Every Vote Counts—and Counts

Brian Doherty | September 17, 2004

Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe writes on how easy it is to register to vote in more than one locality and absentee-ballot your way to democratic heaven: having your voice heard, over and over again. He even did it for his wife's cat, apparently helping decide the fate of our nation in three different states.

[Link via Rational Review]

Comments

|9.17.04 @ 3:15PM|#

you know what they say in Chicago, vote early, vote often!

Steve in CO|9.17.04 @ 3:18PM|#

I doubt it is just being exploited by just one side.

|9.17.04 @ 3:26PM|#

In my city, Philadephia, there are over 1 million registered voters. The population is about 1.4 million. If you assume that, say, 20 or 25 % of these are under legal voting age, non-citizens or otherwise ineligible, which seems reasonable, then well over 90% of the eligible voters are registered. I hope this is because people here are remarkably civic minded, but somehow doubt it.

|9.17.04 @ 3:42PM|#

When I moved to Texas to attend grad school I registered there without having to rescind my registration back in NJ. I never took advantage of it but I could have easily voted in both states. In fact, as a former resident of NJ, NY and TX and a current resident of WA I could theoretically, via absentee ballot, vote in four states!

DaveInBigD|9.17.04 @ 3:51PM|#

Yeah, I did the same thing. I found out I was still registered back home when South Carolina tried to draft me for jury duty.

|9.17.04 @ 3:57PM|#

He should have registered the cat nine times, one for each life, assuming the cat was over eighteen, of course.

digamma|9.17.04 @ 3:58PM|#

I worked at the polls in the Philadelphia neighborhood where I grew up. The voter list were sorted by street address, so if you looked up a given house, you saw the people who lived there, the people who lived there before them, the people who lived there before THEM, and so on. No one ever gets de-registered.

When I left Philadelphia, I registered at my new home, but they never asked me for my old address, so they have no way of telling Philly to remove me from the roll. I'm sure I'm still registered there, and if I call for an absentee ballot, they'll send one to me. It's a pretty ugly state of affairs.

The Lonewacko Blog|9.17.04 @ 4:21PM|#

Motor Voter is also one of the main reasons so many politicians and activists want to get driver's licenses into the hands of illegal aliens. Anyone who believes the "public safety" line is kidding themselves.

NY state is currently trying to revoke driver's licenses of illegal aliens. The usual suspects - including the NYT - are doing their best to make sure that doesn't happen.

FAIR has made formal requests of NY and VA to find out how many illegal aliens are registered.

Lest you think this is just a Democratic thing, recall that Jeb Bush supported DLs for IAs and the Bush administration is trying to make sure that Mexican illegal aliens can use Mexican IDs to open bank accounts. The FBI and the DOJ call those Mexican IDs a security threat, but I guess some things are more important than homeland security.

|9.17.04 @ 4:26PM|#

In Oklahoma, if you don't vote for a certain length of time (something like six or eight years), you get dropped from the rolls. I know of several times when someone saw the name of a dead person on the rolls and informed the poll worker, who I assume informed voter registration.

|9.17.04 @ 4:32PM|#

I hope this policy has been changed, but there were some counties in Alabama that paid the probate judge at each election in proportion to the number of registered voters in the county. The probate judge was also responsible for maintaining the voter rolls. As you might imagine, some counties had more registered voters than adults.

|9.17.04 @ 4:39PM|#

From the stories on this blog it's obvious I'm not the only one who is registered in two places.

So that leads to two thoughts

1)The low voter turnout stats are just pure shit

2) Maybe ther's only 1 or 2 million voters in the whole country!

|9.17.04 @ 4:54PM|#

I've been registered in CA for several years now, but I never formally rescinded my registration in WI. I guess in theory I might still be on the list in WI.

In SB County (I don't know about other CA counties) we divide the roster into 2 sections: The active list, of people whom we believe to be still living here based on time since they last voted and/or registered, and the inactive list of people who haven't voted for a while but haven't given the county any reason to believe that they've moved. The division of the list is just to make life easier for the election clerks, so we don't have to flip through as many pages when a voter shows up at the table.

I know that in CA the voter registration form includes an entry for your previous address. In principle the country registrars of voters could get new voters removed from the list in their old places of residence. I don't know if that's actually done or not. I'll ask at the orientation before the next election.

|9.17.04 @ 5:24PM|#

The author's hard to trust. He fell for this hoax.
"""
Did that wide-open door to fraud cost former the GOP's Robert Dornan his seat in Congress? An investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service following Dornan's 1996 defeat by Democrat Loretta Sanchez found that 4,023 noncitizens may have cast ballots in that election.
"""

This never happened. Those supposed studies were straw-grasping efforts that flagged multiple "Sister Maria" at the same convent and Junior and Senior pairings at the same house as non-citizen fraud voters. In fact, though there was a lot of hyped charges, and the Sec of State invested a lot of attention in this, nobody was ever charged with a crime. The real story here was how a state official leaking info to one reporter at the LAT could spoof them into placing so much ink into this complete fabrication.

Does this fool really think people in Santa Ana really want Dornan and not Sanchez? Really? He ought to pay for your his own poll and find out how full of it he is.

|9.17.04 @ 6:36PM|#

Does this fool really think people in Santa Ana really want Dornan and not Sanchez?

Well, apparently a great many of them do Dornan only lost by a whisker.

|9.17.04 @ 8:12PM|#

The district changed out from underneath Dornan. Dornan haters, R and D, targeted him and funded Sanchez very well funded in 96. Still it was close. But by 98, Dornan was trounced. It didn't help B-1 Bob that he had alienated his large block of Chicano supporters. But the reason why he was targeted in 96 was that people who didn't like him realized he was vulnerable.

|9.17.04 @ 11:12PM|#

Dornan is an ass and Sanchez is a moron. Those Santa Ana voters must be some real smart folks.

|9.17.04 @ 11:57PM|#

Bill,

If that's true, given the two major presidential candidates, the same can be said for the US in general. ;)

The Lonewacko Blog|9.18.04 @ 1:26AM|#

Those Santa Ana voters must be some real smart folks.

One small note in their favor: they recalled the head of their schoolboard, who's a real piece of work.

|9.18.04 @ 3:51AM|#

I trust anything Jacoby says as far as I can throw him, and I'm a nerd who gets all the scifi references on this blog, so I'm no Charles Atlas. He still to this day will tell you about all the wonderful things happening in Iraq that the "liberal media" just won't tell you because of nefarious dark reasons of their own. While every resonsible news outlet in the world focuses on which Texas farmboy got his ass shot off in Fallujah today, Jacoby week in week out will talk about the grade schools being rebuilt and how Iraqis really really love us, and that those WMDs will be found any day now. Feh.
He's the inhouse "contrarian" on the Globe's staff.

|9.20.04 @ 2:05PM|#

One day, the Globe ran Jacoby's "Democrats Refuse to Talk About Their Plans for Iraq" piece directly next to (then candidate) Wes Clark's piece "My Plan for Iraq."

Whatever the RNC line is that week, Jacoby always gets a column out about it by Tuesday.

Peter|9.20.04 @ 5:07PM|#

Oh, what the heck - I'll post a link to my blog entry on this subject...