Dealing with challenged absentee ballots in the 20th Congressional District special election continues. Democrat Scott Murphy leads by 273 votes as of this morning with over 1550 ballots left to count (or not).
Initially, Republican Jim Tedisco's campaign targeted college students at Skidmore College in Saratoga, claiming that the students improperly claimed residency within the district. Given that full-time college students live at their college more than half the year, I'm not sure how 'improperly' is defined.
According to North Country Public Radio, Tedisco's new strategy centers around challenging the ballots of people with second homes in the district.
Apparently, his argument is that people who primarily live outside the district but have second homes in the district can not be legitimate voters, but they can be legitimate Congressmen.
In his report, NCPR's Brian Mann noted that judges traditionally give wide latitude to voters (though apparently not to petition signatories). In other words, the default position is that a vote should count unless there's a compelling reason otherwise.
And that's the way it should be. New York's electoral law, which I've frequently called for overhauling, is pretty vague on all this. My personal opinion is that even if a voter has two residences, his or her vote should count as long as they've consistently voted in this district. They should only be disqualified if they voted elsewhere last November and tried to vote here in March.
If the law says voters can "district shop" in much the same way Congressional candidates can, then we can't change the rules in the middle of the game.
But what interests me is this. When a ballot is challenged by either campaign, is the voter made aware of this? Does he have any recourse? I would loathe to have my ballot challenged by some lawyer hack and disqualified by a judge without me even being made aware of this? How can voters be completely disenfranchised without even being given a chance to defend the legitimacy of their vote?! If I'm wrong, please correct me, but I am almost certain this does not happen.
I wonder if the candidates in this and other close elections would be so eager to casually challenge absentee votes willy nilly if they knew they might have to meet that voter, that potential future constituent, look him in the eye and face his contempt.
Even criminals get a chance to defend themselves before being stripped of their civic rights.
3 comments:
Wouldn't it be hard to square identifying the voter in a public court of law with the sanctity of the secret ballot?
Mark,
Good question.
My dad used to be a county elections commissioner and he's explained the absentee ballot counting procedure to me before.
From what I understand, most of the ballot challenging occurs before the absentee envelopes are even opened. They don't know who was voted for when challenging ballots based on residency. Challenges of this sort are based on public information like the voter's name, address(es) and most notably party affiliation.
The only ballot challenging that occurs after the ballots are opened is for reasons like stray marks, putting an X in two boxes for the same office, etc. -- reasons independent of the specific biography of the voter.
For example, the Murphy campaign may have equal questions about the residency of a Democratic Party-enrolled absentee voter and a Right-to-Life Party-enrolled absentee voter, but it's pretty clear which one they'd be more likely to challenge even without knowing the result of that particular vote.
My dad also explained that unchallenged absentee envelopes were opened en masse, put in a pile and then counted to ensure anonymity. I assume that challenged envelopes once ruled legal are dealt with in the same way.
Hence, a voter given the opportunity to defend the legitimacy of his registration would do so without the result of the vote being revealed against his will.
Frankly, I think there should be a separate process to address questionable voter registrations and that it should be concluded well before Election Day to remove the discussion from this sort of gamesmanship.
After Tedisco conceded, both sides, I believe, gave up the lawyering, meaning county boards of elections will rule on the remaining ballots.
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