who by LAW should not be voting at all.
There is no attempt to determine that the person who shows up to vote is actually that person. A simple voter ID law that is consistent from state to state should be the law.
Allowing illegal aliens who are criminals, just by the fact of being in the country illegally, to vote is obscene.
Allowing people who are too lazy to pre-register to vote can just waltz up on election day and cast a vote. This only opens up the entire system to fraud. What is to stop them from going to multiple locations and voting many times.
Absentee voting should be few. Only those like the military and people who are legitimately out of the area or who for some physical reason cannot make it to the polls should be allowed absentee. Sorry, John Burgess, just being lazy or being inconvenienced is not an excuse.
Third world countries have safer and more sound election procedures than we do.
When you can't trust the veracity of the elections, WHY IN THE HELL SHOULD WE OBEY ANY OF THE LAWS?
You think it's bad now, wait till they go ballotless, with electronic voting. What could possibly go wrong there?!?
As far as granny farming, when you have people like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Darth Vader, registered to vote(I'm looking at you democrats)we got a lot more serious problem.
I think the R's are taking the wrong tack on this voter ID thing though. I would just beat the D's at their own game. Cheat them out of a few elections. I'm sure the D's will quickly see the light then.
I've been arguing for ages that absentee balloting needs to be secured in the same way that in-person balloting is -- i.e., done in a way that no one else can tamper with the ballot before it's sealed, but in the presence of some responsible person. The simplest way to do that would be to make every post office (and possibly every DMV) a polling place. You can vote absentee, but you still have to come in and fill out your ballot in some little booth or cubbyhole where the post office or DMV staff can see that you're in there by yourself and no one else can mess with your ballot.
This doesn't work for the nursing home population, or anyone else physically incapable of getting to the post office or the DMV. So we'd need to arrange for poll workers/observers to visit these places and, again, make sure the ballot is filled out in private but by the voter him/herself. As for people who are genuinely "absentee," as in not even in the US, I'm afraid the only solution is notarization, reimbursed.
Of course, I live in a state where is no such thing as in-person voting. Bleh.
MDT, your solution is fine for the folks experiencing senility, but we still need some provision for those who are mentally aware but have trouble with the physical act of completing ballot.
It's not just about old people. In the 2008 election, my Down Syndrome daughter was corralled by someone - we never were able to find out who it was - who convinced her that Bush was evil and that she had to vote for Obama.
We expressed to her social services broker that we did not want her to vote; she had just moved out of our home so we didn't know of her comings and goings, but she told us after the election that she had voted. We checked on the state's website and lo and behold, she had.
We elected not to have her declared incompetent or to put her under guardianship, so under WI law it probably was not illegal for her to vote, but I would not call this anything remotely like ethical. She hasn't voted since then, but we're being more attentive to the things she mentions about what goes on at her workplace and recreational activities.
I could - but won't - name a nursing home in a mid-atlantic state with a sign on the door declaring that the home is staffed by S.E.I.U. members. Hate to be paranoid or anything, but . . .
Kirk Parker,
MDT, your solution is fine for the folks experiencing senility, but we still need some provision for those who are mentally aware but have trouble with the physical act of completing ballot.
I think there we do what we do now -- there's provision for physical assistance in filling out ballots. There are obvious difficulties -- do we insist that the assistant be a neutral person, a poll worker? I think we ought to, but what if the voter doesn't want to get into a booth or equivalent with a stranger? I think we still have to insist that the assistant not be a friend or an attendant at the nursing home or anyone else routinely at close quarters with the voter, but merely someone kind and gentle and professional who can note down the voter's preferences.
Recording (audio or video) would settle whether the poll worker had exercised undue influence on what ended up on the ballot, but would be an intolerable imposition on the voter's right to vote in as much privacy is practicable.
MadTownGuy,
We elected not to have her declared incompetent or to put her under guardianship, so under WI law it probably was not illegal for her to vote, but I would not call this anything remotely like ethical. She hasn't voted since then, but we're being more attentive to the things she mentions about what goes on at her workplace and recreational activities.
[takes deep breath]
You have an adult daughter who registered to vote, and voted. She has a "workplace," so some sort of job. She has "recreational activities."
You told her "social services broker" that you didn't want her to vote. Dude, it is absolutely none of your f'ing business whether your daughter votes or not. She is apparently an adult with a valid registration. She is exactly as eligible to vote as you are or as I am.
