Tag Archives: absentee voting

October 4, 2016 · 16:00

Vigilance is the Price of Voting Rights and Freedom

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Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Last night I published an article about receiving a notice that my absentee ballot as a military voter would not be counted on election night because there was a question about my eligibility to vote in this election.

Now imagine that you are a military voter who has had to vote absentee since 1996 and during that time you changed your party affiliation to the party that is not the majority party in that state, though at one time it was. Now imagine that you had trouble even getting a ballot during the 2012 election cycle because the legislature changed the rules to require a voter to request a ballot for each election, something that was not publicized. Now imagine that you have been reading all kinds of reports of Republican operatives in Red States attempting to disqualify Democratic Party voters or those who might reasonably be suspected of voting Democrat.

Then imagine receiving this notice with your ballot and imagine your reaction.

provisional-ballot-notice

My reaction was to go to Red Alert and Battle Stations. I wrote about it here as well as at the Daily Kos, and then I went into action calling the County Clerk office, the Federal Voter’s Assistance Program, and the West Virginia Secretary of State Office. The Federal Voter’s Assistance program employee who helped me just happened to be a West Virginia native from the county that my paternal grandmother is from contacted the West Virginia Secretary of State Voting Rights section and the matter was cleared up. Both the man at the Federal Voter’s Assistance Program and the lady from the Secretary of State office were very helpful.

The answer from the County Clerk’s Office was that I got the form by mistake and that a computer problem put them behind and in the rush to get the ballots out the provisional ballot form notice was mistakenly put in the packets. While I understand that I am not sure how much I believe it as it seems incomprehensible to me that that form would be put in every packet by hand without someone noticing and asking the simple question “should we be sending this form out?”

I hate to sound a bit paranoid but recent history shows that there are some public employees who will defy the law for their political and social beliefs, as in the case of Kim Davis in Kentucky. Either it this was a case of incredibly gross incompetence which is pretty rare, or it was it was an intentional act of an employee who is now covering their tracks.

I have to ask. What if an employee of the Clerk’s office decided to send them just to Democrats, or Republicans for that matter and then lie and say that everyone got one with no way of proving it as the forms are not serialized. The question should be asked and the situation investigated and if there is wrongdoing then it should be prosecuted. This is an absentee ballot nightmare scenario. While it won’t matter for the Presidential ballot as West Virginia is solidly behind Trump, it does matter in the state and local races.

Now my vote will be counted on election night, at least that is what I am told. So the next step is to make sure that everyone else who got one of these forms knows what happened and that their votes will count. I have contacted the Secretary of State’s Office and asked that they and the Cabell County Clerk Office issue a press release and also individually notify people that their vote will count.  I can imagine that if I was in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, or on a ship at sea with little way to reach back and find out what is going on that I might just not vote. I can imagine that if I was a student living out of state or an elderly shut in I might just give up on this election. Not everyone is the asshole that I am when it comes to real or potential civil rights and voting rights issues. Many people are simply too nice to rock the boat or the vote.

And then ask the logical follow-up question: “If I didn’t contact Federal and State officials to advise them of this would the situation have been noticed or corrected?” That has to be asked, because accidental or not it would have led to de-facto voter suppression. The Secretary of State office agrees with me and even called me back and they are working on how to work with the county to make sure that people know that this was a mistake.

I do not care what party you are affiliate with, or for that matter who you vote for, but I do ask all of my readers regardless of party affiliation to hold their legislatures, county clerks, and state level secretary of state offices charged with ensuring that elections are free and fair to make sure that no one is disenfranchised. I also contacted the news office of one the local NBC affiliate in Huntington because I am not sure that this will get out to the people that need to know and that if there is a cover-up going on that it will surface without outside scrutiny. I am also going to contact other news outlets.

If a “mistake” like this happened to me it can happen to anybody. The price of maintaining our civil rights and voting rights is unrelenting vigilance.

Until tomorrow, stay alert, and keep democracy alive.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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November 4, 2014 · 15:24

I’m a Disenfranchised Military Voter in DeFacto Red State

votersupresssion

I did not to get to vote in this election. I am active duty military and have lived away from the state where I vote, West Virginia, where my family settled in the 1790s for about eighteen years. It used to be that as long as I let the state knew where I lived my absentee ballot was sent to me without question. But then something changed. I stopped getting ballots. In 2012 I ended up calling my county commissioner’s office to ask why. I was told that I had to now reapply each election year. I was barely allowed to vote. In fact though I sent it in, I don’t even know if it was counted.

West Virginia used to be a Blue State, and the legislature still has a slight majority of Democrats, but at its heart the state as as Fire Engine Red as it gets. Business interests have priority, the environment suffers, the secondary education system is broken and the poor, who gives a damn about them?

The code of my state specifically states that military personnel must reapply every election cycle. This is a fairly recent change. In fact I grew up in a California, and when I first entered activity duty in the early 1980s in that state never failed to get an absentee ballot. Now the rules have changed. Evidently in an attempt to make it harder to vote under the guise of preventing voter fraud the onus is on the person serving their country to make sure that they reapply, mind you that people living in the state don’t need to do that. In fact they can walk up, do early voting or vote the same day. Heck even a person dying on a hospital bed in the state on election day can get an emergency absentee ballot brought to them and in between their dying breaths can have someone mark a ballot for them.

