{"id":34289,"date":"2013-02-25T05:53:45","date_gmt":"2013-02-25T09:53:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=34289"},"modified":"2013-02-25T07:07:33","modified_gmt":"2013-02-25T11:07:33","slug":"if-you-needed-another-reason-to-be-against-early-voting-by-absentee-ballot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=34289","title":{"rendered":"If You Needed Another Reason to Be Leery of Early Voting by Mail . . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>. . . <a href=\"http:\/\/www.miamiherald.com\/2013\/02\/23\/v-print\/3250726\/the-case-of-the-phantom-ballots.html\">here it is<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>An interesting thing happened last year in the Miami area during last year\u2019s primary elections.\u00a0 Over 2,500 fraudulent absentee ballot requests were submitted by unknown on-line actors during a 2 1\/2 week period before the elections.<\/p>\n<p>The scam requested that absentee ballots be sent to roughly 2000 voters who had not requested an absentee ballot (about 500 were duplicate requests).\u00a0 Making such a bogus third-party request is a felony violation of Florida election laws.<\/p>\n<p>The timing and sources of the on-line requests were what initially tipped off authorities of the problem.\u00a0\u00a0 At times, the bogus requests appeared to have been submitted entirely too fast to be from humans.\u00a0 Further, the 2500+ requests appear to have originated from only 15 IP addresses &#8211; 12 of which were located outside the US.<\/p>\n<p>The perpetrators of this scam targeted 3 voting districts.\u00a0 In one Congressional district, the scam overwhelmingly requested ballots for voters who were registered Democrats.\u00a0 In contrast, two Florida state House districts showed requests for bogus ballots overwhelmingly for registered Republicans.<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, the \u201csystem\u201d caught this because someone noticed an obvious pattern.\u00a0 But that was only because the scam\u2019s perpetrators were stupid enough to be obvious.\u00a0 If they\u2019d been more subtle, they might have gotten away with it.<\/p>\n<p>Voting is a right.\u00a0 But attempting to make it too \u201cconvenient\u201d has the unintended consequence of also making it easier for someone to scam the system. \u00a0And where someone thinks the system can be scammed \u2013 someone will try.<\/p>\n<p>I used to be a fan of the idea of early voting via absentee ballot.\u00a0 Not any more.\u00a0 Allowing unrestricted absentee early voting simply introduces too many opportunities for fraud.\u00a0 Personal convenience is nice, but fair and honest elections are far more important than personal convenience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>. . . here it is. An interesting thing happened last year in the Miami area &hellip; <a title=\"If You Needed Another Reason to Be Leery of Early Voting by Mail . . . .\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=34289\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">If You Needed Another Reason to Be Leery of Early Voting by Mail . . . .<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[186,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2012-election","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}