Track your Absentee Ballot

[Lynn Farris]

Maybe you could always do this, but I wasn't aware of it. With all the alledged voter fraud, it is nice to know now that you can Track your Ballot in Cuyahoga County if you vote absentee.

Just go to http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/ and select Track Your Ballot in the Blue Box in the middle of the screen. Then you have to enter your last name and date of birth. They will show you when they received your request for an absentee ballot, when they mailed it to you and when they received the ballot back.

They will also indicate if it is a provisional ballot - because there is a problem or question. You then have the opportunity to call and resolve any potential problems before the election.

I thought this was a great feature - especially as more of us are voting absentee. I really like it as you have the time to review any issue, look up infomration on it.

[sharon kinsella]

Thanks Lynn. I never knew about this before.

[Grace O'Malley]

Yes, thank you very much, Lynn.

I was just discussing with my neighbor that we voted Absentee and she asked me how I could be sure my vote was received and counted. I must admit that I was a bit worried that the mail could be lost or misdirected.

But, I just checked and all of our ballots are accounted for! That was great!

[Stan Austin]

Folks--- This opens up a much more significant discussion. As some of you know, I've been out the last several weekends canvassing for my preferred candidate for President.
Among the many reactions I have received, the most disturbing was the questioning of the integrity of the ballot.
This hasn't been a reaction from flakes or whatever. Rather, it has been a reaction from sophisticated citizens and voters.
This is more fundamental than anything having to do with finances, issues, or whatever. It is the basis on which those issues are decided by the national electorate.
After listening to our Secretary of State and Cuyahoga County Board of Elections Director, I have absolute confidence in the integrity of this upcoming election.
But, I wonder, how could this estrangement from our most basic right have happened?

Stan Austin

[sharon kinsella]

The 2004 presidential election happened Stan.

Never again.

[Lynn Farris]

Stan,

I know how politically savy you are, so I can only assume that your comment was in jest. After Gore actually won the race in 2000, but W assumed the presidency and after the fiasco in Ohio in 2004 one should really be concerned.

Robert Kennedy Jr. has taken on Voter rights as one of his issues. While he is clearly a Democrat, he is by no means a flake.

If you are serious about not knowing why people are concerned, I will quote our dear Congressman, Wake Up!

Your homework would be to read Robert Kennedy Jr.s and Greg Palast's article in Rolling Stone.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/st ... k_the_vote

In state after state, Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."


Jim Crow was laid to rest, but his cousins were not," says Donna Brazile. "We got rid of poll taxes and literacy tests but now have a second generation of schemes to deny our citizens their franchise." Come November, the most crucial demographic may prove to be Americans who have been denied the right to vote. If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat John McCain at the polls — they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering.

I find it incredible how long people are waiting for early voting. My brother and sister who live in South Carolina are allowed to vote early as senior citizens. In fact they were encouraged to as they could wait inside and have chairs. They had to wait 3 hours to vote. They were told that on election day, lines would be much longer and they would have to be outside and their would be no chairs. I find that incredible. Also look at Florida and the long lines.

It does sound like the new Ohio Secretary of State is trying to do a good job, by allowing us to check if our ballot was in. But we did find out that it appears that if your absentee ballot was sent out of state (like to a college), that your ballot is indicated as provisional and you really have to call the election office to confirm that your ballot should be counted. This would in effect get all of those college age students, many of which are for Obama off the voter roles without them even being aware of it. And provisional ballots can be thrown out as your will read in Kennedy's article

In 2004, an estimated 3 million voters who showed up at the polls were refused regular ballots because their registration was challenged on a technicality. Instead, these voters were handed "provisional" ballots, a fail-safe measure mandated by HAVA to enable officials to review disputed votes. But for many officials, resolving disputes means tossing ballots in the trash. In 2004, a third of all provisional ballots — as many as 1 million votes — were simply thrown away at the discretion of election officials.

Meanwhile all we hear about in the news is ACORN and them inacurrately registering people.

To justify this battery of new voting impediments, Republicans cite an alleged upsurge in voting fraud. Indeed, the U.S.-attorney scandal that resulted in the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales began when the White House fired federal prosecutors who resisted political pressure to drum up nonexistent cases of voting fraud against Democrats. "They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments that would scare these alleged hordes of illegal voters away," says David Iglesias, a U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was fired in December 2006. "We took over 100 complaints and investigated for almost two years — but I didn't find one prosecutable case of voter fraud in the entire state of New Mexico."

