Online Voting A Reality For Military

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80sU2isBest

Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
Joined
Nov 12, 2000
Messages
4,970
Here was the problem:

from
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2001/1105/pol-vote-11-05-01.asp

"...ballots mailed in by military voters from overseas were thrown "by the fistful" into the trash.

It was wrenching, Katsurinis said. As vice chairman of the Alexandria, Va., electoral board and a voting rights lawyer, he is more accustomed to fighting to ensure that as many voters as possible can exercise their franchise to vote.

But there, in the midst of one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history, absentee ballots were being discarded. State law forbids accepting votes after an election deadline, Katsurinis explained, and delays in mail delivery prevented many military ballots from arriving on time.

The scenario was repeated in many states. Things were especially intense in Florida, the battleground state that decided the election. There, courts were asked to rule on whether more than 1,500 questionable absentee ballots from military voters could be counted.

The fiasco convinced Katsurinis that it's time to permit military personnel to vote via the Internet. "The technology is safe and secure," he said, and vote delivery is instantaneous."


Now, the solution...

from http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,93469,00.html

"When it's completely up and running, eligible voters thousands of miles from home will be provided with links to Web sites offering news and information about the candidates. American servicemen and women will be able to vote from virtually anywhere in the world, provided they have access to a Windows-based computer with Internet capabilities.

The $22 million project comes on the heels of the controversial 2000 presidential election, in which significant numbers of military voters' ballots were disqualified because they lacked postmarks."
 
online voting is widely known to be rife with possibilites for fraud. until the technology improves, i'd say this is a dangerous move :down:
 
This bothers me too. It's obscene for those who serve our country to get their votes quite literally thrown in the trash. It's obscene for any votes to get thrown in the trash. If anything like this happens next year I'm going to raise hell.
 
What is disgusting is the tossing of absentee ballots of service personnel as worthless while election officials invest extraordinary time determining the intent of Florida retirees.
 
nbcrusader said:
What is disgusting is the tossing of absentee ballots of service personnel as worthless while election officials invest extraordinary time determining the intent of Florida retirees.

I couldn't agree more. This really stinks. :mad: :mad: :censored: :censored: :censored:
 
what is really is wrong

is people thinking it is disgusting that people who voted according to the law, during the proper election time, did not have their votes counted.

and there are people who believe that people who voted after the dead line should have their votes counted

what is the rational?
 
Deeep, they voted before the deadline. The mail delay caused the votes not to get there till after the deadline:

"delays in mail delivery prevented many military ballots from arriving on time."

Now for teh second question: What people who voted according to the law didn't have their vote counted? Are you talking about the people who said they didn't understand how to mark the ballots? Did you ever see the ballot? They weren't hard to understand. And if you didn't understand how to do that, wouldn't you ask?

Also, did you forget there was indeed a recount, and Buish won that, and that on every newspaper recount after the election, Bush still won?
 
Hell, I voted for Gore, but I didn't like it that they wanted to pitch the military ballots. There were numerous and sundry things wrong with the vote counts from that election. That didn't make it OK to pitch the military ballots because those votes *were* cast on Election Day.
 
80s,


I understand that THE ballots that were recounted put Bush a few hundred votes ahead.

If one votes absentee they should do it early, so postmark or delivery is not an issue.

The law states ballots received after deadline are not counted and in previous elections they were not counted.


On Oct 7 we will vote to recall our Dem. Governor Davis. Millions will vote if the election is within a few hundred votes, chaos will erupt here, too. Davis will argue for interpretations that favor him.


80s,

In your world of right and wrong you seem to believe all wrong doing is always done by the other side.

I hope my last statement is not offensive to you, if so I apologize.

here is anther article concerning this issue




Florida's vague absentee laws make fraud a concern
By SYDNEY P. FREEDBERG and LEONORA LAPETER

? St. Petersburg Times, published November 14, 2000


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thomas and Karen Baltazar of Herndon, Va., haven't lived in Florida in 15 years. They have no Florida home. They pay no taxes here.

But they vote here.

"If you look at most military people, they are residents of Florida or Alaska or New York because they don't have to pay income tax there," said Mrs. Baltazar, whose husband, a lieutenant colonel in the Army, was once stationed at the Naval Diving & Salvage Training Center in Panama City.

The Baltazars have lived in seven places, including Germany, since leaving Panama City. Yet, like scores of military personnel, the couple punched Florida absentee ballots in last week's presidential race -- even though they live elsewhere.

Florida laws governing absentee ballots are so vague that virtually anyone who declares the Sunshine State their home can get an absentee ballot, as long as they claim to be temporarily away. Even if temporary is 15 years.

"What seems to be causing some concern is where there are multiple state (voter) registrations by the same individual, and right now there are very few mechanisms to detect that," said Deborah Phillips, chairwoman of the Voting Integrity Project, a watchdog group.

What's more, supervisors of elections admit they often have no idea whether they are issuing absentee ballots to people who could vote twice -- once by Florida absentee and once in another state where they also are registered.

Problems with absentee voting have been known for years, but the deadlocked presidential election has put them under more scrutiny than ever.

