Posted on 10/29/2009 11:46:06 PM PDT by American Dream 246
This year, New Jersey’s registered voters can request a mail-in ballot for any reason. (Before 2005, voters needed to provide a reason for why they needed an absentee ballot.) The state received about 150,000 absentee-ballot applications this year.
On about 2,300 of those applications so far, the signature on the request form does not match the signature on the voter’s registration forms with the state.
In a development that is depressingly predictable, the New Jersey Democratic party is asking the state to provide provisional ballots for all these voters. Those ballots could, presumably, be used to overcome any narrow lead by Republican Chris Christie over Democrat Jon Corzine on Election Day.
A mass distribution of provisional ballots, at the request of a political party, would represent a significant change from established law. Currently, when a county clerk rejects an absentee-ballot request, the clerk tries to contact the voter — through mail, by phone, and in some cases, by attempting to contact the voter in person. And a person who has spoken to some of New Jersey’s county clerks says they’re granting wide latitude on signature styles; for them to reject a ballot request because of the signature, it has to be dramatically different from the one on file.
Could some of these cases be an election official misjudging the natural deviation in two handwriting samples from the same person? Certainly, and that's why the current system has clerks reaching out to rejected voters (presuming they actually exist) to sort out the discrepancy. But Democrats want to short-circuit the established methods of sorting out the problem, and in fact to ban rejections based on signature mismatches entirely.
Paul P. Josephson, a lawyer representing the New Jersey Democratic State Committee, wrote to Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells, asking her to “instruct County Clerks not to deny (vote by mail) applications on the basis of signature comparison alone.”
Josephson claims that “the data reveal a troubling disparity in rejection rates — from hundreds of applications in Atlantic (271 rejections, or 5.84 percent) and Hudson (362, or 4.13 percent) to just a handful in counties such as Hunterdon (6, or .20 percent) and Mercer (35, or .49 percent). We also note that staff and unaffiliated voters are being rejected at a far higher ratio than Republicans by a ratio of three-to-one.” But a source who has seen the data disagrees, contending the number of rejections is consistently proportional to the number of absentee ballots requested. This source described the rate of rejections as within a normal range, and he saw no clustering in particular regions.
Josephson contends that “even if the county clerks notify voters by mail that their applications have been rejected, too many of those voters will not have an opportunity to correct the situation.” But besides the county clerks’ efforts to contact voters laid out above, those who have not received an absentee ballot will still be able to vote on Election Day.
Democrats have never made this request before, not even in 2008, where many more New Jersey residents were voting through absentee ballots. Of course, that year Democrats Barack Obama and Frank Lautenberg were expected to win the statewide races handily.
Last year, the state party had no objections to the actions of county clerks; now, the party's counsel fears that the county-clerk staff “may be overworked and are likely not trained in handwriting analysis.” Strangely, these same county-clerk staffers managed to handle this year’s primary elections in New Jersey without any major complaints.
The fears of absentee-ballot fraud in New Jersey is not theoretical or far-fetched. Earlier this year, Atlantic City councilman Marty Small and 13 people who worked on his unsuccessful mayoral campaign “were indicted on charges they conspired to commit election fraud during the June Democratic primary through a variety of schemes involving messenger absentee ballots, state Attorney General Anne Milgram announced in Trenton.” One of those workers has already pled guilty. Five workers were indicted on similar charges in Essex County in August.
Suspicious minds see the letter as an attempt to create a pool of emergency votes to be used if Christie holds a small lead on Election Night. The Secretary of State has not yet responded to the Democrats’ request.
ACORN. They get boxes and boxes of mail-in ballots at a time I guess. Fill them out in their spare time.
And they have to write real fast, because “we have such a short amount of time to dummy up all these registrations”.
ping
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