Pinger dinger.
Posted on 10/15/2003 6:17:14 PM PDT by jern
Absentee voting stirs debate Some blame politics for a change that makes getting a ballot harder
By JOHN ZEBROWSKI, Staff Writer
Rep. Martin Nesbitt, a Buncombe Democrat, said he didn't know who did it. Across the political aisle, Rep. Paul Stam, a Wake Republican, said he had no idea how the change made it into an unrelated bill on the last day of the 2002 General Assembly. Same for the State Board of Elections, the Republican Party and local elections officials. The quasi-mystery was: Who inserted language into the Technical Corrections Bill -- a thick slab of legislation used to clean up mistakes in the state budget -- that makes it more difficult for people to obtain an absentee ballot for all North Carolina elections, including the one Nov. 4?
This wasn't an amendment, so there was no sponsor. People had hunches that it came from a Democrat in the Senate; they just didn't want to be the ones to say it.
"I wish someone would get to the bottom of this," Nesbitt said .
Here's the bottom: Sen. Tony Rand, the powerful Fayetteville Democrat, added the few lines to the bill while it was still in committee. Rand is not denying his role . He said the changes were necessary to fix a system that was being abused. Others, though, insist the move was pure politics, another skirmish in an escalating contest between the two major parties to control voter turnout.
"It's as simple as the fact [that] more Republicans send in absentee ballots than Democrats," said Cherie Poucher , Wake's elections director.
Absentee voting is no longer just for the absent. The deadline to apply for a ballot for the Nov. 4 election is Oct. 28 , with all absentee ballots due at the Board of Elections the day before the vote. Early voting at the Board of Elections begins Thursday.
For the past four years, the legislature has been making it easier for people to vote absentee, striking the provisions that a voter needed a reason to apply, such as illness or travel. Easing the rules for mail-in voting is one of the major trends in U.S. voting, seen as a way to limit costs and increase turnout.
Last year, someone could download a form from the election board's Web site or fill out a photocopy of a form and mail it in. A ballot was sent almost immediately.
This year, though, the Internet forms have been removed; photocopies of a request aren't allowed. Now the voter must contact the board directly for a form or mail a request "written entirely by the requester personally" or by a family member and then signed by the voter.
As Poucher puts it, voters now must request a request -- a change that provoked a couple of dozen complaints for last week's election. She expects the angry letters to roll in for next year's general election, when most voters will discover the changes.
When "no excuse" absentee voting was instituted for the 2000 general election, the Republican Party aggressively moved to take advantage of the changes. Bill Peaslee , the state GOP political director, said information on how to obtain a ballot was integrated into campaigns. In Wake, Poucher said, Republicans sent absentee applications to party members containing the voter's name, address, date of birth and registration number -- all that was needed was a signature and a trip to the mailbox.
The efforts worked. Poucher said Republicans have been pulling away from Democrats in Wake in the number of absentee ballots cast through the mail. Statewide, the two parties were even for the 2000 general election. But last year, the percentage of registered Republicans voting absentee surpassed the percentage of Democrats.
When the legislature liberalized the absentee law, it was Republicans who tried to block it, arguing that it could be subject to fraud. "We fought it, and it turned out to be a bonanza for us," Rep. Joe Kiser, a Lincoln County Republican, told North Carolina Insight magazine this spring.
That bonanza, Rand said, comes at a price. The absentee ballot, he said, is not something political parties should be encouraging people to use. Rand said he is a supporter of the one-stop voting sites where people can fill out a ballot up to three weeks before the election. But even though absentee voting is now "no excuse," he said, it really should be used only by those who know they won't be able to make it to the polls.
"We've made it about as simple as the voting process should be," he said. "We don't want anybody soliciting people to vote absentee. It violates the spirit of the law, in my humble opinion."
Rand dismissed criticism by Republicans such as Stam as nothing but politics: "A hit dog always hollers."
Michael McLaughlin , editor of North Carolina Insight, which is published by the N.C. Center for Public Policy Research, said Rand's argument that soliciting absentee voters is wrong doesn't make sense. "What's different about that than soliciting people to go to the polls on Election Day?" he asked.
Nesbitt, the Buncombe representative, plans to fight to get the changes repealed. He said he will introduce legislation to repeal the restrictions. An earlier attempt, passed by a huge margin in the House, stalled in the Senate.
If another bill makes it to the Senate, Rand said, he will fight to make sure it's defeated.
Ferrel Guillory , director of the P rogram on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill, said the battle over the mechanics of absentee ballots is part of a greater fight over voter turnout between the two major parties. The 1980s and 1990s, he said, were dominated by an "air war," with the emphasis on attack ads on television and radio.
But the rise of Republicanism in the South has brought the two major parties to near-parity in North Carolina, with the Democrats holding on to a slight edge in voter registration. This, Guillory said, combined with the state's low voter turnout, triggered massive drives to get people, particularly loyalists, to actually cast their ballots. Absentee voting was seen as one more way to achieve this.
"Just over the last four [to] six years, the competition has really increased over voter turnout," he said. "It's the ground war now where elections are won."
Staff Writer John Zebrowski can be reached at 829-4841 or jzebrows@newsobserver.com.
For those outside of NC, and in NC for that matter who do not know. The Technical Corrections Bill is an annual bill that makes "Technical Corrections". Meaning, it corrects misspellings, improper punctuation, and grammatical errors in the budget. That is what it is supposed to do, but the past couple of years the RATS have snuck things into it without anyones knowledge.
I don't remember what they added last year, but it caused a big stir when it was discovered. I am hoping Constitution Day or another FReeper will remember what it was.
Pinger dinger.
Of course they do,,, six months to a year after they vote on them.
MKM
Why the hell not?
Time after time, Fat Tony has shut down debate and used parliamentary shell games to sucessfully shield Democrats from up or down recorded votes on tax and spend alternatives and many other sound ideas offered in good faith. He essentially wrote the present Senate Rules, so using the term "parliamentary manuvers" is an insult to honest deliberative assembly and the role of legislatures in constitutional republics.
The Capital Press Corp just ignores this over and over again.
Again, thanks for putting it up here.
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