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Lansing clerk wading through bogus voter forms
The Lansing city clerk's office is sorting through thousands of fraudulent voter registration forms that have been turned in recently.
| "Thousands." Not "a few." Not "dozens." Not even "hundreds." |
The city is using $2,000 from its general fund budget to pay for two temporary workers to sort through 5,000 to 8,000 bad forms. "We're going to have them painstakingly compare each form to the qualified voter file," Lansing City Clerk Debbie Miner said.
| Good idea. Gimme a call. I can set you up with a program to help. |
Just throw 'em up on the web and let the pajama brigade ankle-biters bloggers have at it. |
Officials believe the forms were turned in by the state advocacy group Public Interest Research Group In Michigan, Ingham County Clerk Mike Bryanton said. The Ingham County Sheriff's Office is investigating.
| "Yup. We're investigatin'. We think it wuz them..." |
| Yup, indictments any day now ... |
Calls to PIRGIM's Ann Arbor office were not returned Friday or Tuesday. Bryanton said the investigation shows that some people took names out of a phone book and forged signatures. Meridian Township has been dealing with the same problem for the past few weeks. "They have no idea the problems they've caused," Meridian Township Clerk Mary Helmbrecht said. Helmbrecht said Tuesday that her staff hasn't requested extra help, but that her office has been flooded with extra forms. "We just got an envelope (Monday) with 100 more forms from that group," she said. "It's extraordinarily time consuming."
| But if you just dump them all, you're "suppressing the vote." |
| I'm sure there's a reason why we can't require people to register to vote in person. |
Last month, Helmbrecht's office notified Bryanton about registration form irregularities such as addresses that didn't exist or several people listed for the same apartment.
| Are you checking for deaders, too? |
| Can't, they moved to Chicago. |
The sheriff's investigation shows that members of PIRGIM, a statewide advocacy group that encourages voter registration, were paid $50 a day to collect registrations and were given bonuses for collecting extra forms, Bryanton said. The $2,000 Lansing is spending for two extra staffers for Miner's office came from an allocation in the city's general fund for temporary help for city offices. The request was approved at Monday's council meeting. The money comes at a time when Lansing may be facing as much as a $5 million budget deficit. "My own internal staff will be working with these people," Miner said. "We're working overtime every night as it is." Any form that looks similar to a form already in the qualified voter file will go into a separate "suspect" file, Miner said. Anyone who registered to vote by mail and did not provide proof of ID must show identification when voting, she said.
| I know it suppresses the illegal alien vote, and the cons on the lam vote, and the dead vote, and the never-existed vote, but I still think you should have to show some sort of ID when voting. But in Ann Arbor they'd accuse me of setting fire to the Reichstag. |
Posted by: Fred 2004-09-29 |
