In What State did 33,500 Registered Voters Receive Two Ballots?
Here’s a hint: They are holding their presidential primary today and it’s not Kentucky.
Brad Friedman knows the answer is Oregon, and today he takes the time to write a thorough post about the potential problems with Vote by Mail:
Many Oregonians will tell you they believe their system is wonderful, yet many of the Election Integrity advocates on the ground there, including many we’ve spoke with at the Oregon Voting Rights Coalition, warn that the success of the state’s VBM program is largely based on good procedures put in place by Bradbury [Secretary of State Bill Bradbury], and which they fear may disappear, as they are not statutory, when he is someday no longer the state’s SoS.
Brad also posts these “six quick, simple, easy-to-understand points” written by Colorado’s election integrity advocate Claudia Kuhns, the executive director of the Public Integrity Project, as to why Vote by Mail is a very bad idea:
Paper Ballots, Not Mail Ballots
(Why all mail ballot elections are a bad idea)
- Lack of Transparency - Ballots are mailed in secret and counted in secret on secret software. Ballots are counted at a central location that makes fraud on a large scale easier to accomplish and harder to detect. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse data shows that approximately a third of computer security breaches are done by insiders either intentionally or accidentally.
- Lack of Security - Ballots in hundreds of thousands of locations with no security for two to three weeks. The chain of custody lacks security as the ballots are handled by many anonymous persons throughout the process. Any unmarked contest on a ballot can be marked by someone other than the voter when the ballots are opened for counting.
- Voter Intimidation - Voting can be done as a group at churches or union halls with people looking over the voter’s shoulder to make sure they vote “the right way”.
- Election Fraud - There is no way to be certain that the person who signed the envelope is the person to whom the ballot was sent. Ballots can be stolen from mail boxes while the voter is at work or away from home on an errand. Other tactics include vote harvesting by persons who show up at your door to “help” you vote. The elderly and those with disabilities are particularly vulnerable.
- Potential for Ballot Mishandling - Post office or contract mailing company illegally forwards ballots, more than one ballot sent to voters, postal workers putting ballots in the trash. (All of these thing have happened in Colorado, 1100 ballots illegally forwarded in Douglas County, 214 voters received two ballots in Boulder County, ballots found in dumpsters at post office in El Paso County.)
- Lack of Secret Ballot - When election judges check in your ballot, they can see how you voted when they match the inventory number on your ballot to the inventory number next to your name on the voter rolls. The Colorado Constitution guarantees your right to a secret ballot. [ed note: as do most other state Constitutions and elections code.]
May 20th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
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