Weekend Question 2: So Now You Have a Ninth Reason to Be Against Unrestricted ‘Early Voting’?

ANSWER: Absolutely.

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There are eight good reasons already. Here’s the story about the ninth:

Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Dan Gaul ruled yesterday that all 88 counties can start scanning absentee ballots before Election Day, specifically at 7 a.m. Monday. Gaul granted a request by Cuyahoga County officials who wanted to start scanning absentee ballots early because of an expected crush created by a new law that allows anyone to vote absentee.

Gaul made the ruling after Michael Vu, director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, testified that it could take more than 22 hours for machines to scan the estimated 90,000 absentee ballots that he expects the county to receive.

OK, so I’m supposed to believe that poll workers won’t tabulate results of these scans and will therefore keep them secret until the polls close? That’s a real stretch.

Poll workers can assist the political parties in their Get Out The Vote strategies by letting party officials know how the absentee ballots are falling. If the vote is not going well for the party contacted, on-the-ground workers can redouble their efforts to find people they though would vote early but didn’t. If it is going very well, they can concentrate on people they expect to vote on Election Day. In either case, it enables the party contacted to reallocate its resources in response to something they had no right to learn. Note that either major party can do this, depending on how effective they have been at planting moles inside the Board of Elections.

This is unconscionable.

The fact that the resources aren’t there to count all the early votes is shows that either the equipment is inadequate (purchase decisions are made by the BOEs, NOT the Secretary of State, who may approve them on the perhaps-naive assumption that the BOEs know what they are doing), or that the idea of universal early voting so compromises the deliver of timely results that it should be abandoned.

I believe it’s the latter.

So now there are nine reasons why universal early voting (or as I prefer to call it, “no excuses absentee balloting”) should be abandoned:

1. The political landscape can change after you’ve voted.
2. Candidates reveal their rude, deceptive, or self-righteous or other less-than-desirable sides (in this case, all by one person, and there’s still a few days to go).
3. Unpleasant or pleasant truths about candidates that should legitimately affect voter opinion can come in the final days. (Do you really want to tell me you wouldn’t care if a candidate’s previously unknown violent crime history was discovered after you voted for him or her but before Election Day?)
4. Politicans can abuse it if they get into disputes over their residency or voter registration situation (the link is to a mythical conversation between two Ohio politicians who have done just that this year)
5. There is no way to ensure the privacy of the secret ballot and protection against coerced voting.
6. There is no way to verify that only duly registered voters cast ballots (i.e., someone using someone else’s ballot to vote).
7. There is no way to absolutely safeguard ballots against loss or alteration.
8. (as we have seen) There is no way to assure their prompt counting.
9. (just shown above) in cases of heavy early voting and/or inadequate counting equipment, counting the ballots before the polls are closed opens up the possibility of inappropriate communications between Board of Elections workers and political parties or candidates.

There’s even a “corny” tenth reason, which is the feeling of camaraderie and of representative government in action you get when voting in person with your fellow citizens (hey, I said it was corny, but the Carter-Ford Commission cited it).

Absentee voting should be restricted to those who legtimately cannot be present on Election Day, and those who are truly physically unable to come to the polls, PERIOD.

Why are we allowing this to happen?

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UPDATE: Here’s a supplement to Reason 9, which concentrated on turnout-based communications — It is very possible that a Board of Elections worker could determine whether or not specific people have voted. Then they could alert the candidates or their favored party to that fact. The candidates or parties could then go out and either round up those individuals in time for the absentee deadline, or include them in the group targeted for roundup on Election Day. In extreme cases, this could be coercive — maybe a citizen didn’t want to vote, but gets found out, and the candidate or party, by learning something that is none of their business, uses some form of threat to get that person to the polls or to complete the last-minute absentee ballot.

I would like to know if the activities described in the original Reason 9 or this supplement are even considered illegal. I would guess not, because our legal system is not very good at anticipating future types of crimes (and I cannot see any reason why these types of communications would NOT be considered crimes — can you?).

UPDATE 2: The fact that “early voting” ballots can be brought to the Board of Elections as late as when the polls close on Election Day (here’s the law; I see no evidence that the person delivering the absentee ballot has to the be the voter himself/herself), in conjunction with Reason 9, could conceivably mean that those who are thinking about gaming the system could make a calculated decision as to whether it’s worth it based on the information they are getting from Board of Elections workers.