The sad thing is you don’t even get a reminder from the state that you need to reapply, even though they have my address and e-mail info. It’s not like the state or county is a massive metropolis where it would be too difficult to do this. That simple effort on the part of the state to reach their active duty members living away from home wouldn’t be that hard, nor would simply sending out the ballot.

Now I will take my personal responsibility, I knew the rule and should have registered. If I was in my right mind I would have done it. However I was in the midst of terrible year dealing with a move, and a major PTSD meltdown that shattered me for much of the year, I just forgot to reapply, and by the time I remembered it was too late. 

But it shouldn’t have to be that way. We in the military should not have to jump through extra hoops that people at home don’t have to be concerned with when it comes to voting. In fact, though the mechanism is there to vote, it is a way to make it more difficult and to ensure that your vote doesn’t get counted. But, that’s what you get for begin registered in a state when certain groups want to make sure that voting is restricted.

The process is insidious and terribly undemocratic, and it devalues the citizenship and voting rights of the members of less than one percent of the population that serves in the military. But then, if those people only make up one percent of the vote, what do they matter and why should anyone give a damn.

I’ll remember that the next time some politician from West Virginia says the empty words “thank you for your service.”

Screw you West Virginia politicians, pundits and preachers of both parties, my Democrats, and  my former party the GOP, which is about to take over, I won’t be coming back when I retire. You can keep it.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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October 16, 2012 · 20:29

My Goodness My Vote Almost Got Suppressed and I’m a White Guy: Not that it Will Matter Anyway…

The Legislators of West Virginia made a change to Absentee voting that had I not bothered to make a phone call that I would not have noticed. Absentee voters must now make a new absentee ballot application every election. Local, primary, or general.

It is not like before where if you voted in the primary and are a legally qualified registered voter, of whom most are military that you would automatically would get your General election ballot. Now you can go and vote in the primary and unless you realize that the West Virginia legislature changed the law and requires you to register for every election, even if they are less than 6 months apart and think that you will get to vote in the general election you will be sorely disappointed. You will not get a ballot. You will not be able to vote.  For all practical purposes you will be denied the your only chance to have a say in who runs the country. Unless per chance you are someone like the Koch Brothers or Sheldon Adelson who can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy candidates at the Federal level and any state that you please thanks to Citizens United. If you are someone like that you don’t even need to bother to vote, you simply bury candidates that you don’t want in office by financing anywhere in the country, even if you don’t live in those congressional districts or states.

Now in my case I didn’t notice the change to the absentee ballot application. I have been on active duty either as a mobilized Army Reservist or Active Duty Navy Officer and away from my home of record since 1996. I have never had a problem voting, until now. With two weeks to go before the election I wondered why my wife and I hadn’t gotten our absentee ballots. Now we are a mixed marriage, she is a Republican and I am a Democrat but neither of us got our ballots.

So I made a phone call to my country clerk office who told me that though I was a registered voter I was not getting an absentee ballot. I was horrified. I was told that I could have them send a new application or go online to request an absentee ballot. I was pissed. I asked what happened and was told that the rules had changed. I asked who changed the, the legislature? and was told that they are always changing the  election laws. I told the lady that I would go online to get my application and that I thought that it was a case of voter suppression because had I not bothered to call I would not have been able to vote.

Not that my vote will really matter anyway, but it is the principle. When it comes to the Presidential election West Virginia is redder than my ass after consuming too many habanero peppers. If I vote for the white guy, it doesn’t matter. If I vote for the black guy in the White House it doesn’t matter. If I vote for a third party candidate it does’t matter. The voters of West Virginia which at the local level is overwhelmingly Democrat will vote for the white guy that is not in the White House. That was shown in the Democrat primary when a convicted felon in the Federal prison at Beaumont Texas got more than 40% of the vote against President Obama.

I am now voting out of the principle that Americans should be allowed to vote not that I expect that my vote in my red State will matter one bit. The reason why is that only votes of the voters in a few “swing states” really matter.  Some states are so “Red” or so “Blue” that when it comes to voting for the President your vote really doesn’t matter. Both political parties have so gerrymandered congressional districts and state legislature districts to ensure that their guys are pretty much safe. So if you are a voter who is of the party that is not of the incumbent then for the most part you have a losing vote. As far as the presidency, forget it. If you are a Democrat in West Virginia that votes for Obama, or a Republican in California that votes for Romney you are screwed because unless you have a lot of money to donate to other races in other places your one vote won’t matter in an electorate that is as bitterly dived as ours.

I will vote. But since my vote doesn’t matter to either campaign because I don’t live in Ohio, Virginia, Florida Wisconsin or Colorado I am simply going to ignore the rest of the election season the best that I can. I am so tired of the partisanship and enmity that I just don’t care anymore. Well screw it, I do care otherwise I wouldn’t write about it.

But the fact is unless you live in a swing state or a contested congressional district your vote doesn’t matter a bit to the professional political politicians, pundits and preachers, or dare I say prostitutes of either party your vote doesn’t matter a hill of beans. Unless… you and I decide like William Holden in the movie Network stand up and say I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore and vote to upset the status quo.

The fact is that the most conservative and most liberal parts of both parties are too entrenched and invested in their special interests and issues to give a damn about the rest of the country and I say a pox on all of them. If I wanted to be a part of a party that only voted along party lines and refuses to compromise I would move to a country with a parliamentary system like England.

I am mad as hell and after almost losing my vote because of unpublicized changes in election law and I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of me anymore. That’s why I’m an American.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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