Common Sense Election Reform

I've come to admire the contributions of Almiranta, a regular contributor to the comments at Blogs For Bush. Recently she submitted a post on election reform that fits perfectly the title I've chosen for this blog entry. I sent her an email asking if I could share her thoughts here on the 4. I present it as she sent it to me. Thanks, Almiranta!

It is clear that voting in this country is a mess. Partly by intent, as in the fraud apparent in Washington. Partly by simple human error. Partly by political wrangling to try to get as many people registered as possible if that demographic appears to be favorable to that particular party.

I’d really like to see a serious effort in the next two years to clean up the voter registration mess, as a start. Maybe one way to do this would be to send a letter to every registered voter, informing him/her that this registration must be renewed within a certain period of time, by filling out and returning a form, to be kept on the books. As the notices would be sent to the supposedly legal residences of the registered voters, this would be a first step in weeding out the fake addresses.

Further, each renewal of voter registration would contain information that providing false information to register someone who does not meet the criteria of a registered voter is a felony, punishable by jail time and/or substantial fines. This would eliminate the claim that “I didn’t know it was wrong” to register, or vote, if the person is not a citizen, or is a felon, etc.

While these steps would still leave some wiggle room for serious manipulators, I think they would week out a lot of those who registered for a pack of smokes, or—in the Dems’ case—a hit of crack. If the notices could not be forwarded, but everyone knew they were being sent out, then legitimate voters who had moved could go to their new precincts to register there. Oops—that’s already what we do.

And dump Motor Voter. Now. If you can’t haul your heinie down to register, then you can’t vote. Simple.

Voting is one of our most treasured rights and privileges, and to see it made meaningless by various levels of fraud and manipulation, without rousing the ire of EVERY AMERICAN CITIZEN REGARDLESS OF PARTY AFFILIATION is mind-boggling.

Another area that MUST be corrected is absentee voting. I don’t have enough information to take an educated stand on the new trend to allow early voting, but clearly the concept of absentee voting has to be tweaked. Why allow it all if they are not opened? It seems that the reality of so-called absentee voting now is “If you’re not here, you don’t vote”.

So every absentee ballot HAS to be sent out in time to be returned properly. The fact that some people didn’t get theirs in time has been mentioned in passing, as a reason for the votes not being counted. I think that topic alone deserves a lot of attention. How about some accountability here? How can the person responsible for getting these ballots sent out be exonerated from any responsibility for corrupting the voting process? And then each ballot returned has to be opened, and each validly cast vote counted. It should not matter if a winner has been chosen in that state. It should not matter if the vote cannot possibly make a difference in the electoral college vote of that state. With the new attention to the popular vote, no vote should be discarded.

We need to count every single ballot that has been correctly executed to indicate, unambiguously, a vote. Read that again. We do not need to count every ballot, We cannot, MAY NOT, count any ballot that is ambiguous. But we must count every true VOTE—that is, every ballot which has been executed according to the rules, clearly, to indicate a vote, by a legally registered voter, submitted in accordance with the law.

For all the whining about “disenfranchisement” I don’t hear anyone complaining that I, an American citizen, duly registered, and competent enough to execute my ballot in a manner that transforms it into a valid vote, have probably been “disenfranchised” by either an illegal alien vote canceling mine out, or by one which was “interpreted” in a manner which cancelled mine out, in spite of showing to clear preference at all.

Instead of all the beating of breasts and tearful made-for-television dramas about being “disenfranchised” because a voter thought passing a traffic stop on the way to the voting booth was “intimidation” or any other such silly poppycock, how about paying attention to the people who really CAN vote, who really DID vote, who got cancelled out by fraud?

Oh, and if you can’t read a ballot and execute your vote correctly, then it is not my fault. Or anyone else’s.

Then we can start to address human error.

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BTW, of the 2000 or so complaints registered with the Florida Election Commission after the 2000 election, only one was a complaint that a woman thought she had been denied the right to vote because she was black—or any other color. However, in a race-related note, several Haitians complained they could not vote because there were no translators there to read them the ballots. As was pointed out to me by a friend who plans to apply for citizenship, you have to be able to speak English to be naturalized. Her parents are studying English right now, in anticipation of their citizenship test. Why were these people complaining that the only thing keeping them from voting was a failure on the part of the state of Florida to provide translators? Shouldn’t it have been that they were not ELIGIBLE to vote because they were not citizens?

The GOP needs to present legislation very similar to what Almiranta has so eloquently espoused about the time Flipper craps his let-fraud-count election reform bill into congressional record.