Of course the Democrats support vote-by-mail. It's easier to commit fraud that way, as turned out to be the case in Britain, where an election "won" through a conspiracy of vote-by-mail fraud was just set aside:
Judge Mawrey said evidence of "massive, systematic and organised fraud" in the campaign had made a mockery of the election and ruled that not less than 1,500 votes had been cast fraudulently in the city.Sounds familiar.The deputy high court judge said the system was "hopelessly insecure" and expressed regret that recent warnings about the failings had been dismissed by the government as "scaremongering".
In what should be encouraging to the WA Democrats who are promoting their own nutty scheme to move to all-mail voting, another report on the British vote fraud says
Reading from the executive summary of his judgment to a packed court, the judge said: "This system is wide open to fraud and any would-be political fraudster knows that it's wide open to fraud."I think Rep. Sam Hunt knows exactly what he's doing. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at April 04, 2005 05:11 PM | Email This
The only American innovation that I did not find in my own investigations of Britain's problems with postal ballots is "vote brokers", who can be found in many places in the United States. But I am sure they will have them by the next election.
Posted by: Jim Miller on April 4, 2005 05:43 PMNow, the voter at a polling place must slip out of view to show the ballot to the purchaser of his vote. But, voters using absentee ballots can choose the place and time to meet with the purchaser.
Our old election laws tried to cover the obvious situations. Buying someone's vote or using threats to make him vote a certain way (loss of his job, for example) is illegal. Asking to see someone's marked ballot is illegal. Taking a ballot out of the polling place is illegal. Checking election records to see how someone voted is illegal.
Those laws were enacted to cover real situations in which people bought and sold votes.
Now, for the convenience of voting by mail, we have made those old laws almost obsolete.
Hunt and the people like him want to make them entirely obsolete.
Is convenience worth the cost?
Do we really have to learn those same old lessons from personal experience rather than from the experiences of those who have gone before us?
Let's support pushing through voting reform requiring electronic voting in person with ID required(outside of military and selective groups of absentees) and periodically require reregistration including proof of state residency and country citizenship. This will result in a 7-10% correction (stock market term) through improved voting accuracy, a minimum of 3% decrease in state illegal alien vote registration, and other statistical improvements involving illegal and irregular votes. This could give the Republicans up to a 15% difference in ballot tallies in their favor. Now that changes everything.
Now if anyone argues that touch screen voting is intentionally skewed by programing or calibration. It is easy to determine it and prosecute. All calibrations on a touch screen can be mapped and printed out prior to and immediately after the elections to prevent tampering. The equipment summary also shows which technician keyed in to do the calibration. As for programming, it may be able to set the screen to a predetermined point which any observer can easily identify and ask for its removal. Also, there is a preview/confirmation step similar to ATMs or this blog post which can allow for erroneous/fraudulent changes to be corrected before a ballot is posted. In none of the partisan reports were machines actually found to have these problems. All electronic voting machine irregularities while alleged were unfounded otherwise the court cases and investigating committees would have highlighted the companies and machines (by serial number, technician, and precinct) responsible.
Posted by: Mark Beyer on April 4, 2005 08:47 PMI think we've had enough recent *lessons* to learn from with our November election! What is the current count of illegal, non-citizen, double voters, felons, dead people, unverified provisional fed through machines, late military ballots, missing, found ballots, etc....that can ALL be tied (directly and indirectly) to absentee voting?? It's in the thousands!
Most of our election problems are directly tied to absentee voting! The Democrats raced this *All Absentee Voting* bill through the legislature........Do we really have to spell out the reason for this???
In the next election - the Dems are toast..they know it - we know it - the people of this state know it......The only way they can pull off a win is through fraud with an all absentee voting system.....The ONLY way!
Posted by: Deborah on April 4, 2005 08:53 PMThe fraud was perpetrated with only about 15 percent of the vote being cast by absentee ballot.
Activists stood over some voters, watching them fill out their ballots.
Ballots with forged signatures were cast.
I wonder if they might have got away with it, but for this:
There was uproar on the day of the vote when three "unexplained", unsealed ballot boxes appeared at the count and were included, along with a plastic bag stuffed with votes for Labour.
And this:
A midnight raid by police on the eve of the election found them sitting at a table with 275 unsealed postal votes scattered on a table in front of them. The find proved to be the tip of the iceberg.
They had collected the ballots in a variety of ways. The most common was to get hold of a copy of the electoral register, apply for a postal ballot in someone else's name and have it sent to a "safe" address where it could be picked up.
England started allowing absentee voting "on demand" in 2000. Before that, they allowed it for those who were truly absent or had medical reasons justifying voting by absentee.
Recently, they imposed vote-by-mail on a large part of their populace -- eliminating voting in person at the polls.
No identification is required for requesting and casting an absentee ballot. (They do have one step WA doesn't have -- a requirement for a witness's signature on the ballot envelope. But, of course, those signatures were easily forged as well.)
Their election laws sound familiar, and that's not comforting.
And, naturally, the reason given for allowing vote-by-mail sounds familiar:
But the Government changed the law in 2000 to make postal voting available on demand and last year gave millions of people in England (although not in Birmingham) no option other than to vote by post at local and European elections.
The reason given was a belief that if people found it easier to vote they would be more inclined to do so. The take-up of postal voting has been so remarkable this year that suspicions are bound to be raised that something is amiss.
We don't have such a nightmare in WA, so far as anyone knows. But is there such a desire for convenience that we should let things go until we do?
Posted by: Micajah on April 4, 2005 08:59 PM