This is why a political office would have a bunch of completed absentee ballots
The Orange County, North Carolina Republican headquarters was struck by a firebomb over the weekend, and while that in and of itself is a pretty crappy thing to have happen regardless of the fact that it was a Republican campaign HQ, one piece of news that slipped out in the aftermath has been getting some attention. The North Carolina Republican spokesperson Emily Weeks told NBC News that it was possible that completed absentee ballots had been destroyed in the fire.
The problem with that statement is that, according to North Carolina law, there shouldn’t be completed absentee ballots at the party HQ. Absentee ballots are supposed to either be mailed to the county or delivered in person by the voter or a close relative. There is no legal reason that those ballots, if they were there, should have been anywhere near that office.
But a big stack of absentee ballots being where they shouldn’t be sounded familiar to me. I live in Dallas, and about fifteen years ago, the local alternative weekly, The Dallas Observer, published a series of stories about accusations of organized fraud using absentee ballots.
After a digging down, Observer reporter/columnist/curmudgeon Jim Schutze figured out the open secret of absentee balloting in South Dallas, and it wasn’t very pretty.
There were vote harvesters — people who would stake out specific neighborhoods and ‘vote the people’ in those neighborhoods. And it worked one of two ways. At the time in Texas, the county was required to publish a list of the people who had requested and been sent an absentee ballot within 72 of the request being granted. In those cases, the vote harvesters would know when those ballots were expected to arrive, and they’d arrive at the same time with an offer to ‘help’ the voter fill out the ballot.
Sometimes the vote harvesters cajoled or coerced the voter to vote the way the harvester wanted. Sometimes the harvester just filled out the ballot without regard as to who the voter wanted to vote for. And then, the harvester who was so nice to come over and help get the ballot filled out would offer to mail the ballot for the voter. The harvester would then leave with the completed/signed ballot.
Other times, the vote harvesters would be the ones who requested the absentee ballot in the first place...
Continues in link: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/10/17/1583672/-This-is-why-a-political-office-would-have-a-bunch-of-completed-absentee-ballots
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