Absentee ballots is where the real fraud is happening:
What do forged absentee ballots and vote-buying have in common? They’re more common than in-person impersonation (which is virtually non-existent) and are unaffected by voter ID laws. What’s more, states like Florida and Texas, which recently enacted legislation making it harder to vote in most respects, feature no-excuse absentee voting, making it easier to commit fraud that way. As Liptak explains, that’s probably no coincidence: “Republicans are in fact more likely than Democrats to vote absentee. In the 2008 general election in Florida, 47 percent of absentee voters were Republicans and 36 percent were Democrats.” (Liptak adds: “Voters in nursing homes can be subjected to subtle pressure, outright intimidation or fraud.”)
From personal experience, for voters in nursing homes, or the elderly living at home, there’s not even any pressure involved. When I was younger and doing volunteer work collecting absentee ballots, I was often asked by seniors flat-out how they should vote. It wasn’t always dementia or confusion: I was working for a Democratic candidate and collecting ballots from Democrats, and they wanted to vote a straight ticket with the least amount of fuss and muss. I always deflected that question, but one year another volunteer was caught helping someone fill out their ballot and got in a lot of trouble.
By the way, the people who caught him were other campaign workers. Nobody else monitors or even gives much of a shit about seniors voting absentee.
max
Nobody else monitors or even gives much of a shit about seniors voting absentee.
Quite. So we shift to keeping voting open for 30-45 days before the election (including weekends!), but require people to amble down to the voting place to vote. (We can work with the worst-off people, but rather than absentee mail-in ballots, we send some guys with a truck and a portable voting machine.)
If we set up federal voting using post offices, that would solve a lot of the logistical issues. (With that wide a voting period window, most people can get there.)
To compensate for any narrowing effects, we make registration automatic.
max
[‘But if we tried it, the screaming from the Confederacy would make your ears bleed.’]
Violet
@max:
Post offices? Bunch of soshulist takers, the postal service. Close ’em all down! Everyone can just use UPS or FedEx.
Schlemizel
I know its early to be going full Godwin but it seems fitting.
Rove promised the GOP a thousand year Reich back in 2000 and has been working hard to deliver. It is no accident that there are active attempts to suppress legitimate voting that might favor Dems while encouraging areas of known fraud and abuse that favor the GOP.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
I’ve read that no more than 80% of votes are cast in person at a polling place on election day now. Certainly a large proportion of the other 20% are absentee ballots by mail. A huge opportunity for rodentfornication.
Davis X. Machina
I’m waiting for the wholesale adoption of postal voting, so that you can go to Ballot Night — after Bible Study this Wednesday — where Pastor Bob and the ministry team can assist you in the prayerful execution of your civic duty.
I’m sure that there will be no problems when you tell them “Well, I didn’t bring my ballot because I filled it at home, in and mailed it in already.”
red dog
My ballot is filled out and will be mailed on the earliest legal day. I’m a senior (70), sane, knowledgeable and live at home with my wife, dog and cat. I drive, shop, and have a pension. The idea that we all live in nursing homes is wrong. Somebody should check and see what % of folks over 68 live in care facilities. My bet is under 10%.
Ohio Mom
What I don’t understand is the difference between absentee voting, which is mailing in your ballot, and what they do in Oregon, which as I understand it, is that everyone mails in their ballot. How do they prevent widespread fraud in Oregon?
bemused
@max:
That reminds me I was going to look for a ‘save the post office’ t-shirt. Other than zazzle or cafe press, anyone know of any save the post office organizations selling t-shirts?
Davis X. Machina
@Ohio Mom: PDF here .
DecidedFenceSitter
@red dog: For the record – depends on how you define “care facilities” if you mean nursing homes alone, you are correct – 6-8% seems to be the percentages. However, this doesn’t cover senior housing or assisted living facilities, which *I* would certainly count as pertinent to this discussion, but unfortunately, there’s no tracking of those numbers.
But honestly – the context of the apparent triggering statement is clear – no one cares about seniors who are at their most vulnerable state at the assisted living/nursing home stage. If you are 70 and living a full healthy life, congrats, so is my father, good for you.
Versus my wife’s stepfather who is 65, and while he is sharp and well spoken on some things, thanks to the chemo and cancer can get befuddled and confused on other things.
Carnacki
While canvassing in 2004 I was checking on an elderly woman on my walk list. Her caregiver, who I could tell immediately was a real wingnut, told me, “Oh I’ll make sure she votes the right way.”
Paul Gottlieb
My mother spent the last few years of her life in a very nice assisted living facility. I visited her many times and got to know many of the other residents quite well. What I found striking was how much people of that generation–particularly women–valued the franchise. I would guess that at around 75% of the residents voted in the major elections. I never saw any evidence of improper behavior by either campaign workers or care givers, but I did see a generation that took the right and obligation to vote very seriously
Schlemizel
@Paul Gottlieb:
AS a kid I did volunteer work in what at one time was called “The poor farm”, a country run home for elderly indigent. Making conversation with one of the ladies there one fall I asked her how she decided who to vote for (she brought up the Humphrey/Nixon contest). She said “Oh, my husband was a Republican so I always vote Republican”.
