I’m really not sure what to think about this issue. Here’s what happened:
In Ohio, anyone can design and print a request for an absentee ballot, and as long as it meets the list of legal requirements, the ballot is legal. The requirements, very much influenced by the GOP’s fear of unqualified people voting, require the forms to include “a statement that the person requesting the ballots is a qualified elector.”
Ohio lawyer Scott Piepho writes:
…the required statement of eligibility to vote serves two purposes. One is to put the applicant on notice that he should only be getting an absentee ballot; the other is to make it easier to prosecute Rampant Voter Fraud.® When applicants don’t check the box in the form as constructed, neither purpose is served. We don’t know that applicants have gotten their notice because they may well have blown past the header. And as a prosecutor, I wouldn’t be very confident that I could prosecute someone for falsely claiming that he was an eligible voter when he doesn’t check the box saying that he is an eligible voter.
And no, the signature doesn’t cut it. Generally when a form requires a signature to certify something, the statement appears directly over the signature line and explicitly states the effect of the signature: “By signing below I certify that . . . etc.” Without that, a prosecutor can’t prove that a defendant knowingly made false statements, which is the standard for prosecuting fraud.
So the McCain campaign printed up and distributed the card at the top of this post. ((I created the card image by cleaning up this messy pdf someone posted.)) And not everyone who turned in the card, checked the checkbox. And now the secretary of state — Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat — says Ohio can’t accept these cards if the box isn’t checked. Republicans are angrily accusing her of making a partisan decision and disenfranchising voters.
I’m not completely sure what I think.
On the pro side:
1) Brunner is right about the law. It was the McCain campaign’s mistake to design this form so that it had a checkbox, rather than a signature, for the statement — but the principle is the same. Just as a signature statement isn’t valid if there’s no signature, the checkbox statement isn’t valid if there’s no checked box.
I really don’t see a lot of leeway. Saying that this form should be accepted without the checked box, is saying that the Secretary of State should ignore both the intent and the letter of the law. (Remember, this law was intended to emphasize preventing voter fraud, not getting as many voters to vote as possible.)
2) If the Obama campaign had sent out this card to its supporters, and the SoS was considering accepting these cards without the box checked, Republicans would be screaming bloody murder.
3) Looking at the form, neither the statement nor the checkbox are hidden, and the layout isn’t confusing. This isn’t a butterfly ballot situation.
4) Brunner is offering a compromise:
Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner on Friday offered to contact thousands of voters who filled out an absentee application mailed to them by Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s campaign but forgot to check a box stating they are a “qualified elector.”
Brunner said the voters would be given a chance to correct the mistake by visiting her office’s Web site. Or county boards of elections could choose to handle the problem locally. Details would come by mail.
The Republicans are refusing this compromise.
5) Although some individual Republicans are decent, Republicans as a party have no sense of honor at all, and have only contempt for democracy. Republicans are devoted to trying to keep Democrats from voting, either out of a sincere but nonsensical fear of vote fraud, ((Although if this is how Ohio Republicans really feel, then they should be praising Brunner for not accepting unchecked cards, rather than urging her to accept them.)) or out of a desire to win elections by any means. For example, in this election, Republicans in Ohio planned to challenge the voting rights of people who have had their homes foreclosed (they’ve now recanted — but they still plan to use vote caging and other vote suppression techniques).
Can Democrats afford to play nice and fair forever, when Republicans cheat every chance they get? Isn’t refusing to bring a gun to a knife fight, when you know the other person always brings a gun, a form of suicide?
On the con side:
1) Why would someone who didn’t think they were a qualified voter send this card in? It seems likely that the overwhelming majority of voters who sent this in with the box unchecked, merely forgot to check the box.
2) The Secretary of State isn’t going to be thrown out of office if she ignores the legislature’s intent, and instead interprets the law liberally, to allow as many people to vote as possible.
3) There is no substantial threat of voter fraud. It’s bullshit made up by Republicans trying to keep legitimate voters from voting.
4) If Democrats act like Republicans, that’s no guarantee that they’ll win elections. But it is a guarantee that they’ll have acted like Republicans. Why take the chance of selling out and still losing?
5) Actually, the layout is possibly a little confusing. The checkbox at the top of the form is to the left of all the other content, giving the feeling that it’s outside the “content” area of the form. They should have indented the first line, so that the checkbox was within the same margins as the rest of the form.
On the whole, I think Brunner should reverse herself, and accept these applications for absentee ballots even if the box isn’t checked — but the legislature should revise the law to prevent this specific conflict from coming up again, preferably by adding a directive that in cases where voter intent seems unambiguous, the Secretary of State should weigh her decision to avoid disenfranchising legitimate voters.