I agree with you that there is much exploitation of the mentally impaired by unscrupulous people, but really, sir, your daughter has a vote, and you do not get to take it away.
There have been problems with keeping elections free from fraud and vote-buying since ancient times. Athenian democracy was far from exemplary, and both Plato and Aristotle thought participatory democracy was too flawed to survive. So it's not really news that American jurisdictions haven't come up with a system of perfectly pure voting.
That's not an argument for doing nothing. Voter ID laws, plus penalties for 'granny farming' in all its many forms, seem sensible. The unstated presumption in these stories is that voter ID laws are Rep attempts to suppress the Dem vote, while 'granny farming' is mostly a Dem attempt to steal votes. Both sides of that equation strike me as counterfactual. Voter ID laws don't suppress anything; and I suspect both sides have figured out how to play the 'granny farming' game.
A little perspective is also in order. If an election can be swung by these kinds of games, the reality is that the electorate was effectively evenly split. Elections are far from perfect measures of the will of the people. The deviation from the theoretical perfect expression of the people's will introduced by voter ID laws, 'granny farming', vote-buying schemes and many other games at the margin, are likely to be offsetting in part and variable as to which will be more significant. All in all, not that big a deal.
Dude, it is absolutely none of your f'ing business whether your daughter votes or not. She is apparently an adult with a valid registration. She is exactly as eligible to vote as you are or as I am.
I agree with you that there is much exploitation of the mentally impaired by unscrupulous people, but really, sir, your daughter has a vote, and you do not get to take it away.
I absolutely disagree. First of all, the only reason she was able to register is because we did not elect to have her declared incompetent through a court hearing. (IANAL, but see WI Stats. 6.03). We did not want to put her through that, but if we had, she would have been found to be incompetent. We did not think it would be an important thing in her life. And she WOULD NOT have voted but for the 'intervention' of some unscrupulous people.
In addition to all that, you don't know her situation so I will say it's really none of your business. That said, let's both take a deep breath. Then read this. Anecdotal, maybe, but from the way many of our daughter's friends talked at outings we attended, there is a whole lot of influence out there to vote the way their 'handlers' would like them to vote. Her friends' degrees of competence are all over the map so I won't presume to know if they were unduly influenced, but in our daughter's case I am quite certain that she was.
Dude, it is absolutely none of your f'ing business whether your daughter votes or not. She is apparently an adult with a valid registration. She is exactly as eligible to vote as you are or as I am.
I agree with you that there is much exploitation of the mentally impaired by unscrupulous people, but really, sir, your daughter has a vote, and you do not get to take it away.
I absolutely disagree. First of all, the only reason she was able to register is because we did not elect to have her declared incompetent through a court hearing. (IANAL, but see WI Stats. 6.03). We did not want to put her through that, but if we had, she would have been found to be incompetent. We did not think it would be an important thing in her life. And she WOULD NOT have voted but for the 'intervention' of some unscrupulous people.
In addition to all that, you don't know her situation so I will say it's really none of your business. That said, let's both take a deep breath. Then read this. Anecdotal, maybe, but from the way many of our daughter's friends talked at outings we attended, there is a whole lot of influence out there to vote the way their 'handlers' would like them to vote. Her friends' degrees of competence are all over the map so I won't presume to know if they were unduly influenced, but in our daughter's case I am quite certain that she was.
I was a judge of election for nursing home voting in the primary this year. (I'm a Republican in Chicago.)
The voting was conducted honestly, AFAICT (and it was my job to make sure it was done honestly).
Between stipends for the judges of election and the salaries of the Board of Election personnel who were present, and the expense of equipment deployed...
I'd estimate that each vote cost over $10 to cast. (There weren't that many voters at this particular home.)
This is a problem that is only going to get worse over the next decade, as the baby boomers get old and sick.
"...failing to put their signature in the right place..."
La Griffe calculates the minimum IQ needed to operate various voting machines (absentee ballots not addressed):
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/elec2000.htm
"I'm a Republican in Chicago"
Shouldn't you be using the definite article in that sentence? ;-)
OK, Blogger just ate a long comment to MadTownGuy. It was not the "preview" glitch, because I did not use preview. Anyway, will try to reconstruct, but it might be awhile, because there's a lot of stuff here (culinary, mostly) that's on a schedule. Sorry.
" there's a lot of stuff here (culinary, mostly)"
Are we invited??? :-)
Post a Comment