‘cause Sunday is gloomy, hours are slumberless and the shadows I live with are numberless.

Precisely. It’s an after the fact way of looking for (Some kinds of) absentee ballot fraud. And every time I’ve heard of somebody doing it, they got shut down on the basis that they were engaged in “voter harassment”.

Elections in Florida are controlled locally: the County, i.e. taxpayers, funds the supervisor’s office; the supervisor’s office specifies the voting precinct boundaries, based on US Census demographic data. After 2000 some State funds, mainly for election equipment, has additionally been available to counties.

The Florida Capital is in Tallahassee, and Tallahassee is a city in Leon County; in 1992 the Leon County Supervisor of Elections changed to optical scanning voting equipment. The paper ballots are marked by voters and then scanned into the voting machine, which is about the size of a small washing machine. The paper ballots (8.5”x11”, close to A4) are retained in machine, and can be examined and recounted if needed. The process works fine.

I’m a die-hard yellow-dog democrat (except for Charlie Crist and Charles Bronson), but I’ve also read Katherine Harris’s book: I don’t like what she did, but she had every legal right to do it.

Your claim that in Florida the Republican Secretaries of State suppress minority votes is poppycock, in the sense of its original meaning!

Have too! I drove through it twice!

Seriously, I think what you’re describing is different from what Brett was talking about—I think he’s talking about, after the election, calling people who are listed as already having voted absentee and asking them “Was it really you who sent in the ballot?” Whereas, if I’m not mistaken, you’re talking about calling people who (as far as you know) aren’t listed as having sent in their absentee ballots and saying, “Hey! Send that ballot in!”

Truth be told, I’d never heard of any such effort

Then you’ve never been to Iowa. I was an independent backing Kerry in 2004. The Democratic Party was trying to get more people to vote absentee, which can be done on demand in Iowa, in order to make sure people did vote. Party voluteers would call registered Dems to ask if they wanted an absentee ballot, and fill out the official form for them and have another volunteer to take to them and have them sign and mail to the county auditor.

After the Dem presumably had received the ballot, volunteers would again call to see if they had mailed their ballot. Volunteers trained by the state can collect the absentee ballots from the voters and deliver them to county auditors! The Republicans did the same thing, only more effectively.

Iowa even has a receipt on the absentee ballot for politcal parties to use to keep track of votes. See
http://www.sos.state.ia.us/PDFS/AbsenteeBallotApp2002.pdf

The record of whether you have voted is public information. In Iowa, all parties can monitor the voter rolls the day of elections to see which registered voters have voted and which ones have not. The Dems (and GOP too I presume) would then see which registered Dems in various precincts had not voted and send voluteers out to remind them to vote.

Unfortunately for Dems in 2004, their record keeping in Iowa sucked and was not linked in real-time. Most people on a follow-up list that I was given on election night had voted—by absentee ballot—but so many had done so that auditors offices could not update the info fast enough, and the Dems could not update their internal records fast enough, so many volunteers were chasing after people who had voted months ago. In short, the Dems created a system that made it harder for them to monitor how many votes they had.

I had noted that this might be a problem when they were organizing (heck, anyone who has read any organizational theory could have figured this out; I’m no genius) but was smugly told not to worry. Another guy in IC did the same w/ similar dismissals.

Moreover, if someone ordered a ballot and then lost it, they would have to vote by a provisional ballot since you cannot decide after ordering the absentee ballot to instead show up at election site instead, running the risk that they would end up not voting or having their vote challenged.

While PalmPilots and fancy databases might have been used by some groups before the caucuses, that technology was not around in Iowa— a battleground state that was lost to Bush—after the caucuses.

I never heard of calling people to ask if they had voted being challenged as voter harassment though I would personally find it annoying and probably tell the caller to lick salt, but it is not illegal.

While it may seem reasonable that the locally dominant party would ensure that their locals can vote, in fact many hacks get put in charge of this stuff and they suffer from budget constraints as well. In Des Moines in 2006, which had a Democratic auditor, heavily Democratic areas had the voting locations in some cases located outside the residential ward the location was supposed to serve while another ward had the their location inside the other’s ward. You might say: hey, shouldn’t the locations be switched so each group has access to the closer ward? Well, you would if you read CT but not if you were a Democratic managing elections in Polk County.

