Like I'm mailing in these posts:
"As voting by mail rises, so do problems with ballots; Nearly 2 percent of absentee votes are rejected" by Adam Liptak |
New York Times, October 07, 2012
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner. The list includes the 2000 presidential election, in which problems with absentee ballots in Florida were a little-noticed footnote to other issues.
I've lost complete confidence in the AmeriKan electoral system.
In the last presidential election, 35.5 million voters requested absentee ballots, but only 27.9 million absentee votes were counted, according to a study by Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He calculated that 3.9 million ballots requested by voters never reached them; that another 2.9 million ballots received by voters did not make it back to election officials; and that election officials rejected 800,000 ballots. That suggests an overall failure rate of as much as 21 percent.
Some voters presumably decided not to vote after receiving ballots, but Stewart said many others most likely tried to vote and were thwarted.
‘‘If 20 percent, or even 10 percent, of voters who stood in line on Election Day were turned away,’’ he wrote in the study, published in The Journal of Legislation and Public Policy, ‘‘there would be national outrage.’’
The list of very close elections includes the 2008 Senate race in Minnesota, in which Al Franken’s victory over Norm Coleman, the Republican incumbent, helped give Democrats the 60 votes in the Senate needed to pass President Obama’s health care bill. Franken won by 312 votes, while state officials rejected 12,000 absentee ballots. Recent primary elections in New York involving Republican state senators who had voted to allow same-sex marriage also hinged on absentee ballots....
Election experts say the challenges created by mailed ballots could well affect outcomes this fall and beyond....
The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say....
Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised, and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show....
Scenes like this will play out in many elections next month, because
Florida and other states are swiftly moving from voting at a polling
place toward voting by mail....
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