Stan, I don't think you talked to me about this, but I'm one of the people that is very frightened that the right to vote, maybe our most precious right is being taken away. Former President Jimmy Carter had said of the 2000 and 2004 elections that if he had seen these discrepancies in any of the countries that he monitors for voter fraud, he would have called them invalid elections.

This is not just my humble opinion.

[David Lay]

Stan, I don't think you talked to me about this, but I'm one of the people that is very frightened that the right to vote, maybe our most precious right is being taken away. Former President Jimmy Carter had said of the 2000 and 2004 elections that if he had seen these discrepancies in any of the countries that he monitors for voter fraud, he would have called them invalid elections.

My wife & I just watched Hacking Democracy today, and I have to say we share your sentiment.

[Donald Farris]

Hi,
More about this in todays NYT (read it while you can):

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/us/po ... ref=slogin

Article is about Ohio and voter supression.

[Ivor Karabatkovic]

heyyyyyyyyyyy,

I can finally get my dad off my back when he's freaking out that his ballot isn't being counted.

[Donald Farris]

Hi,
Further info on how Ohio's vote could have been hacked in the 2004 Presidential election: http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Documents ... _1031.html

I also wanted to stress to Stan that (as least from my perspective) all of these bad things (eg voter suppression and vote changing) happen despite the high caliber and integrity of the local people running the election. I have never felt I didn't trust those manning the polling place.

[Donald Farris]

Hi,
Oprah now believes that e-voting is a problem. She almost lost her vote.

See: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6603

[Will Brown]

Thanks for posting the link. But I would point out that it merely shows that your absentee ballot was received, not that it was actually counted. I think that suspicious people will never be satisfied, since somewhere in the process the tabulation is out of your hands, and you just have to trust that the people doing the actual final tabulation do their work honestly.

My questions about the integrity of the system go back to the election where JFK was recognized as the winner over RMN. My recollection is that it was a very close election, and JFK needed Illinois to win. Rumor was thatJFK was actually behind in early tabulations, but the votes from the Chicago area came in very late, and included enough JFK votes to give him the win. Many believed that Mayor Daley, a political boss of the old school, had asked how many votes were needed, then went out and got them, even from some people who were deceased.

I had to visit the Board of Elections four years ago, when they somehow didn't get me my absentee ballot on time. Now, I didn't expect it to be a hub of activity (it wasn't), but I expected them to be alert and informed enough to solve my problem, and they weren't. Finally another person came back from lunch and knew how to solve my problem, but I was left with the impression that the workers there were probably hired based on patronage, and that this office was where the least talented of the patronage hires ended up. But I think it is a matter of concern when they are swamped with registrations from new voters, many of which could be difficult to verify. I'm not convinced that the BofE has the resources or talent to verify these registrations. How, for example, can they communicate with a street person who has no address, and what wards does he vote in.

A few years ago my mail contained an election notice from a lady I had never heard of. It had my address on it, but I knew she had not lived here, at least in the past 30 years. I called the BofE and asked what to do, and they said mail the notice back to them. I did, and included a letter explaining the problem. I assumed they would fix the problem, but when we subsequently went to the polls, she was on the list of registered voters at my address. So I don't have much faith in the ability of the BofE to exclude non-legitimate voters. But this has been a weakness of our system for many years, and I'm not sure what a good solution is. I do think that private organizations should be barred from obtaining and submitting registration forms, as it is to easy to falsify them. Perhaps private organizations should be limited to obtaining and submitting requests for registration, and a BofE employee could then visit the prospective voter, veryify his bona fides, and have him complete the registration in the presence of the BofE official. It's an expensive proposal, but the BofE workers don't seem to have much to do for most of the year, and we do have citizens (such as inpatients) who cannot be expected to travel to the BofE to register.

One problem with questions of illegal voting, or illegal campaign contributions, is that they are almost never resolved until after the election, and what court is going to invalidate the results of an election after the apparent winner has assumed office?

[sharon kinsella]

They don't enter the absentee ballots for counting, until election day. They are in the system, but the votes are not.