I could almost imagine Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott opening a vein and wondering why they had bothered!
Every generation has people who care & try to understand & those that can’t be bothered.
raven
How does Paul Krugman keep from slapping that fucking smirk off of Matlin’s face? Surely that wimp ass motherfucker husband of hers wouldn’t intervene.
PeakVT
Somewhat related: the National Election Pool will be cutting back severely (GOS link) on the number of exit polls it does. It’s not the end of the world, but a lot of people would certainly find the missing data interesting and useful. Maybe the Census should take over the whole enterprise.
Davis X. Machina
@PeakVT: The Census can’t even continue to put out the Statistical Abstract — and that’s not really a tenth the political football exit polling would be.
Davis X. Machina
@Davis X. Machina: Collecting any political data using public money is at risk.
Facts have a liberal bias.
pseudonymous in nc
@Ohio Mom:
This is a question I’ve asked, and the general consensus is that Oregon has a fairly decent culture of good governance and fair elections, i.e. it’s not Mississippi.
I don’t think that’s an entirely satisfying explanation, which is why I’ve always been less than eager to share Oregonians’ enthusiasm for all-postal ballots. The UK has never had a big problem with ballot fraud, but the occasions where it has occurred in recent years have all been for absentee voting, particularly all-postal elections, and it’s usually been patriarchs voting for the entire family, or landlords voting for tenants.
I do think, however, that the underlying culture counts, which is why Section 5 of the VRA needs to exist. Large parts of the US still collectively have problems with fair elections.
Arm The Homeless
@Davis X. Machina: I always believed that the urge to kill things like the American Community Survey is that they want control of this useful information for only paid polling firms. Once it becomes a commodity that can be bought and sold, the information becomes useless to anyone who isn’t willing to pony up cash, not to mention opaque gathering techniques that would inevitably follow.
opie_jeanne
Mom had Alzheimer’s and Dad cared for her at home the last three years of her life. He filled out her absentee ballot for her, and they had voted a straight Republican ticket for the past ten years.
This is the same man who sent me that email letter, the one with the ridiculously stupid people described in it that ended with the line: “and they vote!”
I lost Dad three weeks ago and will no longer feel that my vote is only being used to negate his, but God, I miss them both.
Davis X. Machina
@Arm The Homeless: Worse than that. The guy paying the pollsters chooses the questions, and that guy keeps changing.
It’d be useless for anything longitudinal even if you could pay to see the results</I.
Arm The Homeless
@Davis X. Machina: It’s not a commodity when it’s obviously useless. I would bet on them keeping the same questions over a long period of time, but making slanted changes to extrapolation methods in the name of ‘proprietary curve fitting’ techniques.
Upon further consideration, simply messing with household travel data is enough to stymie mass-transit options in many cities since most of these CBAs that are required for DOT funds rely on this type of data
Brad
I believe the the biggest problem in elections, at least in terms of individuals voting, are snow birds. People voting in Arizona and Florida as well as absentee in their home state of Michigan, Ohio or another swing state. I always suspected my dad was dong this.
By the way, Washington state is going to all mail ballots in this election. I will miss going to the polls.
Jay in Oregon
@DecidedFenceSitter:
If people want a sense of how the right wing treats seniors, check out Mail My Grandpa Gets on Twitter:
twitter.com/GrandpasMail/
The writer’s grandfather is an 86-year-old registered Republican, and he posts scans of the letters that his grandfather receives. (He has his grandfather’s permission to do so.)
The most galling part is that every single one of them asks for money, after scaring the shit out of the reader that Barack Hussein Obama is a dictator who will leave your kids in the hands of pedophiles, force your pastor at gunpoint to marry those pervy homos (after replacing the cross with a crescent-and-star), jail Christians for daring to say the Lord’s name, and hand the whole country over to the One World Government of the U.N.
Matt McIrvin
I may be misremembering here, but I think that when I was voting absentee in Virginia, the candidates’ parties weren’t listed on the ballot. This made it particularly hard to vote for county offices where, as a faraway college student, I hadn’t even seen any campaign literature (and this was before widespread use of the Internet).
cmorenc
@Ohio Mom:
Oregon has an earnestly squeaky-clean political civic culture that reflects the lingering prevailing Scandanavian social culture of the state. That’s not to say that political contests aren’t often fought with fierce abrasiveness, but the electoral process has the sort of widely trusted integrity lacking in places like Florida or Ohio in some recent elections.
