Washblog

By requesting an absentee ballot, you have entered into a contract, with considerable forethought, to vote.

Not returning your ballot undermines the elections process.You can return it blank for all I care but you must return it.

Beyond that, I don't know what to say except that anything less than 100% by-mail participation is unacceptable.

by m3047 on Tue May 16, 2006 at 10:41:37 PM PST

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on that last day or two when a ballot is lost?  I work in a library - we always get at least a handful of people on election day saying "I can't find my ballot - help!"  At present, they have those "provisional ballots" at every polling location.  Is there something in place in Oregon for this eventuality?  If you have to go to the elections office for a replacement ballot, people won't likely make the effort.  I see this issue as a series of trade-offs, and like anything else, as a democracy we should choose which trade-off we value most.  If there's more 'accuracy' with VBM, but fewer people are voting their true choice due to coersion, then it's not truly more accurate, in the absolute sense, anyway.

by awickens on Wed May 17, 2006 at 02:05:12 PM PST

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A little thought exercise here. There isn't a perfect equivalence; and that's part of the exercise, what is taking the place and how well thought out it might be. I vote at the polls, and although I am a computer poly, I don't understand why people don't count change any more. I work as a pollworker. I stepped up to the plate for a Party which I at times only support because a yellow Party is better than the alternative and was the pollworker coordinator for my LD. I am a data consumer of the electronic canvass.

As an exercise, I wanted to explore how a polling site might be run if it was run the same as vote-by-mail.

Assuming you have the same array of resources, the primary difference is that it would be arranged differently, sort of like concentric moats, with the ballot box (optical scan machine) in the center of the "keep".

At the outer ring you'd have a stack of ballots. No need for numbering, help yourself folks.

Nobody needs to stay in the polling place with them. Go ahead and leave. Mark them, give them to your friends, fill them out, photocopy the filled-out ballots... whatever. In fact, they could just leave a pile of them for anybody to pick up for weeks or months ahead of time. This is great, we no longer need to account for ballots issued against ballots voted. Silly exercise anyway, since theoretically we'd have to accept a ballot marked with crayon on a piece of wood if that was all the person had; glad to be done with the silly ballot accounting nonsense. It's all about the voter's intent.

So, you want to vote. You bring back a marked ballot and some i.d. There is the customary id check and you sign the book, providing nobody has signed your name already. (If they have and you want to vote then we have to open that special envelope marked "DO NOT OPEN". You don't want us to have to do that on your account, do you?)

Normally at this point either you or the poll judge would also print your name on the Inspector's List, which is displayed as a public and timely record of who has voted. We don't need this silly exercise. The folks downtown will publish the list later, after the election is over, if they feel like it. Or maybe they'll give you some number to see if your ballot was counted, but nobody else's; it's better that way, trust me. No? Whatever. What makes you think you've got the right to check up on your neighbors, anyway? Dead? Are you sure? Hah! They voted hours ago! Guess they could've just died. Whatever.

At this point your ballot goes into the box. We don't really count the ballots here. We just sort them. Not sure why... They'll count them later. Downtown.

If you're milling around at the end of the night to see the poll tape with the election results, you're wasting your time. Go home and watch it on television.

Presumably somebody would still account for the signatures in the ballot books against the numbers of ballots cast, but this is government work and none of those people who worked a fifteen hour day at the polling place for minimum wage seem inclined to pick up the slack so I can go home early. What ingrates. I think I'll go home, too.

by m3047 on Wed May 17, 2006 at 10:38:18 PM PST

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Much is made about the mechanism whereby if you vote by mail they give you a special number so that you can see if your vote was counted.

There can be no debate about the fact that not all ballots are returned to be counted. The question needs to be: Do the people who don't send in their ballots use the number to verify that their vote was not counted?

My opinion is that people who don't see it as a civic and patriotic obligation to return the ballot they have been entrusted with aren't to be trusted to verify that their vote was not counted.

by m3047 on Thu May 18, 2006 at 08:54:46 AM PST

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Stop being the right wing's useful idiot, and stop pretending that you are anything other than that, unless you are their mole posting here, which I don't rule out, either.

The data are indisputable that voting by mail increases voter turnout. This scares the hell out of the right wing, which has been trying frantically to suppress turnout with damn near everything they do. They don't want all those brown people and black people voting.

Your claim that you are for "voter integrity" rings hollow. Any system can be made to work, and any system can be gamed. Voting by mail is not intrinsically any less "clean" than poll voting is.

Oregon's system works just fine, and turnout is way up in that state. That is a positive good.

When Spokane County votes to go all-mail, with 60 percent of the vote, the trend is clear, and you're on the side of whack-jobs like Stefan Sharkansky and Gentry Lange who couldn't care less about "voting integrity."

So please pardon me, Jason, if I am not impressed with either the substance of your issue, or your motivation for pimping it on this blog. Quoting David Domke and Mahatma Gandhi won't make this turd smell any sweeter. Y'all have a nice day now.

If perception is reality, then the world must be flat and the sun must revolve around it.

by ivan on Tue May 16, 2006 at 07:21:53 AM PST

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As the overwhelmingly popular and therefore successful vote by mail mandate has demonstrated, there is no need to count ballots issued. All we need to do is count ballots voted. (Specifically, all we need to do is check i.d. becore accepting a ballot.)

This would be such a huge paperwork headache eliminated!

All we need to do is give ballots away, and then when people show up with them filled out, that's when we let them in to deposit their ballots in the box^M^M^M optical scan machine.

by m3047 on Tue May 23, 2006 at 08:54:08 PM PST

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