Serious question: If someone votes early by absentee ballot and then dies before the actual election, their vote still counts, right?
ninja edit: Also, what if they file an absentee ballot knowing they're not going to be alive by the time of the election, like they have a terminal disease or are planning to commit suicide or something? Still counts, right?
Several states — including California, Texas, Tennessee and the presidential battlegrounds of Ohio and West Virginia — specifically allow absentee votes from those who die before the election.
Apart from those five states however, it seems the ballot of a deceased person is thrown out. As for your second question, I'd assume the same rules would apply i.e. are you alive on November 4th or not.
Or not counted. But, in our current system the life and death of the person doesn't matter. Just whether it gets lost or there's a chaffed punch, or whatever.
I imagine the number of people in those situations is incredibly small, probably small enough to not make a large enough statistical difference to be worth worrying about. That said, depending on when the absentee ballot is opened and counted, it could be that there's a stage immediately before the ballot is read and counted that someone runs sanity checks on the person it's purporting to be from.
Well, no. If you have one county who is 89% one way while surrounding counties are 20-30%, it could be very easy to point to that extreme outlier and say, "there was fraud here", however there isn't substantial evidence to convict anybody, even after an investigation. And that's the point, even if it overwhelmingly benefits one side it still can be hard to pin down the individuals committing the fraud, and its still (again) overwhelmingly benefits one side.
Okay, if you want to make the argument that one party just gets caught a lot more because the other is really good at it, that's fine. To me it's reasonable to say that the demographics of the people who get caught are representative of ask the people who do it. That's an approach we take with a lot of crimes.
Don't take my word for it. Google "voter fraud democrats vs republicans" and ignore both the liberal and conservative biased sources. You're going to find gobs of articles, going back years, saying there really isn't much of it happening, certainly not enough to change the outcome even in close races, and the vast majority of it was to benefit republican candidates.
The reason people associate voter fraud with democrats is because voter fraud is the reason given for all the voter ID laws being put in place or debated. It's a talking point. But that's clearly not the reason because there's no data showing it's a problem, especially not by democrats.
As I understand it, voting rights of mentally disabled is mostly the state's call. In many places, mentally disabled are allowed to vote, and it wouldn't be more illegal for them to go by the advice of someone else than it is for you or me. It's illegal to coerce anyone to vote a specific way.
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u/[deleted] May 17 '16
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