News Absentee Ballot Loopholes: Are Our Votes Secure?

[pattylou]

Are more and more people choosing to use absentee ballots? This is what I have heard, and a quick google turns up articles that seem to support the idea, such as this one from Iowa: http://www.sos.state.ia.us/press/04/2004_10_13.html

What is disturbing, is that although there is a trend towards more paper trails for electronic voting machines, evidently the requirements do not apply to absentee ballots - even though they are counted with the same hardware as the regular ballots.

The Diebold absentee ballot optical scanners ("Central Count") don't record the vote totals this way, even though they're based on the same hardware as a standard precinct optical scan AND they have the little printer installed! They could easily print results for each "batch" of absentees but that feature is completely turned off.

... that quote is in this discussion: http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/14296.html

I don't have another source for the claim. (When I google for additional information, I come up with many hits that are very convoluted... and I don't quickly see which ones are pertinent.) Jim March (who I quoted above) is an activist and heavily invested in finding where loopholes exist in the voting process. I have no reason to think that he is making up the bit about no results tape on absentee ballots - and it is distressing to think that we are always one step behind the vendors in terms of getting an accurate vote count.

There appear to be so many loopholes in how votes are counted in this country, I don't know how we can ever get to the bottom of it!

 

[Art]

Are more and more people choosing to use absentee ballots? This is what I have heard, and a quick google turns up articles that seem to support the idea, such as this one from Iowa: http://www.sos.state.ia.us/press/04/2004_10_13.html
What is disturbing, is that although there is a trend towards more paper trails for electronic voting machines, evidently the requirements do not apply to absentee ballots - even though they are counted with the same hardware as the regular ballots.
... that quote is in this discussion: http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/14296.html
I don't have another source for the claim. (When I google for additional information, I come up with many hits that are very convoluted... and I don't quickly see which ones are pertinent.) Jim March (who I quoted above) is an activist and heavily invested in finding where loopholes exist in the voting process. I have no reason to think that he is making up the bit about no results tape on absentee ballots - and it is distressing to think that we are always one step behind the vendors in terms of getting an accurate vote count.
There appear to be so many loopholes in how votes are counted in this country, I don't know how we can ever get to the bottom of it!

This was a major issue in the last British general election even though they do not use electronic counting machines. The number of absentee ballots has shot up enormously and there were numerous instances uncovered of election fraud such as 10 or more fictitious people living at one address so it is a path that needs to be treaded very carefully.

 

[loseyourname]

The point of the paper trail is to have it voter-verified. In the case of absentee voting, the ballot itself is a paper trail. There wouldn't be much point in having the counting machine print out a separate slip of paper, as the voter wouldn't be there to verify that what it prints is what he actually voted for. It would be like the real e-machines printing out a slip of paper for each vote cast but not letting the voter see it. How does that provide additional security?

 

[pattylou]

Good point. I suppose the main value of a paper trail in the case of hard-copy ballots, is that you can more easily demonstrate when a number has been wrongly reported. In other words, it l;eaves more of a trail if there is corruption. But, I hadn't thought of it that way, thanks.

 

[ray b]

dead people vote absentee in south fla
just another way to stuff ballot boxes

new local laws limit the vote harvesters to 3 ballots each
before this change some had 100s of votes turned in by harvesters each
they collect them from nursing homes or go door to door
others collected names from tombstones