Yes, that one should count! But if they've been dead for years, well lets just use our own common sense. If you are a Democrat please contact someone else not of same persuasion to gain this common sense.
Patriot Paradox
Posted on 10/31/2004 12:51:56 PM PST by Dubya
RALEIGH, N.C. - In what would be her last conscious act, 90-year-old Trixie Porter gripped a pen in her weak, trembling hand, checked the candidates of her choice and scrawled a squiggled signature on her absentee ballot.
Within an hour, the petite woman who had been suffering from heart problems lay back in her hospital bed, closed her eyes and never woke up. Her ballot arrived at her local elections board two days later, Oct. 5 - the day she died.
"We commented that day that it probably won't count," said daughter Cheryl McConnell. "But she went to her grave not knowing any different. It counted with her."
An untold number of ballots like Porter's will indeed be counted because of the haphazard and cumbersome process of enforcing laws in many states to weed out the absentee votes of those who die by Election Day.
With millions of voters taking advantage of new, in-person early voting in at least 30 states this year, it's even more certain that such "ghost" votes will be counted because, in most cases, those ballots are impossible to retrieve. Besides, it could be days or weeks after the election before local officials get word someone has died.
Death has no political allegiance. But the thousands of lawyers from both parties who will be descending on battleground states Tuesday looking for reasons to pick up a few votes could find the phenomenon of dead voters more than just an Election Day curiosity.
In Florida alone, more than 1.8 million people, many of them elderly and sick retirees, have cast absentee ballots or voted early in person in the past two weeks.
How many of those voters won't be alive on Election Day? Considering that an average of 455 voting-age people die in Florida every day, and that the 2000 presidential election was decided by a mere 537 votes, dead votes that slip through the cracks could become a meaningful bloc.
"There are lots of examples of elections being decided by one vote or 300 votes," said Tim Storey, a senior fellow with National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver. "It's the classic policymaking dilemma when you're trying to embark on new methods like early voting."
The problem has arisen as an unintended consequence of laws meant to prevent a repeat of the 2000 presidential election debacle. Unlike traditional mail-in absentee ballots that are stored in labeled envelopes and can be pulled if someone dies, most of the new "in-person" early voting is being done on machines with no paper ballot to tell how those people voted.
So if a person in Florida casts an early ballot, then is run over by a truck right outside the polling place, there's no way to rescind the vote. But the vote of a Florida soldier who mails an absentee ballot from Iraq, then is killed in action, won't - or shouldn't - be counted.
"You've got potentially two people with exactly the same situation being treated differently under the law," said John Green, director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at The University of Akron in Ohio. "And on the face of it, that's unfair."
Some elections officials go to great lengths to purge voter rolls of dead people. In Flagler County, Fla., elections supervisor Peggy Rae Border has staff members scan the obituaries regularly.
"Here we check our newspapers every single day," she said. "We're still a fairly small county, so we're able to do that on a regular basis."
In Florida and other states, the vital statistics agency sends local elections officials monthly computer lists of people who have passed away to be checked against the voter rolls.
But if that data dump occurs at the beginning of the month, as in North Carolina, the death of a voter may not be caught until after the election, when it's too late to take it back.
In Missouri, absentee voting began Sept. 21, but the latest state-provided list of dead people was only current through Oct. 15 - and only went out late this past week.
"I personally know at least two absentee voters who are in hospice care and their minds are clear and they know what they want when they vote," said Christian County Clerk Kay Brown. "But who knows if they will be alive Election Day?"
Pennsylvania Secretary of State's spokesman Brian McDonald said enforcing that state's disqualification of dead voters is just impractical on the eve of a big election. "How the heck is the county supposed to know if an absentee voter has died?"
Several states - including California, Texas, Tennessee and the presidential battlegrounds of Ohio and West Virginia - specifically allow absentee votes from those who die before the election. This patchwork of state laws also means two identical sets of circumstances can lead to very different results.
Take the hypothetical of two Fort Campbell soldiers who cast absentee ballots and were killed in the same incident overseas. The vote of the soldier who lived on the Tennessee side of the base would be counted. The vote from the soldier who lived on the Kentucky side should be pulled because an attorney general's opinion in that state says those ballots should be tossed.
But such opinions are not legally binding - allowing the Christian County, Ky., clerk to count them with impunity.
"As far as I'm concerned, Christian County will count their vote," says Clerk Mike Kem, who is also chairman of that Kentucky county's election board. "I think if somebody votes, their vote ought to count."
North Carolina structured its early voting process specifically to address this situation, with a retrievable ballot that is not counted until Election Day. So if election officials are notified that an early voter has died, that ballot can be removed.
The only two ways those ballots can be removed is if the computer crosscheck catches it, or the family submits written proof to election officials that the voter has died.
"We don't check the hospitals on the day before the election," said Don Wright, general counsel for North Carolina's Board of Elections. "We're not at the morgue."
Cheryl McConnell won't say how her mother voted before she died, but she made a copy of the ballot to keep.
As for the real absentee ballot, election officials hadn't pulled it because the family had yet to notify them of her death. McConnell says she's in no hurry.
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Allen G. Breed is the AP's Southeast regional writer, based in Raleigh. AP writer Scott Charton in Columbia, Mo., contributed to this report.
Why worry about a day or two difference when here in Illinois (particularly Chicago) the dead are always part of the base. As they say here; " Just because a person is deceased, that should not deny them the right to vote."
Yes, that one should count! But if they've been dead for years, well lets just use our own common sense. If you are a Democrat please contact someone else not of same persuasion to gain this common sense.
Hell, dead Democrats have their votes counted all the time.
Yes, that one should count! But if they've been dead for years, well lets just use our own common sense. If you are a Democrat please contact someone else not of same persuasion to gain this common sense.
