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| Home Front: Politix |
| People Who Vote Twice -- a round-up |
| 2004-10-28 |
| EFL A sudden crackdown on an old trick Maybe Joe Moschella thought he was playing it safe. The 59-year-old retired transit employee had mailed his absentee ballot too late, he thought, so on Election Day 2000, he trotted down to the polls and voted in person. The only problem was that his polling place is in Staten Island, where he lives, while the absentee ballot went to Florida, where he winters. NY Daily News: 46,000 New Yorkers were registered to vote in both Florida and New York . Sixty-eight percent of the News' double-registrants were Democrats. Florida and New York officials — embarrassed by the newspapers' revelations — have been playing catch-up. The Orlando Sentinel found that 68,000 Florida voters are also registered in Georgia or North Carolina (the only two states it checked), 1,650 of whom voted twice in 2000 or 2002. The Kansas City Star discovered 300 "potential" cases of individual voter fraud, including Kansans voting in Missouri and St. Louisans voting in both the city and the surrounding suburbs. Technology also makes double voting easier. Some 34 states still don't have statewide voter databases, as required by the Help America Vote Act, a Band-Aid passed by Congress in 2002. Nor is there any national voter database. "The fact that people are on the rolls in more than one place is not at all surprising," said Sam Issacharoff, a Columbia University law professor and election-law expert. Issacharoff remembers litigating voting-rights cases in Mississippi in the 1980s, in counties where he said the voter rolls outnumbered the state population by 25 percent. "They just never purged the rolls," he said. . |
| Posted by:trailing wife |