Voters considering the Constitutional Amendment on the ballot this November and legislators considering what to do if it passes, need to pay heed to the facts and experience of early voting in other states. When it comes to mail-in, no-excuse absentee voting we can learn a lot here in Connecticut and New England. You will hear many claim we that we need stronger voter ID because of rampant votER fraud and others say there is no problem with expanding absentee voting since there is no votER fraud. They are both wrong, wrong, wrong.
- There actually is very little fraud by individual voters. You are risking a lot to intentionally vote when you are not eligible. Risking a lot going to a polling place and risking detection. Especially if you are an illegal alien who risks deportation for much less.
- Actually individual votER fraud is easier and much less risky by absentee ballot. Some say it is frequently done by parents voting for their children away at college. We are not so sure how prevalent that is. It is very hard to prove and detect.
- There is another type of fraud, mass votING fraud by insiders and candidate supporters who, without the knowledge of voters in one way or another create, intercept, or destroy absentee votes mailed-in.
We have been covering some of this in our recent blog series “It happens all the time.” All over the place <read> A sampling of our “favorites”:
It is apparently routine in Bridgeport: <read>
In Bridgeport, a hallmark of Democratic Party politics has been the aggressive use of absentee ballots — so aggressive, in fact, that more than a dozen consent decrees have been signed since 1988 with the State Elections Enforcement Commission stemming from allegations of wrongdoing by party operatives.
We could highlight more recent allegations in Bridgeport, but lets consider Hartford and a State Rep fined for absentee vote fraud – not the kind of oversight we expect from the legislature: <read>
The Connecticut Appellate Court on Tuesday ruled against state Rep. Minnie Gonzalez, D-Hartford, in an absentee ballot case in which she was fined by the State Elections Enforcement Commission. The commission imposed a $4,500 civil penalty on Gonzalez for four counts of election-law violations, concluding she was “knowingly present” while four voters filled out absentee ballots in the town clerk’s office in Hartford City Hall in the fall of 2006.
Who said” that sort of thing just isn’t done in Massachusetts?” East Long Meadow, MA: <read>
The Boston Globe is reporting, that a Republican candidate [Jack Villamaino] decided to try and win a primary by sending in hundreds of absentee ballots on behalf of hundreds of voters. State election officials were tipped off to the potential voter fraud when a suspiciously large number of residents of the Springfield suburb of East Longmeadow suddenly changed party registration from Democrat to independent, making them eligible to vote in the upcoming Republican primary.
At least they were caught, not so in Florida, in a similar fraud, likely by insiders, followed by a cover-up: <read>
As we detailed at that time, some 2,500 absentee ballots were fraudulently requested online for three different 2012 primary elections in Miami-Dade, FL. One race involved requests for Democratic absentee ballots in a U.S. House primary, the other two involved requests for Republican ballots in two different Florida State House primary races. All of the fraudulent “phantom” ballot requests are said to have been flagged as such at the Supervisor of Election’s office and, therefore, never fulfilled… It was not until excellent investigative reporting from The Miami-Herald discovered that a number of the requests came from IP addresses located in the Miami-Dade area. For reasons currently chalked up to administrative confusion, the Elections Division never gave those Miami area IP addresses to the grand jury.
We really disagree with the prosecutor in the above case: ‘Absentee voting is the source of all voter fraud’ – it is votING fraud, no voters required!
