Subject:
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Re: "In order to do a proper count one has to know how many people voted in the first place."
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 6 Aug 2004 16:18:38 GMT
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Viewed:
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2048 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Scott Arthur wrote:
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Postal votes have been used in the UK for yonks. However, they have been used
recently as a tool to improve voter turnout. This has led to three problems:
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We’ve got Absentee Ballots, but they’re primarily aimed at those who either
can’t be in their district on voting day (such as deployed troops), or can’t
reasonably be expected to travel to their voting place (such as the elderly or
handicapped). I don’t believe there are any current requirements that you not
be able to vote in person to qualify for an AB.
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Party workers have been “assisting” voters with the paperwork.
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Yup, we’ve had that, but not always even restricted to ABs. Some polling places
have reportedly had “assistants” standing by to “help” anyone who might be
having difficulty figuring out who to vote for.
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Within some ethnic minorities and workplaces there has been a great deal of
coercion.
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Again, we’ve had that, and not limited to ABs. Even as late as the 2000
election I believe there were reportedly some districts where minorities were
“discouraged” from entering their assigned voting location. And there are
probably bosses out there who will decide whether to let an infraction slide or
not based on your announced voting intentions. They can’t fire you outright for
voting “wrong,” but they can probably find a more legitimate reason to fire or
penalize you if they really work at it, and depending on the specific reason, it
could be very difficult for you to prove that it was really based on voter
discrimination.
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Outright fraud: “A
councillor was allegedly seen sorting through ballot papers in a car park
and a postman was offered £500 for his sack of postal votes”
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I don’t think any voting fraud quite approaches that of Chicago, where “the dead
vote twice,” but I’m sure there are still a lot of voting districts where
dishonest poll supervisors weed out non-compliant votes. Hopefully such action
is fairly evenly matched on both sides of any election so their actions will
cancel each other out, or the vote is so disproportionately skewed to one side
as to render all such actions pointless (like weeding out Dem votes in Texas, or
Rep votes in New York).
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