Must Voting (as opposed to Suffrage) Be More or Less Universal?

[victimofGM]

I served in the Navy from 1990-1998. I tried to vote in the presidential election of 1992 by filling out a request for my state’s absentee ballot. I received the ballot after the election deadline. It was postmarked for the very last date required by stat law to be mailed out. This was fine if mailed within the Continental US but I was on a ship in the Mediterranean Sea. I later found out other more senior sailors on the ship gave up trying to vote when at sea because their ballots would arrive too late to be counted. Was this intentional form of disenfranchising military votes, I don’t know.

Someone mentioned shuttling voters to the polls. When Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu ran for senate and it seemed she could potentially lose the election several private charter buses with limo window tint were sent out to the various wards to pick up voters and bring them to the polls. Those votes brought her over the top. For years there’s been rumors and allegations of bribing people to vote a certain way while they were on those buses. The fact that her father was a very powerful former New Orleans mayor and judge added to the negative speculation outside the New Orleans area while those in New Orleans denied with a wink and a smile. Louisiana has a long history of voter fraud to the point it’s become several jokes. “Louisiana sold their mechanical voting machines to Mexico and Edwin Edwards wine their election”. “Know why the graves in New Orleans are above ground? To make it easier for the dead to vote on Election Day”.

[markg91359]

Originally Posted by victimofGM

As voting technology and laws change, so does the methods of those trying to cheat the system. Providing proof of ID to vote and other measures are merely a step towards ensuring only those who are legally allowed to vote are the ones casting their vote. Sadly it doesn’t stop small forms of voter fraud such as nursing home staff sending off for absentee ballots for their residents and then filling them out themselves before mailing them back without their residents ever touching the ballots.

As for education or knowing the issues,…that is a touchy subject. I’ve personally known people who have at least a 4 year university degree who were idiots outside their field of study and people who never set foot in a university who knew a great deal about how our state and federal government operated as well as international issues. This allows people to vote based upon their own personal knowledge, views, and life experiences. It would be nice if students graduating high school would do so with at least the most basic understanding of our three branches of government, the bill of rights, and the US Constitution. They should also learn that the bill of rights and Constitution are there to set limits upon the government, not the citizens. It would be nice if every voter had at least a basic understanding of the three branches of government but that isn’t necessary to cast a vote. I would be wary of state laws allowing for voting officials to enter the voting booth with someone because they could not read. In my state this was used as an opportunity for either the official to vote how he wanted instead of how the voter wanted or to bribe the voter to vote a certain way. In those days it was a local sheriff or police officer doing the bribing or threatening of the voter.

Mail in ballots have to be signed and the signatures have to reasonably match the registration signature. This should eliminate most of these kinds of concerns. I've said before, we've done mail in balloting for years in my heavily-republican state of Utah. I'm unaware of there ever being any problems.

There is an inevitable debate between "access" and "security" when it comes to voting. Security is a concern, but so is access. If security measures keep seven people from casting fraudulent ballots that has to be weighed against keeping 20,000 people from being able to register to vote because of some barrier that has been put in place. Personally, I think I would rather take the chance that seven people might cast fraudulent ballots than keep 20,000 people from voting.

[victimofGM]

Originally Posted by markg91359

Mail in ballots have to be signed and the signatures have to reasonably match the registration signature. This should eliminate most of these kinds of concerns. I've said before, we've done mail in balloting for years in my heavily-republican state of Utah. I'm unaware of there ever being any problems.

There is an inevitable debate between "access" and "security" when it comes to voting. Security is a concern, but so is access. If security measures keep seven people from casting fraudulent ballots that has to be weighed against keeping 20,000 people from being able to register to vote because of some barrier that has been put in place. Personally, I think I would rather take the chance that seven people might cast fraudulent ballots than keep 20,000 people from voting.

