Unrelated Bits
Unrelated entirely to my other post from earlier, but today is Oregon's May primary election day. Which isn't a big deal to anyone I know until tomorrow morning when we can see the final results, everyone I've talked to sent in their ballot by mail over a week ago. Vote by mail can be nice like that at times, especially on days like today when it is supposed to be unseasonably warm out again and going to a voting booth would be a decidedly unfun trip in the heat.
One of the local free papers (The Portland Tribune) had a nice article about it today and it is worth reading. If your state puts up a ballot measure to switch to vote-by-mail I'd suggest supporting it. Just so nice to have it done with, especially since once your by mail ballot has been registered as accepted you are off the mailing lists for all the candidates and can stop getting election crap in your mailbox everyday.
Oh, also found this article on the Tribune website talking about how Portland inspired various bits and pieces of Matt Groening's "The Simpsons", which is again unrelated to the earlier bit of this post but might amuse Simpsons fans.
posted by Hythian at 12:38:00 pm
4 Comments:
Hate Vote by mail...
And I heard that it was hot there.
Tue May 16, 01:40:00 pm GMT-7
Why the dislike for vote by mail?
Personally, I love it. Get my ballot out, get the voters pamphlet out, sit down at the computer to do some web searches, and get a chance to leisurely be an informed voter for a change instead of the long waiting in line and impatient grumbling of people behind you as you use a voting booth (hated them when I lived back east).
Yeah. Still irritatingly hot. Almost 80 degrees inside, which is still a lot cooler then outside.
Tue May 16, 06:55:00 pm GMT-7
My main issue with mail in ballots are all they do is allow people to sell them to the highest bidder (Yes, there have been website that buy ballots).
Second, it is a great big vote fraud generator.
Verifible paper ballots, with people going to polls. That is the way I like it.
Wed May 17, 10:59:00 am GMT-7
Huh. Weird way it is handled there.
Oregon mail-in ballots have a doubled envelope, the inner envelope is unlabeled and is for keeping the ballot secret, the outer envelope requires a signature on it and every signature is matched against voter registration cards and is discarded and the voter contacted if they don't match. (Oregon being the only state in the US that validates 100% of voter signatures in all elections, apparently NY validates all signatures as well but doesn't do so in all of its elections.)
We've had only six cases of voter or ballot fraud since 2000 when this became the way votes were handled in Oregon, which puts us on the very low end of cases of election fraud in the US if I recall the stats correctly (plus, it is a Class C felony (5 years + 100k fine) in Oregon to sell, buy, alter or tamper with a ballot in any way).
I do have to agree on paper ballots though, the electronic voting machines with the touch-screens are not a good idea, IMHO. They allow for no audits to be performed to verify voting accuracy and don't allow for recounts in extremely close elections.
Wed May 17, 03:49:00 pm GMT-7
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