Yutsano
@Brad: Most counties were already there anyway. It greatly increases the participation rate and if there has been any fraud it’s been pretty low-key. The Republicans will never turn the People’s Republic of Seattle red and they know it, and four-fifths of the population of the state lives in the Seattle-Tacoma area. We choose to not talk about the east side of the city or the state. They go crazy there.
Another Halocene Human
@cmorenc: So what happened to Wisconsin? It’s crawling with Scandahoovians but seems to have one of the most crooked election officials in the country (Waukesha) AND they refuse to do paper handcounts to verify vote tallies. (See BRADBlog for more info.)
Davis X. Machina
@Another Halocene Human: The LaFollette Progressives and the Sewer Socialists were reacting against something, and what it was still isn’t buried that far under the surface today, is my guess.
Ronzoni Rigatoni
When I was a mere wisp of a lad, and just got my PA driver license, our Dem committeeman gave me a station wagon to pick up all the old Italians in the nursing homes and bring them to the polls (there were no absentee ballots in those days) I made several trips. Voting booths in those days allowed pulling a single lever for straight-ticket voting, and, because there were some language difficulties with the old folks, I was allowed to accompany them into the booth. These were Depression era voters, and FDR was a saint to them, so choosing which party to vote for was never an ethical problem. The GOP watchers grumbled, but never interfered (they wouldn’t dare, as people with lead pipes waited outside). We actually won some local seats in a highly GOP precinct.
Frankensteinbeck
@Violet:
Oh no, the post office isn’t sokkirist. The problem with the post office is that it illegally usurped the real federal goverment in the early 1800s and if it can be rooted out, Liberty and No Taxes will return.
Right now the GOP takes its marching orders from the Tea Party primary voters. The Tea Party gets its marching orders from the conspiracy theorists (presumably because the Kochs are raging paranoids themselves). The conspiracy theorists come in White Power and Socereign Citizen varieties, with overlap. The evil of the post office is an article of Sovereign Citizen faith.
By the time this stuff filters down to the legislators, they don’t know WHY they hate the post office and have to make up excuses.
Another Halocene Human
@Davis X. Machina: The other thing that bothers me is that Scandanavian is a bit of a misnomer when you’re talking about Oregon. I’m pretty sure there were a lot of Baltic emigrants. They tended to do hard labor like mining and logging and joined the Wobblies. Sure, Denmark, Sweden have Baltic ports, but come on.
And the gold fever drew people of all ethnic backgrounds. I found it interesting to read rush narratives of African-Americans. Definitely not mentioned in my shitty history textbooks.
I’m starting to piece together this puzzle and what it seems like is that the mid-19th century saw increasing integration of African-Americans into American life, but what happened in the 1890s was a reactionary backlash to the success of the franchise in the deep South, and the economic gains of the African-American community, a reaction that was by far strongest in the South but had implications nationwide. It was also a period of the slow ascendency of academic racism, but remember most people didn’t go to college in the 19th century so that took a while to permeate out. Racism became national policy under the Wilson administration, a Southern academic. With his soft rollout of apartheid, it’s not surprising then in retrospect that racial terror exploded in the 1920s.
raven
@Another Halocene Human: You might enjoy “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson.
arguingwithsignposts
I recently watched a 3-hour debunking of the History Channel “Ancient Aliens” series. Those people are on crack – the ancient alien theorists.
Edited for clarity.
owlbear1
@Ohio Mom:
Each ballot is sent out with 2 envelopes. The outer envelope has a unique ID number and is tied to your address and name. You sign that envelope. The ballot is placed inside the ‘security envelope’ and then you put the ballot inside the signed and number envelope and send it off. At the election office your signature is checked against the one on your registration form and the ID is checked for your address.
If those match, the security envelope is moved to the counting box where somebody other than the ID checker opens the now anonymous ballot and runs it through the counting machine.
I think a big part of why it works has to do with the simple fact there is no other way to vote. There are no in person ballot locations.
I love voting in this fashion. It allows me time to go over the candidates and the ballot measures in depth. I feel more confident in the decisions I make.
Janet Strange
@Another Halocene Human: I’m currently listening to “The United States from the Late 19th Century to the Eve of World War II”, a history course from UC Berkeley, taught by Richard Candida Smith.
I’m getting the same view of the late 19th century as you describe in your last paragraph.
I’m learning a lot from the podcasts of the lectures. You can get them from iTunesU if you’re interested. I have no interest in staring at his powerpoints on the computer (I just listen to the audio while I’m doing other stuff), but he shows quite a few old, silent, movies and you can go here and scroll til you get to where you can watch whichever one he’s showing in that lecture.
Another Halocene Human
@arguingwithsignposts: That Danish guy who popularized that crap was just a straight-up racist.
“Ancient Peruvian peoples never could have built something like this!” etc.
