[EL] FL absentee voting rules and the attempted Miami-Dade web-request absentee ballot fraud

[Bev Harris]

That's easy to catch, though, and in fact has ben caught fairly often. The
number of need-only absentee ballots, and the general percentage for the
reasons, is known and easily seen when it spikes. In New Jersey in 2009,
suddenly some 10 percent of all voters had requests that listed them as "sick
and shut in" and the fraud was caught quickly and traced to the database guy
working with some operatives.

The Florida hack would have worked, and it does demonstrate why no-fault
absentee is so dangerous. What the writers of the article missed is what can be
done with the bogus requests for ballots. Typically the database dictating
where ballots will be mailed is outsourced from the elections office to a
middleman, and some of these guys are really quite sketchy. Several counties in
Colorado and California outsource the vote by mail database to John Elder, who
is a convicted narcotics trafficker who shared a cell with another convict,
embezzler Jeffrey Dean, who developed his own vote by mail software, which is
still widely used throughout the USA.

Need-only absentee does two things: (1) it caps the risk for these ballots at
one to five percent, depending on how tough the state makes it to get the
ballots; and (2) it provides a check and balance because the number of requests
and the distribution of reasons is a known factor. It's much like the store
owner who knows the percentage of cash transactions. When suddenly that
percentage skews (downward, in the case of cash), he knows someone has their
hand in the till.


> Even if Florida moved to an excuse-required absentee balloting regime, if a
> fraudster can request ballots online en masse, the fraudster can just as
> easily alter his/her hack to communicate an appropriate "excuse" to the
> Supervisor of Elections' computer systems during the hack -- especially if
> one of those reasons doesn't require offline submission of additional
> proof. The problem, then, is the Internet-based request system, not the
> no-excuse legal regime.

Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
http://www.blackboxvoting.org

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