BREAKING AND EXCLUSIVE: Funny business with Chicago absentee ballots
In Illinois, military and overseas voters can ask for either a paper ballot or a ballot sent by email. Ballots sent by email must be reprinted by the voter on the voter’s printer and send back.
In most counties the electronic choice is made by about a quarter of voters. Three quarters want good old fashioned paper. The highest rates of choosing electronic is in Champaign County and Lake County – which is about 30 percent.
There is one place, however, that is strangely off the scale: Chicago. Where else?
In Chicago, the rate of voters “choosing” to get an email attaching their ballots is a whopping eighty six percent. This is such as extraordinary outlier, that something must be wrong.
In Chicago, 6,800 ballots were sent by email, 982 were sent by paper.
A person expert in the administration of elections in Illinois told Election Law Center that “Chicago appears to be disregarding the choice of the voters and may be simply sending ballots electronically in almost all instances, perhaps anytime the voter communicated by email, even if they communicated they wanted a paper ballot. The problem with this is that no printer can replicate the quality needed by the Sequoia ballot machine readers. This means that every one of these ballots must be recreated back in Chicago before they can be read through the machine.”
Did you hear that? Chicago election officials are going to have to take the paper ballots mailed from overseas, and “recreate” them before they feed them into the machines. Can you imagine Chicago election officials, pencil in hand, deciding who the guy in Iraq wants to vote for in the U.S. Senate race, and faithfully “reproducing” his mark on a nice new official ballot. That’s what seems to be coming in Chicago.
But it’s not as if Chicago has any kind of reputation for cooking election results, do they?
It is even worse than this. In many instances, voters in Afghanistan or Iraq don’t have access to computers and printers. That’s why they chose paper ballots. Paper mail ballots will get to them sooner in forward operating bases than will an email. So the decision to ignore the wishes of the voter, which is obvious with an 86% outlier, means that military voters will be disenfranchined.
Then there is St. Clair County. Guess how many voters in St. Clair chose to have their ballot delivered electronically? Zero, according documents ELC.com has obtained. Really? Not a single military member asked for a ballot electronically in the world?
This, on the other hand, means that St. Clair is most likely violating the provision of the MOVE Act which requires the electronic delivery option. I’ll bet the DOJ is right on top of this violation.
UPDATE: Actually it seems DOJ might be sniffing around this issue, but will it act in time? ELC has obtained an email from state election offiicals to counties stating "I am requesting the actual ballot delivery method of the persons that have requested a ballot using the MOVE site." This may mean DOJ is hip to the problem. Maybe not.
Posted by Christian Adams at October 18, 2010 
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: Military Voting Illinois MOVE
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: Military Voting Illinois MOVE
Ain't the MOVE Act supposed to allow the choice to be the voters choice, not the election official. I bet Illinois doesn't even have the ballot tracking system in place either. So much for the MOVE Act requirement to educate the overseas voters on these new features... can't inform voters if it is not in place.
Reply to this
We email to the troops if they have supplied an email address -- and also mail out the hard copy. The email is sent in case the hard copy is delayed getting to the soldier. Everyone gets 'good old fashioned paper' but in case that doesn't arrive, the email allows the voter to print it out and send it back timely. When the ballot is returned, if it is incompatible with the system, it is remade under the oversight of combination of a Republican and Democratic judge in a process that is open to poll watchers.
Regards,
Jim Allen
Chicago Election Board
EDITOR NOTE: This is generally good. But also bad. Anytime human involvement is introduced into the process, like recreating ballots, human error occurs. Plus it is a typically Chicago solution to assume that just because each political party is represented, that nothing will go wrong. For starters there are candidates not from those parties. Second, a political overseer does not serve as a perfect check against human error.
The other problem with this solution is that the data don't really support this explaination. An 86 percent email rate tells me that alot of paper ballots "were delayed getting to the solider." So what of the solider who requested paper, the paper was delaed, and Chicago emailed one instead. That assumes the solider is monitoring email. There is no question the late delay of paper is going to cause someone not to be able to vote. And that's what the Sun Times cartoon was all about.
Reply to this
By federal law, we must use the method requested by the overseas soldier/civilian. In either case, we emailed, faxed and mailed all two weeks before the federal deadline. Chicago was definitely NOT one of the jurisdictions where there were delays.
Jim Allen
Reply to this