We received three sample ballots in the mail last week: mine, my
husband’s, and our oldest son’s. This would be lovely, except that
our oldest son attends college in Los Angeles, and has very
sensibly reregistered to vote down there.
We received three sample ballots in the mail last week: mine, my husband’s, and our oldest son’s. This would be lovely, except that our oldest son attends college in Los Angeles, and has very sensibly reregistered to vote down there.
Last February, when his ballot arrived, he assured me via email that he had reregistered. I called the office of the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters, and the woman I talked to promised to take him off the rolls. Promises, promises.
This week, after wandering the Daedalian labyrinth of the registrar’s voice mail system, I spoke to Julian, who told me to send it back, with a note that our son no longer lives here. He said we would probably receive one more ballot before they removed his name.
I will follow his instructions, but I am unhappy that Santa Clara neglects to remove from the rolls voters who have reregistered in another county. For one thing, my son has been called for jury duty in Santa Clara since moving; we had to make calls and fill out forms to get him excused.
Secondly, I wonder how much of the semi-annual gnashing of teeth over the so-called low voter turnout is due to neglected, un-purged rolls. How many moved or deceased people continue to be carried, for how many years, after moving or passing away?
Thirdly, having names on the rolls with no actual voter attached to them is an open invitation to voter fraud.
Not that perpetrators of voter fraud necessarily wait for voters to move or die to commit their crimes. From all over the country, reports are rolling in: fraudulent registrations are being filed at record rates.
In Florida, the Daily News has reported that 46,000 New Yorkers are registered to vote in both NYC and Florida. Sixty-eight percent are Democrats, 12 percent are Republicans and 16 percent claim no party. The Daily News compared computer records to determine that many of these doubly-registered had in fact voted in both states, called a few of these dual-voters on the phone, and was hung up on for its pains.
In Colorado, the 9News I Team has discovered record numbers of fraudulent filings, mostly stemming from registration drives, in particular with a group called ACORN, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
Kym Carson admits she forged three people’s names on forty registration forms to help her boyfriend, an ACORN registration drive worker, earn more money. (He gets paid $2 per completed form.) Gerald Obi registered about 35 times to “help” workers earn more.
ACORN’s state director claims that they had no intention to commit fraud, a claim that rang hollow to my ears when I learned that they are also under investigation in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Ohio for similar shenanigans.
Nor is ACORN alone. In Tennessee, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin, groups called, respectively, Tennessee Citizen Action, Americans Coming Together, Voting Is Power, the Public Interest Research Group in Michigan, and Project Vote, are under investigation. Two Republican officials in West Virginia who were investigating voter fraud have received death threats.
Curiously, each of these organizations claims to be a non-partisan, get-out-the-vote group. Each is strongly allied to leftist groups. It boggles my mind that any individual or group that thinks of itself as being democratic, liberal, or interested in social justice would stoop to such tactics, but so it appears.
Perhaps such individuals and such groups have convinced themselves that the end justifies the means, that getting Bush out of office justifies any amount of lying and fraud and even, in the case of campaign offices vandalized across the country, violence.
Thus, I find myself in agreement with one point in Dina Campeau’s column of Oct. 8. “Some people are so turned off by the negative tone of campaigns … that they don’t vote as a mode of silent protest.” Others, perhaps, are so energized by the mud slinging that they engage in fraud and violence.
But Mrs. Campeau exacerbates the problem when, in the eighth paragraph of her column, she calls the president of these United States a demeaning, belittling nickname. I am disappointed that a woman so concerned about social injustice could be so insensitive.
