Professor Schaller makes several good points against early voting, all of them valid. The proposal in Question 1 has the additional downside of placing the early voting locations in places not necessarily friendly to all voters in the county.
Let's look at some additional factors. Ballots are not finalized until forty-five days before the election, provided that the courts do not uphold one of the several challenges to questions and issues proposed for a ballot.
Each county, as has been pointed out by Marylander, does not use the same ballot. Even within an election district in Baltimore County, there will be more than one ballot. This is worse during Gubernatorial Primaries and General Elections. Adjacent election precincts can have different State senators and Delegates, different Congressional Representatives, different County Council Members and more. To have forty different ballots in a county is not unreasonable. This bill allows any registered voter to vote anywhere in the state! Good luck getting all of the ballots in the state to every county polling place.
Beyond the logistics of producing, printing, distributing and securing ballots, there are the voting equipment, staffing and security issues. Local boards currently pull hens teeth to get an adequate number of election judges and train them before and for one Election Day. This question requires judges for ten days before the election.
The real problem with this question lies in the other part of it.
Absentee ballots are the most fraud prone of all voting methods. It is bad that a person not entitled to vote can cast a vote and cancel the vote of a legally qualified citizen. Most people illegally present in the country do not want to call attention to themselves, but there are significant numbers in some precincts that will lie on the application regarding citizenship and vote.
The less risky way for those voters and those who would try to influence the election results through fraud is through the Absentee vote. Let me explain.
A person not entitled to vote registers fraudulently, and then requests an absentee ballot. They execute the ballot and mail it in, never having to risk physical apprehension or identification and challenge. They merely submit a copy of the driver's license issued by the MVA to thousands of aliens every day. But it can be worse.
An organization of individuals could obtain a list of voters, active and inactive, from the local board of elections. They could then identify individuals who, by their history, are not likely to vote. The perpetrators of the fraud would then send in a change of address for each identified voter. When the change is effective, they send in a request for an absentee ballot and then vote that ballot. If the voter shows up at the precinct, the poll book will show that an absentee ballot was requested and the voter will vote a provisional ballot.
Absentee ballots are counted on the Thursday after the election. While that counting is going on, the Provisional Ballots are reviewed and entered into the election files. If an absentee ballot has been received, the provisional ballot is rejected. The fraudulent absentee ballot is counted. The real voter is confused. Confidence in the electoral system is undermined. Very few voters will have shown up and even fewer will challenge what happened. None of the votes will be changed because the systems ensure that each ballot counted is not identifiable with a voter.
What if such an effort only resulted in fifteen votes in each precinct? There are 219 precincts in Baltimore County. Fifteen fraudulent votes in each would result in 3285 votes.
There are about 487,570 registered voters in the county according to the State Election website as of October 1, 2008. If there is 75% turnout, 365,678 voters, one percent could be fraudulent. The numbers could easily be higher without raising an alarm.
In the past ten Presidential elections there have been, on average, five states with more than fifty electoral votes total that have been decided by less than one percent of the popular vote. Those numbers could have changed three of those elections.
I do not have actual vote totals for the states in those ten elections, but I think that several states might have turned on less than one percent of the vote. This is how an election can be stolen with the help of legislatures.
Instead of making it easy to register and vote, we should make it harder for frauds to be committed. Perhaps we can ask for new signatures every five years. Or, sit down for this one, requiring a photo id at the polls and with absentee ballots. Copies are easy to get. A person's agent can take the id to the local copy center, library, post office, or law office to get one.
States should spend the money on signature recognition software and hardware. It's on the market. It processes the applications and flags the signatures that don't match for a human to deal with. Currently, we rely on humans, very few of them and none of them trained in handwriting analysis, to catch this. The results are abysmal.
By the way, it is not the ACORN attempts to register Mickey Mouse and the NFL Cowboys that will result in fraudulent votes. It is the fictitious persons, registered by mail with fraudulent identification cards, made for just that purpose, which will defraud the voters.
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