Villago Delenda Est
@pseudonymous in nc:
Part of the problem IS that Oregon has a long history of civic engagement and desire for good government. It is, in many ways, a cultural thing. So Oregon’s example may not apply everywhere, even in blue states where a history of political corruption much more ingrained than anything imaginable in Oregon exists.
Even before mail-in balloting, Oregon was one of the states with high voter turn outs, when people had to trudge to the local polling place to cast a ballot. I know that in my family it is beaten into your head, repeatedly, with blunt objects, that you have a civic responsibility to cast your vote, particularly in the primaries and general elections.
Yutsano
@owlbear1: Essentially you sign the ballot under penalty of perjury as well as voter fraud. At least that’s how it works up here. So you have the possibility of two state charges and one federal charge if you’re caught.
Carl Christian Schurz
@Another Halocene Human: Wisconsin is crawling with Scandinavians, particularly in the northern and western areas of the state, but it is crawling with even more Germans, and the internal dynamics of that immigrant group and its religious divisions has helped define Wisconsin’s schizophrenic political culture.
Wisconsin’s first German immigrants were of the revolutionary generation of 1848, were staunchly anti-slavery, and helped found what was then a radical Republican Party. There were differences among them though, and these became more defined as more Germans arrived through the rest of the 19th century. Bavarian Catholics versus Lutheran Prussians and Saxons. Among the Lutherans, they soon split into conservative and liberal factions (as pretty much all Protestant denominations were in the U.S. in the antebellum period), hence the birth of the far right Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (and Missouri Synod). Essentially, the dynamics reflected internal German politics, with predominantly Lutheran soçialists squaring off against conservative Lutherans and Catholics.
The next twist came in the middle of the 20th century with immigration from eastern Europe and the Great Migration from the South. Milwaukee’s numbers of Germans slowly decreased, who moved into outlying counties and northwards along the Fox River and Lake Michigan shore, and it filled up with the next wave of European immigrants, and then even more quickly with African-Americans. The city of Milwaukee became roughly divided on north-south lines, the north side being black and the south side white, and by the latter half of the century, amidst deindustrialization, it became the most segregated city in the nation.
Meanwhile, the German element remained and Americanized, spurred along in large part by the wars. It wasn’t a smooth process, though; the Bund was active in Milwaukee, and the city was a major center of pro-Nazi sentiment (alongside German-American communities in Cincinnati and NYC). That was officially swept away by WWII, but the far-right elements underlying these sympathies did not go away, but were rather sublimated into the emerging division between Milwaukee and its suburbs.
Milwaukee’s racial politics are noxious, and are responsible for a lot of the extreme divisions in the state. The Scandinavian influence tempers that, but they’re what defines the political motivations of Scott Walker and the Republican legislative leadership, who are primarily from the Milwaukee suburbs and exurbs.
These divisions are still broadly visible in county voting maps for Wisconsin. When the elections are close, there is a broad division between the eastern and western halves of the state, with Milwaukee an island of dark blue amidst a long north-south band of red. In the western part of the state, the cities of Madison, La Crosse, and the Lake Superior counties (that’s the strongest Scandinavian influence) are very blue, but so too often is much of the surrounding area. (The big change now, though, is that St. Croix and Pierce counties are becoming Twin Cities exurbs, and hence turning quite red.)
Wisconsin is extremely divided, and has been for a long time. Unfortunately the reichists are in power now, having taking advantage of the economic climate and aging demographics of many rural portions of the state.
owlbear1
@Yutsano:
Yep.
don
Washington recently went to all mail voting as well.
The funny thing about absentee fraud is that there was a case here in Washington during the contentious governor’s race where the count was within a thousand votes. Recounting all ballots turned up a voter who had forged his dead wife’s signature on her ballot and mailed it in. Apparently she wanted to vote for the Republican candidate and he was honoring her dying wish. When he went to court, he asked the judge if it was ok to just not count his ballot and count hers instead. What part of dead people don’t vote did this guy not understand? I believe he was given a fine, but no jail time.
Capt. Seaweed
@owlbear1:
If I may add: the poll workers who check the signature on the ballot are trained, paid handwriting experts. If the sig on the outer envelope doesn’t match the sig on the voter registration, it’s rejected. From what I understand the rejected sig goes on for a second look from a different person. If it still doesn’t match, the ballot is kicked out and the voter is contacted IMMEDIATELY. Not in a week, but a postcard is sent out right away and it arrives long before election night is over.
This happened to my gf two years ago. She had broken her hand and her handwriting had changed. The poll workers caught that, contacted her, and she went down and filled out a new registration card. She had her US passport as ID. They gave her a brand new fresh ballot, she filled it out right there, and voted. Simple. Fair.
Ohio Mom
Thanks to all who explained Oregon to me, especially the part about the envelopes and signatures. Makes you wonder why something similar can’t be worked out for absentee ballots.