Failing that, she should go ahead with her proposed compromise as best she can, whether the Republicans accept it or not.
It’s bad design. Most people don’t check boxes when presented with a single box–they know perfectly well those boxes are used to indicate one of several options.
Should we really be advocating punishing Republican voters because Republicans have a nasty habit of disenfranchising voters? At that point, are we any better than they are?
I agree with the SoS, the forms weren’t filled in properly so it doesn’t count. No ballot for you!
Her compromise is reasonable. Republicans should accept it. There’s still plenty of time to get absentee ballots.
I can’t speak for Ohio, but Chicago is famous for voter fraud. The joke is that the graveyards vote in Chicago, and more than once.
Also, why is the information on the three checkboxes below being asked for? It seems logical to me that they are being asked for to be able to verify that the person returning the form is, in fact, a legitmate voter. So the SoS ought to be able to figure this one out on her own.
This isn’t a butterfly ballot situation.
I never did understand that. As I pointed out at the time, Illinois (especially Cook County) used the same kind of ballot for a couple of decades at least (in fact, they were using it up until the last election) and there were never complaints that it was confusing, nor were there issues of “hanging chads” or confusing layouts or anything else like that.
Yes, but is there any evidence of large-scale, contemporary voter fraud, Ron?
The three boxes below are to prove eligibility to vote. The statement that “I am a qualified elector” is there to make it theoretically easier to convict people who commit vote fraud. (Or so the lawyer I quoted thinks.)
I’d have to research it, I’m afraid. I don’t know.
I wonder what it would take for the SoS to use that information and actually run a check on each voter?
You know, I frankly don’t care if a particular juristiction has evidence of voter fraud or not. That could be because it has not been in the interests of the current powers-that-be to look for it, or that they’ve even actively suppressed it. The right to vote is at the heart of democracy. It has always seemed absurd and ridiculous to me that I have to jump though all sorts of hoops to prove I’ve got a right to exercise the privilege of driving a car or the right to own a gun, but the State basically takes my word for it when it comes to establishing my right to vote. I’ll gladly support making the verification process free to the indigent, including digging up birth certificates, etc., and some flexibility for someone who’s 80 years old and born somewhere where there are no records, but it should be verified.
I agree with Ron. A clean vote is important. Everyone who votes should be properly registered; it should be easy to be properly registered if you are an eligible voter, and very difficult if you are not.
The idealist in me says we should conform to the spirit of the law here, and allow the ballots.
The realist says that we should do exactly what the GOP would do if the situation was reversed — and throw ’em out.
And I’m feeling uncharitable of late.
Actually, the spirit of the law is to suppress voting, using the excuse of preventing voter fraud.
The spirit of the law is that somehow preventing people from voting if they fail to check a checky box affirming that their voter registration is legitimate will prevent vote fraud. It is a really stupid spirit. The law should be fixed. Actually, the part of the law where anyone can make up their own absentee ballot request should also be fixed. Not that the state would necessarily design a more effective form, but at least there would be less opportunity for targeted shenanigans.
If people not checking the checky box are not supposed to be able to vote, why should Republicans who don’t check the checky box get to vote? Are the Ohio Republicans calling for the law to be rescinded by executive fiat for this election, or are they just asking that their vote suppression measure only be applied to Democrats?
The problem with the butterfly ballots is that they were misaligned, and that it was a very close race. The number of people who mis-voted due to the misalignments was large relative to the margin, and the presence of the misvotes was obvious because of who they ended up being votes for. If the misvotes had merely been Bush votes in stead of Gore votes, none of us would ever have heard about them.
Both hanging chads and misvotes due to badly designed ballots are very common, they just aren’t normally numerous enough to determine the election, and in most recounts, there isn’t a party that is sufficiently ruthless and well funded to be able to have a court over rule the reasonable person standard for hanging chads. No race except for the presidential race would the Supreme court have intervened directly, and no court except the supreme court would have dared to write the overtly partisan Bush v. Gore decision.
Old school Chicago style election fraud is not perpetrated by the methods that the Republicans have put such efforts into preventing.
So it was a production error? O.K., I didn’t know that.
Some here are suspicious of the reasons that Republicans give for backing voter citizenship verification. In some cases you may be right. But I don’t care. I’m suspicous of the reasons Democrats give for opposing voter citizenship verification. Imputing bad faith to either side gets us nowhere. My viewpoint is that it’s fine to say “Such a process could keep people from voting so let’s make sure we design the process so that people aren’t cheated out of their right to vote”. But I don’t at all accept “Such a process could keep people from voting so let’s not have a process.”
I have since found one of the primary sources; the GAO report.
The compromise seems quite accomodating to me. What are the Republicans upset about? Or are they not really upset, and just using the incident to try to make a stink?