Not effective nor frequently validated. Because these are nursing home residents complications like Parkinson’s and arthritis will eliminate their normal signature. They have a “witness” sign and that’s how some nursing home staff commit voter fraud. All the residents are alive and registered to vote but it’s the staff who are casting the votes.
https://www.macombdaily.com/2021/10/...th-voter-fraud
https://www.wpr.org/racine-county-sh...its-not-simple
https://www.texastribune.org/2017/05...nursing-homes/
https://headlineusa.com/details-emer...-nursing-home/
https://newstalk1130.iheart.com/feat...e-fraud-works/

[Sonic_Spork]

Originally Posted by victimofGM

Not effective nor frequently validated. Because these are nursing home residents complications like Parkinson’s and arthritis will eliminate their normal signature. They have a “witness” sign and that’s how some nursing home staff commit voter fraud. All the residents are alive and registered to vote but it’s the staff who are casting the votes.
https://www.macombdaily.com/2021/10/...th-voter-fraud
https://www.wpr.org/racine-county-sh...its-not-simple
https://www.texastribune.org/2017/05...nursing-homes/
https://headlineusa.com/details-emer...-nursing-home/
https://newstalk1130.iheart.com/feat...e-fraud-works/

Your first link talks about how signatures didn't match and the perpetrator was caught and prosecuted. Three counts, did that mean that only three forged ballots were attempted? That's pretty small beans. And she was busted.

Second link is one where the Sheriff wanted not only deputized citizens but two observers (one D/one R) allowed in to observe people in care facilities voting in 2020, but these people were the highest possible risk of death from Covid and preventative isolation measures caused them to prohibit outside observers in. A committee that included Republican legislators signed off on an investigation into voter integrity that found no substantial evidence of fraud, and to quote the article:

A nonpartisan review of Wisconsin’s 2020 election by the Legislative Audit Bureau, released Friday, flagged only four people who may have voted twice in the election and 11 people whose absentee ballots may have been counted, even though they died before Election Day. There were more than 3.3 million ballots cast in the election in Wisconsin.

Your third link is a bogus article and I'll tell you why. They botched their source citations. It's full of dead links or links to no article at all or something that does not support the point being made. Also, this article is about a bill that Texas legislators want so that any place that requests 5 or more mail in ballots can have an election official and observers show up and treat it like a polling place, and since they would also be able to assist with on the spot registration, it may in fact help seniors vote who otherwise might not. I don't see it as a bad thing, but I also don't see any evidence presented there to support claims that voter fraud in nursing homes is really so prevalent as to swing any election. If anything, disenfranchisement of a group (such as seniors, which this bill would help eliminate such a problem) will prevent more votes from being cast in much greater numbers that DO stand to swing elections.

Fourth link is the exact same story as the second one and is more than anything, recitation of quotes from the aggrieved sheriff who is just sure that bad things are afoot. I do however think that there is merit in the fact that if people are allowed into the facility to clean fish tanks and do other work, the election personnel should probably have been. Get them good masks and let 'em in, I say. I get the complaint that it was handled in this manner, but there is still no new evidence stated in the article that fraud on a large scale was proven to occur.

And your final link is also about Wisconsin (same as second and fourth) but this one is from one of these voting officials, basically saying that letting the deputies in to help the elderly with casting their vote is where the fraud comes in, because some of the deputies might be dirty and the old people in homes might not be of a mental capacity to know what they are doing.

So two of your sources argue one side, one argues the other, and all three of them about that story claim fraud but offer no evidence of it. All proven cases only show small numbers of fraudulent votes.

Ya can't just spam a bunch of news stories you find from Google searching your point as evidence that you're right. And as I have said before, stating an unproven position as fact, or lying outright, to a news reporter is NOT a crime. People do it all the time. Show me where evidence was submitted in court, or show me where people swore under oath, where perjury will land you in prison, to these things...then I'll listen. Not before. At this point, Trump stacked the courts with so many judges during his term that if there was even the slightest bit of credible evidence that fraud played a real role in 2020, one of his judges would have made a biiiiig deal of it. There are enough media outlets who pay homage to the right's concerns that it would have been reported. And yet time after time, these complaints got tossed out of the courts.

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Also, right after I moved here to AZ and immediately registered to vote when I got my new Driver's License, I received my ballot in the mail for a local election. There was only one thing on said ballot, which was a school tax thing for the specific district I'm in. That was IT. I went ahead and voted though, because I always do.

I have remarried in the last year and honestly I am STILL trying to get used to signing my new last name. I don't really have it "down" yet.

I received a phone call from an election worker who asked me to verify my name and address because my signature was not a match. I informed him that I had recently remarried and wasn't quite solid on the new sig just yet and he said he would make a note of that and go ahead and count my ballot.

They ARE checking the signatures.