Mail-In Voting?

[Sean]

I've done mail in voting for years -it was called absentee ballots. It's way easier, I didn't have to find the polls, the only downside is when the guy you voted for in the primary election has an affair and your vote is for a bozo...

Anyway, I'm a fan of mail in voting, but I'm against online voting. There's enough questions with touchscreen voting and no paper trail.

Sean

[Jon]

you also don't know if you ballot got there or was counted. (see the Minnesota Election Senate and the absentee ballot that were falsely regected)

you don't know who else voted for some other state or country, or how many times..

you need to think of a ballot as a withdrawal slip from "YOUR" bank account for 1 million dollars and it already has your signature on it.

Now you would put that into the mail? Would you not want to be able to track every one of those and make sure that the correct people get them and cash them?

The fight over who should or should not vote has seeped into the mechanics of the election process and the "we have to make it easer to vote" side does not want an audit process for obvious reasons.




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I do not believe that America is better than everybody else...
America "IS" everybody else.

[Sean]

Jon,

I'm not sure how the absentee voting works here in Hawaii, but I know that when I was moving around in the Navy it was nice to be able to vote for elections that affected my home of residence. I've voted in person and I've voted via mail. I'll trust the US Postal service to deliver the ballto and I'll trust the folks who count the votes.

As for ballots not being properly counted, that can happen just about anyway you can imagine it happening. I would bet that for as long as we've had elections there have been folks trying to figure out how to discount someone elses ballot.

I guess I don't see this as an issue of us versus them, but just as an option that I prefer.

Cheers,

Sean

[Jon]

It is necessary to deal with absentee voting and the USPS is a great organization, but it also loses mail all the time. So why would you setup your whole election system on top of a system that is known to be flawed?

The more convenient voting is made, the easer it will be to steal elections.

If you don't have a problem with your vote "not" being counted, they why vote at all? Us vs them is part of democratic life and should alway be thought of that way during election time because, just like you state "as long as we've had elections there have been folks trying to figure out how to discount someone elses ballot", and as votes we need to make sure the system does not allow that to happen and if it does and can be proven, the penalty should be just short of death.


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I do not believe that America is better than everybody else...
America "IS" everybody else.

[oink]

Jon,
Your last posts state it very well.

Pua`a
S. FL
Big Islander to be.

[Seeb]

Whats with the permanent absentee thing? if you dont live here how can you vote here ( expect for those in the service )

[csgray]

Permanent absentee voting is used by: people who travel a lot for work, people with transportation issues which make it hard to get to polling places, house bound elderly, people who work weird schedules and can't get to the polling places during voting hours, single parents and other caregivers who can't get respite to go vote, military personnel, and college students going to school away from Hawaii. These people are all qualified to vote here, they just need to do it by absentee ballot on a consistent basis, thus "permanent absentee ballots." No conspiracy, no fraud, just citizens who want to exercise their rights to vote in Hawaii.

As someone who actually experienced vote by mail for many years in a state with a huge range of political persuasions, I do know that there has been very little ACTUAL abuse of the system; and there were plenty of "watch dogs" on every side of the issue to sniff out fraud. Especially since some factions invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their initiatives on the ballot, they sure didn't want to get cheated.

Someone asked about privacy, here is how it worked: you mark your ballot and then seal it in a "secrecy envelope" then that goes into another envelope which you sign and either deliver to an official collection site or mail in (most people dropped theirs off a week or two before the election day). When it gets to the elections division they check your signature against the one on record, if it doesn't match then you get called to verify the signature, your name is marked off as having voted, and then the secrecy envelope is placed in the ballot box to be counted on election day. It isn't much different than early voting, except how your ballot gets to the ballot box.

There were reports of right wing fundamentalist Christian churches having "voting parties" the first vote by mail election (probably because of the anti-gay rights initiative on the ballot which was strongly supported by those churches) 0nce it became clear their tax exempt status was put at risk by such activities they quit doing it. The liberal left in Oregon was always too fractured and disorganized to ever get to that point.

Non-partisan studies have been done which show that Oregon's vote by mail system works; the full spectrum of political factions now support it as effective, the only consistent complaints have been from the direct mail industry who lost a lot of business when the voting window was stretched out to a longer time period.



Carol

[Jon]

And until the current Minnesota mess started, they thought there system was the best/most honest system in the USA... now they know better.

Best as I can tell, all you need to have to vote in Hawaii is an address and some form of ID.


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I do not believe that America is better than everybody else...
America "IS" everybody else.