If these are legal absentee ballots, they should count. The election monitors should spend their limited resources going after cases of legitimate fraud.
After all, there are people who vote on election day and die before the president is inaugurated. Their votes count. In a perfect world, we can limit voting to those who will live under the new administration. But in an imperfect world, I'll live with counting the votes of all legitimate voters who are alive on the day they cast their legitimate vote.
So, if I voted yesterday and am killed in a car wreck tomorrow, my vote shouldn't count? Her's shouldn't count because she died of old age? She was alive, she had an opinion and she voted *while alive*. Gimmie a break.
In other news, the Democrats have begun applying in droves for positions at retirement homes.
Can you smell the fraud yet?
All I care about are the ones who were dead before they cast their ballot :)
I remember joking about this in another thread where a Republican cast his ballot for Bush before he died. I suggested that the Dems might sic one of their lawyers on him.
If the legal absentee ballot arrived where it was supposed to by the date it was supposed to, then of course it should count. Who knows what happens to people around the nation and the world after they mail their ballots in? I'm sure in every election a certain number of absentee voters may die due to accidents, illness or war before election day. A person who votes in accordance with the absentee laws and then has the misfortune to die before the actual election should still have their vote counted.
In Nueces County, Texas the same optically scanned ballots that are used on election day are put into ballot boxes. There is an individual ballot, but there is no way to separate that ballot from any of the other ballots cast. So what if a voter dies before election day? That voter was alive the day he or she cast the ballot. None of us voted for the politicians running the government when we were born.
SOURCE: http://www.conservativeaction.org/resources.php3?nameid=votefraud
How Democrats Steal Elections - Top 10 Methods of Liberal Vote Fraud
1. Over-Voting. In Democrat strongholds like St. Louis, Philadelphia and Detroit, some precincts had 100% of their registered voters voting, with 99% of the ballots going to Gore. Clearly, multiple voting resulted in extra tallies for Gore in the 2000 election. (New York Post, 12/09/00).
2. Dead Voters. This classic Democratic method of vote fraud goes all the way back to 1960 in Chicago and Dallas. The 2000 election was no exception. In Miami-Dade County, for example, some of the 144 ineligible votes (those which officials actually admitted to) were cast by dead people, including a Haitian-American who's been deceased since 1977 (Miami-Herald, 12/24/00).
3. Mystery Voters. These "voters" cast votes anyway but are not even registered to vote. In heavily Democratic Broward County, for example, more than 400 ballots were cast by non-registered voters. (Miami-Herald 1/09/01)
4. Military ballots. Many of these votes were disqualified for the most mundane and trivial reasons. At least 1,527 valid military ballots were discarded in Florida by Democratic vote counters (Drudge Report, 11/19/00).
5. Criminals. Felons are a natural Democratic voter and they're protected on voter rolls across the country. In Florida at least 445 ex-convicts - including rapists and murderers -- voted illegally on November 7th. Nearly all of them were registered Democrats. (Miami-Herald 12/01/00)
6. Illegal aliens. These voters have long been a core liberal constituency, especially in California. In Orange County in 1996, Rep. Bob Dornan had his congressional seat stolen from him when thousands of illegal aliens voted for Loretta Sanchez (Christian Science Monitor, 9/2/97).
7. Vote-buying. Purchasing votes has long been a traditional scheme by Democrats, and not just with money. In the 2000 election in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Democratic workers initiate a "smokes-for-votes" campaign in which they paid dozens of homeless men with cigarettes if they cast ballots for Al Gore (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 11/14/00).
8. Phantom Voters. These voters don't really exist, but their ballots do. In the 1996 Lousiana Senate race, GOP candidate Woody Jenkins had the election stolen from him when he discovered that 7,454 actual votes were cast but had no paper trail to authenticate them (Behind the Headlines, F.R. Duplantier, 4/27/97).
9. Dimpled chads. Those infamous punch-cards were a ballot bonanza for Al Gore. Democratic poll workers in Palm Beach, Dade and Broward counties tampered and manipulated thousands of ineligible ballots and counted them for Gore, even though no clear vote could be discerned. (NewsMax.com 11/27, 12/22, 11/18, 11/19/00).
10. Absentee ballots. Normally it's assumed that Republicans benefit from absentee ballots. But in the case of Miami's 1997 mayoral election, hundreds of absentee ballots were made for sale or sent out to non-Miami residents. Fraud was so extensive in the race that the final results were overturned in court (FL Dept. of Law Enforcement Report, 1/5/98)."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=votefraud
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=electionfraud
WE MUST FIGHT VOTE FRAUD!
Election fraud is a serious offense. Although we get many reports of such behavior, I don't recall any reports of those criminals being prosecuted. Why is that? Hard lessons have to be taught to those who would steal the rightful power of my vote and yours!
According to this story, the woman signed the ballot herself. Fine.
But according to stories making the rounds in 2002 apparently a lot of Democrat votes were cast by people in nursing homes and insane asylums with a Democrat operative guiding their hands. You have to wonder about that. Who is checking to see that these voters are competent and are actually voting for themselves? Or that they actually even see the ballot?
A week or a month before the election?
What if I fill out my absentee ballot but croak before the mailman shows-up? Should the mailman go inside take my pulse and then determine if my vote should count?
What if Granny, tells me she wants to vote for Bush, but she dies before the ballot arrives? Can I fill it out and sent it in?
How about Chris Reeves? While he was alive he could not fill out a ballot, could he still vote absentee even though he is now dead?
Your list could include all types of people such as those that are in jail and have not been convicted or those is mental hospitals or Detox centers.
Are we going to permit all of the above to vote or none of the above to vote?
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