"Numerous" questionable absentee ballots were cast from Bay County, a GOP stronghold in Florida's Panhandle where Republicans had an aggressive effort to gather absentee votes, according to an affidavit by a Panama City woman.

Prosecutors in Escambia County are investigating at least one absentee ballot that was stolen from a Miami man and forged.

In Pinellas, absentee ballots raised eyebrows of Republican party operatives, who spent the weekend trying to sniff out irregularities by poring over signatures of 12,000 ballots.

Several Tampa Bay area voters say they suspected something was amiss when they were turned away from polling places after being told -- erroneously -- that they had punched absentee ballots.

In Hillsborough, scores of voters received telephone calls before the election from people claiming to work for Hillsborough Elections Supervisor Pam Iorio. The callers, who claimed to work for the "elections commissioner," falsely told voters who had requested absentee ballots that the ballots had not been received.

In Seminole County, Democrats say thousands of absentee ballots never should have been counted because election officials allowed the Republican Party to alter 4,700 ballot requests -- to fix a printer's error -- several weeks before the election.

In England, at least five Florida residents serving at a U.S. Air Force base each received two absentee ballots from at least three Florida counties -- Santa Rosa, Osceola and Hillsborough, according to a report in the web journal, salon.com.

These incidents and others have raised the specter of voter fraud, a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and/or a $5,000 fine.

State law requires that voters must be registered at their legal address and makes it a felony for someone to intentionally vote from an address that is not his or her permanent home.

Absentee voters must sign a voter's certificate stating they are unable to go to the polls because they are disabled, will be out of town on Election Day, have recently moved or have moved to a state in which they can't vote.

Of 55 counties where more than 450,000 absentee votes were cast last Tuesday, Bush won in a landslide -- 60 percent to 35.5 percent over Gore, according to a survey Monday by the St. Petersburg Times.

Supervisors in some larger, highly Democratic counties did not have totals.

The latest challenge over absentee votes comes from tiny Bay County, home of Tyndall Air Force Base, where about 11,000 votes -- nearly one out of every five cast -- was by absentee ballot. Three of four absentee votes in Bay were punched for Bush.

Some were cast by voters listing out-of-state addresses, post office boxes or military duty stations elsewhere in the United States.

In their zeal to win, Florida's GOP mailed tens of thousands of absentee-ballot requests to registered Republicans before the election, encouraging them to sign the request and return it, postage-free, to their local supervisor of elections.

The direct-mail brochure featured a letter from Bush's brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, printed over a background image of the state seal.

Bush's letter encouraged the voters to "vote from the comfort of your own home."

Elections supervisors in the Panhandle questioned the mailing, saying it was against the law to promote absentee voting for mere convenience.

In Tallahassee, Leon County Circuit Judge Terry Lewis threw out a lawsuit that challenged the mailing. Bush spokesman Katie Baur said the mailing was carried out by the Republican Party, not the governor. And the GOP noted that it was "ridiculous" to assume voters would not tell the truth when they signed a statement affirming they would be unable to vote in person on Election Day.

Yet that is precisely what happened, according to the new Bay County complaint.

Cynthia McCauley, a special education teacher from Panama City who voted for Al Gore, charges that some of the absentee ballots in Bay County were invalid because the GOP did not notify citizens of the statutory requirement that they be "unable to attend the polls on Election Day."

"As a result of the Republican Party's misleading invitation to enjoy the ease and comfort of voting through the mail . . . numerous absentee ballots include the false statement that the elector is unable to attend the polls on Election Day," McCauley's five-page affidavit says. "In fact, many of the electors whose ballots have been certified were able to attend the polls."

Bay County Elections Supervisor Melanie Williams Boyd said the canvassing board will meet Wednesday to discuss the complaint.

She said the GOP mailing demonstrated a "loophole" in absentee-voter law. She also acknowledged that state law is "gray" on the precise definition of what constitutes a legal residence in Florida.

For years, Florida supervisors have allowed out-of-state military personnel to vote here. They cite a provision in a state law that says a person temporarily living outside the county where he or she is registered may vote absentee, as long as they intend to return to the county where they are registered.

Such is the case of Air Force 1st Lt. Craig Barham.

"I'm a resident of Florida, but I don't live there. . . . I don't have an address there," said Barham, once stationed at Tyndall and now at a base in Phoenix.

Kathy Banks, the wife of an Air Force pilot stationed in Alabama, said she finds it outrageous that people would question her family's right to vote in any state.

"My husband has fought in wars, he's been shot at, and risked his life for this country," said Banks, who hasn't lived in Florida since 1996. "For people to question our right to vote is terrible, it's very hurtful."
 
deep said:

80s,

In your world of right and wrong you seem to believe all wrong doing is always done by the other side.

I hope my last statement is not offensive to you, if so I apologize.


Have you ever given me reason to think you are not the same in that aspect?

And actually, I don't agree with every thing Bush has ever done as president. People who know me personally know that. However, I see no need to bash him here on things; there's certainly plenty of that to go around.
 
Of course this happened. The military votes Republican. Now why isn't internet voting allowed for civilians? With a Republican Congress and a Republican presidency, one need not guess why...

Melon
 
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