printed in the Monmouth Daily Review Atlas, Friday 11 Feb. 2005
Three cheers for Governor Blagojevich! Once again, he has shown his mastery of an absurd situation by making it still more absurd. This time, in light of all the election fraud perpetrated to our north, in the Milwaukee area, it seems almost criminally stupid -- or just plain criminal -- that he’s making it easier to fiddle the system down here in the Land of Lincoln.
Up in Wisconsin, there is an FBI investigation under way to find out how so many dead people, nonexistent people, and people apparently living in offices at the courthouse could have cast (mostly Democratic party) ballots in this past November’s election. Part of the reason is, in Wisconsin, there is no waiting period required between registration and voting. If you move to the Dairy State on a Monday night, you may register and vote on that following Tuesday morning. They don’t even ask you for a photo ID. Therefore, people who gave their home mailing address as Miller Park --where the Brewers play their home games -- cast at least a dozen votes. And nobody had, heretofore, known there were apartments in the stadium! Several occupants of a trestle bridge, too, seemed to feel the need to make their political clout known. The upshot is, in a state where only eleven thousand votes decided the state for the “Blue”, there may have been an equal or greater number of unlawful ballots counted toward the election.
Illinois has long had a cushion around elections. It isn’t perfect, but we’ve required that you register to vote at least 28 days before casting your ballot. In those 28 days, it is possible for something to happen to change your circumstances -- a sudden change of address -- but in those circumstances, you can still return to your old neighborhood to vote, or file for absentee ballot from said old neighborhood. If you know you are going to move, all post offices even have change-of-address kits to make the process easier (take it from me, they’re more than a timesaver, they’re a lifesaver). Of course, if you get a surprise change of place -- your house burns down, or you are hospitalized (or, in Chicago, if you have joined the ranks of the deceased, she said laughingly), things are a little harder, but there are accommodations to be made for special circumstances, so you can still make your voice heard.
But if a person can’t be bothered to register to vote when he’s in the process of changing the address on his subscription to TV Guide, why should we care what his opinion is, when it comes time to choose an electoral body? The whole point behind the waiting period was so that the local officials could double-check to see that your registration was valid, that you had given the correct information about yourself, and that you were legally qualified to have a vote. True, in this day and age of electronic data gathering, it shouldn’t take very long to check somebody’s information, it still requires honest human effort to do the checking, and, in cities, in particular, that can create a backlog. A month is a reasonable amount of time to allow a clerk to run his analyses.
Sure, the “grace period” votes can be held in a separate place from the “regular” votes until their validity can be confirmed, as the new law stipulates. My question on this, though, is, doesn’t that just make extra work for the election officials? They’ll have to have a separate ballot box or electronic device to hold the data from those provisional ballots, until they can be confirmed. They’ll need extra judges to supervise the care for and counting of those provisional ballots. Doesn’t that mean, therefore, more expenses? In an age when the federal budget managers are striving (or so they say) to cut costs to taxpayers, why is our state government trying so hard to jack up its operating costs? (All right, that’s more than one question -- but they’re all related.)
Why is it that Governor Blagojevich is cutting the “grace period” in half? Instead of 28 days between registration and vote, he has signed a law making reducing the waiting period to 14 days. What with our “motor voter” registration system, and a lack of photo ID requirement at the polls, doesn’t this just open us up to more opportunities for fraud? Is he so oblivious to the potential for corruption of the system? Or is he simply inured of it, after spending his politically formative years in the aura of the old Chicago machine? Whatever it is, easing security restrictions on voting is not a good idea. Several somebodies in Springfield are not looking after our best interests.
No comments:
Post a Comment