[EL] Today's example of in-person voting fraud, Indianapolis division

[Larry Levine]

The matter of individual poll workers making their own interpretations of what they think they heard about rules and regulations has been a fact for as long as I have been watching elections as a news reporter and a political consultant for some 60 years. It’s one of the reasons for having poll watchers armed with the phone number for the elections office to report problems.

Larry

 

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Robbin Stewart
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2016 6:49 PM
To: Election Law Listserv <law-election at uci.edu>
Subject: [EL] Today's example of in-person voting fraud, Indianapolis division

 

In person voting fraud may not be so rare, it's just not the kind that Trump is talking about. Fraud is a technical term and maybe what happned to me today was just incompetence and lacked mens rea for fraud, but this is the way voter ID actually works in Indiana.

 

I went to the marion county election board's office to see if I could early vote. I was handed a clipboard and told to have my ID ready. I asked what if I don't have ID. I was told that without ID, I can't vote. I asked if I could get that in writing, They said no and had an armed guard "suggest" I leave the building.

 

I have talked to some people and this will probably get fixed tomorrow, but they've been doing early voting this way for about a week. They keep no records of  how many or who they turn away. 

 

This is not the version of voter ID that was approved in Crawford, but this is how it actually works. Not giving people provisional ballots when they are supposed to was listed on the top 10 poll worker errors back in 2008, but it hasn't gotten any better. This same thing happened at my local precinct back in the primary,and happened to my roommates in 2015. It is the norm, although the practice varies a bit by precinct. I am trying to get poll watcher credientials for election day so I can further document this at multiple locations.

I have written this up in a bit more detail at my blog,

http://ballots.blogspot.com/2016/10/today-i-went-to-test-early-voting.html

http://ballots.blogspot.com/2016/10/letter-sent-just-now-today-tuesday-oct.html.

 

Marion County elections are (mostly) under Democratic control, so I don't see this as deliberate voter suppression at the county level so much as somewhat ineptly carrying out what they see as a statutory mandate to suppress votes via voter ID. 

 

The integrity of the election results are being undermined when an unknown number of people who go to try to vote are told they can't vote. This is addition to the thousands of people who cast provisional ballots that are thrown away instead of being counted, and the unknown numbers of people who no longer bother to try to vote because they know it would be futile.

I see this overall system as deliberate voter fraud which could be fairly described as rigging the election. I have requested an absentee ballot so that I can vote for Gary Johnson and a mix of downballot libertarians and republicans,and vote against a couple of public questions. - Robbin Stewart.

 

 

 

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