More on absentee ballots...

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Some absentee ballot tactics draw concern
Limited restrictions make tampering easier in some states
By MICHAEL MOSS THE NEW YORK TIMES Monday, September 13, 2004

As both major political parties intensify their efforts to promote absentee balloting as a way to lock down votes in the presidential race, election officials say they are struggling to cope with an array of coercive tactics and fraudulent vote-gathering involving absentee ballots that have undermined local races across the country.

Some of those officials say they are worried that the brashness of the schemes and the extent to which critical swing states have allowed party operatives to involve themselves in absentee voting -- from handling ballot applications to helping voters fill out their ballots -- could taint the general election in November.
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In the past four years, prosecutors have brought criminal cases in at least 15 states for fraud in absentee voting.

One case resulted in the conviction this year of a voting-rights activist for forging absentee ballots in a Wisconsin county race. In another case, a Republican election worker in Ohio was indicted and charged with switching the votes of nursing-home residents in the 2000 presidential race. And last year in Michigan, three city council members pleaded guilty in a vote-tampering case that included forged signatures and ballots altered with correction fluid.
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As a result, as many as one in four Americans are expected to vote by absentee ballot in the presidential race, a process that begins today, nearly two months before Election Day, as North Carolina becomes the first state to distribute ballots.
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"Everybody was worried about the chads in the 2000 election," said Damon Slone, a former state election fraud investigator in West Virginia, "when in fact by loosening up the restrictions on absentee voting they have opened up more chances for fraud to be done than what legitimate mistakes were made in Florida."

Yet numerous states -- including battlegrounds in the presidential campaign -- have abandoned or declined to adopt the safeguards on absentee voting that election officials have warned they will need to prevent rigged elections, a examination The New York Times examination has found.

Only six of the 19 states where polls have shown that voters are almost evenly divided between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry still require witness signatures to help authenticate absentee ballots. Fourteen of the 19 states still allow political parties to collect absentee voting applications, and seven let the parties collect completed ballots, raising the possibility that operatives could gather and then alter or discard absentee ballots from an opponent's stronghold. Most of the swing states even let party operatives help voters fill out their absentee ballots when the voters ask for help.

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