Posted on 11/04/2004 3:00:59 PM PST by timbuck2
New Mexico's 33 county clerks are required to submit their complete vote totals— including provisional and absentee votes— to the Secretary of State's Office by Nov. 12, Ortega said... State officials are to present their final canvass, or vote count, to the state canvassing board by Nov. 23, Ortega said. Bernalillo County Clerk Mary Herrera said Wednesday she wants to count the provisional ballots soon. "I'm making it a priority to count the provisional ballots right away," Herrera said. About 13,000 provisional ballots awaited counting in Bernalillo County, Herrera said. There are three kinds of ballots to be counted within the 13,000 total...
Provisional ballots: These are paper ballots given to voters who show up at the wrong precinct or don't have the right kind of identification when they come to vote in person, for example. Total: About 8,550.
Provisional absentee ballots: These are absentee ballots where the voter was required to show identification. Diaz said election workers do not know whether these people satisfied the identification requirement or not. (Only people who registered to vote by mail, and are voting for the first time in the county in which they registered, must show identification.) Total: 2,640...
Partisan lawyers watched the vote counting process closely on Wednesday. "Provisional voting is to ensure that voters can cast their ballots in a new legal environment," said Jim Noel, a Democratic lawyer. "It's to make sure people aren't disenfranchised. . . I'm talking about people who are entitled to vote— eligible voters." A Republican lawyer says the majority of "garden variety" provisional ballots often are invalidated. "Typically the vast majority of them are bounced," said Joe Thompson, a Republican lawyer. "It's a very, very high standard, and the invalidation rate of those is well over 50 percent by any analysis."
(Excerpt) Read more at abqjournal.com ...
Conservatives had better keep the pressure on Congress to have hearings and pass legislation. I have two words: Detroit and Philadelphia. Read up on the massive voter fraud in those two cities. Eliminate the fraud there and Michigan and PA are red states in 2008.
-T
I'm not too worried about it. Half of them will be invalidated, and heck, if they go 100% for Kerry, Bush will still lead by 9,000. That's a lot in a state that small.
I know we had better get something done about the corruption that allows blatant fraud here in Michigan (detroit)
The GOP better keep contendiong the provisional ballots in Ohio as well. The Bolsheviks are the most dangerous when they are losing.
OOps, never mind, I read 8,000, not 18,000. Still, there is no way Kerry will beat Bush's 13,000 vote lead with those. A lot of them will be invalidated, and the rest won't break 100% for Kerry, which is what he would need.
I saw the essay by the person who was a poll watcher in NM...she said they thought nothing of telling people who "lost" their absentee ballot to go ahead an vote in the booth.
It is on here somewhere....very eyeopening...made me want to poll watch in a key state next time.
Um, Bush lead is now down to 8,236...
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/NM/P/00/index.html
-T
Provisional ballots are generally just a way of getting unqualified voters out of the polling place without having them pitch a fit. Only about 1 out of 6 are valid.
If the provisional ballots are counted in accordance with the law, there's nothing to worry about. Most of them will be invalid, and in any case, they break (by party) at about the same rate as the precinct from which they were cast.
I said NM would go for W... and they did. Many many military families in NM. W knows them and he cares for them. Gov Richards... that is another story.
I actually hope Bush loses New Mexico due to bogus provisionals. I mean come on people! If 50% are proven to be invalid, that means there is massive fraud going on here! Also, how can prevent somebody from voting once in the booth, once by absentee and once with each of the three types of provisionals in New Mexico? That is a total of 5 votes from 1 person.
-T
The story says 13,000, not 18.
Unless they turned in the absentee ballot at the polling place before voting, that was a bad move. They generally have to sign an affidavit, and it can later be checked to determine whether they have voted twice. There are significant fines and penalties for doing this, but in the past, voters have rarely been scrutinized. Perhaps this time around they will be; or if not, somebody should go and insist on it, since all of these records are now computerized and it should be pretty easy to tell if a person's absentee ballot was recorded and they voted at the polling place anyway.
My son almost had to vote by provisional ballot because the list at the precinct did not have his name and they had yet to get their updated list even though when I checked the voting list, it was already 3:30 p.m.
The problem wasn't that he wasn't registered to vote, it was that when he re-registered in October due to us moving last year, he wrote the street address as one word. He got notification of his address being a non-precinctable address which required a phone call to see what the problem was and get it straightened out.
Fortunately, when he got to the precinct at around 6 pm, the new list with his name on it was in the process of getting faxed.
I do see a need for provisional ballots, since when I was checking the voter list off my list to see who had voted and who needed to be called, I noticed there were other people on my list who were not on the precinct's voting list.
It's ridiculous, though, that the precinct got an updated list so late in the day.
Bernalilo County is 51-48 Kerry. A break that way for the 13000 ballots is only 500 net Kerry votes. No guarantee they break that way, however. And after a 50% trash rate, there would be only 6500 to split.
"If the provisional ballots are counted in accordance with the law, there's nothing to worry about."
You're joking right?
-T
If people are not prosecuted in a very public way, the behavior will not change. Provisional ballots are a danger to democracy because they can be abused to easily. If they are not being abused, why are half being proven invalid?
This concluding paragraph from the article I excerpt above says it all:
Partisan lawyers watched the vote counting process closely on Wednesday.
"Provisional voting is to ensure that voters can cast their ballots in a new legal environment," said Jim Noel, a Democratic lawyer. "It's to make sure people aren't disenfranchised. . . I'm talking about people who are entitled to vote— eligible voters."
A Republican lawyer says the majority of "garden variety" provisional ballots often are invalidated.
"Typically the vast majority of them are bounced," said Joe Thompson, a Republican lawyer. "It's a very, very high standard, and the invalidation rate of those is well over 50 percent by any analysis."
Normal rules don't apply in the fiefdom of NM.
Richardson will make the votes happen for JFK.
Why don't repubs tackle this issue at the federal level? If they do not tackle it now, they will lose elections in 2006, have a smaller majority with which to push through legislation and will have squandered their opportunity for reform.
-T
I know that the 3 that were cast in the precinct I was working in will be trashed. They just allowed them to vote to make them go away.
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