I guess I have a definitional problem. Absentee, to me, is the individual filling out and posting of ballots, any time up to the day of the election.
My proposal is that people can still vote prior to an election, but there must be a person(s) that verifies that the person voting had proper ID and was not coerced (or dead) when they voted.
Today, the current absentee and vote by mail system is much to easy corrupt. You can look at just one blog (
Sound Politics, Seattle WA) whose major reason of existence is voter fraud and the massive amounts of fraud/incompetence in the current vote by mail system.
I would still propose that people be allowed to vote prior to an election--however, that would have to be done in the presence of an election proctor (official at city hall, or even just a couple of people in a fox hole that attest to the validity of the ballot--ID, of sound mind, free of coercion, etc.).
Would I be willing to pay for it? I am sure that in our "military budget" of several hundreds of billions of dollars that somebody could find a couple tens of millions of dollars to set up a process to vote.
Military budget is in quotes because of things like this:
Schumer, Clinton Earmark Funds for Contributors:
WASHINGTON - Senators Clinton and Schumer are asking the Pentagon to spend $123 million of its wartime budget for New York projects that the Department of Defense didn't ask for - but that in many cases are linked to the senators' campaign contributors.
The two Democratic senators announced the projects - from a genomics research project at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan to cancer research on Long Island - in press releases this month, touting the impact they would have on the state economy.
But former Pentagon officials and Senator McCain say that the increasing number of "earmarks," as the projects are known, in the federal budget often divert money that would be better spent by the Defense Department's normal competitive bidding process. The number of pork barrel projects, including earmarks, has soared to 13,997 in 2005, from 1,439 in 1995, according to Citizens Against Government Waste, which tracks earmarks. The projects backed by the senators from New York are included in the conference committee report of a $454 billion defense-spending bill that was approved by the Senate on Wednesday and is awaiting President Bush's signature.
We have seen that states and localities either reject 1/4-1/3 of overseas military ballots (Florida 2000), or 1.5 Million absentees (California 2000) that were never counted. And we have seen ballots accepted for people that don't live in the city/county/state, or aren't alive, etc.
And, we have religious fundamentalists that have demanded their wives to vote absentee so that the husbands (and girls' fathers?) can vote properly for them.
Don't get me wrong... I very much want the military to vote and to have their votes count (not withstanding the fact that the military vote is probably much closer to my politics than not). I want everyone to vote and have their votes count.
And, I believe, that every ballot fraudulently created, submitted, counted, or rejected is an affront to my voting right too.
The system, as it stand today, your military vote has a very high percentage chance of not being counted today. I am looking for improvements, not just accepting of the stuff that is happening today.
-Bill