Democrats need to face up to the fact that the Republicans in general have much better organization and record-keeping than the Democrats do.

Of course, this argument works better in a system like Australia’s where you’ve got preferences to distribute than in a first past the post system, where results are often known within an hour or so of polls closing. Boring! No decent arguments/resentments of the guys who are winning when your side is losing really get a chance to develop in that time.

Come to think of it, that may also be where the electoral system comes from: it has a sort of 17th century tortured logic to it.

We Yanks call our flag “the red, white and blue” not because we’re Dutch, but because a line ending in “blue” is easy to rhyme and, ending in a vowel, easy to sing. Contrast “It’s fun to shred/the blue white and red.” Sure, “d” is voiced, but when prolonged it sounds at best like a dial tone or a damaged CD.

Truth be told, I’d never heard of any such effort. Anyway, let I’ll let my comment stand as a reminder to everyone else that what you’re talking about is orthogonal to the typical voter fraud discussion, which doesn’t concern absentee ballots.

About your proposals, holding the polls open for a while seems like a pretty good idea to me (they do that in Texas), but I think the vote-mobile idea would be subject to severe regulatory capture when you determined where it went.

That was changed here (in Michigan) only very recently. See for example:

“The State of Michigan has implemented a statewide, uniform optical scan voting system through federal grant funds in order to comply with the new HAVA (Help America Vote Act) laws. The City of Farmington Hills received new M-100 tabulating equipment to replace the optical scan units the city purchased 16 years ago. This new equipment was used for the first time for our November 8, 2005 City General Election.”

http://www.ci.farmington-hills.mi.us/Services/CityClerk/ElectionAndVotingInformation/VotingEquip.asp

Notice that until two years ago, the voting equipment was locally selected and purchased. And now even though the equipment is uniform state wide, the polling stations are still staffed and operated by local governments.

Not long ago (less than 10 years ago) in Ann Arbor, we still had the old voting booths with the curtains, mechanical levers and ‘cha-ching’ sound. Which I kind of miss—it was much more theatrical than just filling in a space with a black felt tip marker.

I don’t know how you’re supposed to detect somebody fraudulently casting absentee votes in somebody else’s name, without doing such a survey.

I’ll be upfront here: I don’t think people should be voting absentee, except in extraordinary circumstances. We have election monitors for a good reason, and absentee voting puts too much of the process beyond their view.

This might not matter if our elections were administered by some non-partisan body, but as we all know, election administration in this country is anything but non-partisan. The fox isn’t just in the hen-house, it’s been put in charge of guarding the hens.

There are alternate ways of accommodating people who would have trouble getting to the polling place on election day: Opening the polling places on a reduced basis for several days before the election, mobile “vote-mobiles” going to places like senior centers, things like that.

But what I’d really like to see is a wholesale reform of election administration, with the creation of an “election corps”, a volunteer institution of people who’d be randomly assigned to administer elections far from their homes. That would make the degree of collusion among election officials needed for effective ballot fraud essentially impossible.

But, of course, incumbents by definition having been elected under the existing system, under which most of the opportunities for ballot fraud are available to the party in power in an area, the incumbent’s party, have little incentive to reform the system that put them in power, and keeps them there.

The insinuations here are a little confused. When Republicans pass voter ID requirements in the name of preventing ballot fraud, Democrats often accuse them of voter harassment. But these Republican efforts never focus on absentee ballots (how could they, short of requiring notarization?) even though absentee ballot fraud is much easier to carry out and much easier to do en masse. Absentee ballots also skew Republican.

That’s just one piece of evidence that these voter ID requirements are intended to discourage legitimate Democratic votes rather than to prevent fraud; if you really wanted to prevent fraud, you’d go after the massive absentee ballot security hole. As it is, in 2000 when Florida had a strict law about absentee ballot applications, Republicans colluded with election officials in two counties to alter signed application forms. They didn’t seem awfully concerned about gathering data there.