Focus on absentee votes hurt Kerry, report says

[Pirate Smile]

Democrats spent too much time getting ballots from
people who would vote anyway, a professor says.

By JANE NORMAN
REGISTER WASHINGTON BUREAU
February 8, 2005
Washington, D.C. - Iowa Democrats' decision to emphasize absentee ballots in the 2004 presidential campaign likely contributed to Sen. John Kerry's defeat in the state, a Drake University professor said in a report on the election issued here Monday.

Iowa was one of about 17 battleground states in the hard-fought contest between Kerry and President Bush. Bush won the state by a slim margin of about 10,000 votes, the first time a Republican presidential candidate had carried Iowa in two decades.

"In terms of allocation of resources, I think the Democrats spent too much time chasing down absentee ballots from people who were going to vote anyway" for Kerry, said Arthur Sanders, professor of politics and international relations.

In contrast, he said, Iowa Republicans conducted an absentee ballot drive but also assumed their strongest supporters would go to the polls on Election Day. That left them better able to target wavering or undecided voters, said Sanders, who researched campaign data and interviewed strategists in both parties after the election, including John Norris, an Iowan who worked as Kerry's national field director.

http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050208/NEWS09/502080372/1001/NEWS

I want to know how many of those absentee ballots also got thrown out because they weren't sealed or signed or something else. I read somewhere that a county clerk said a huge number of absentee ballots got thrown out.

I voted by Absentee because the party seemed to really want you to do that and I volunteered to be a AB courier so I went around picking people's ballots up for them. It was something I could do with my 3 year old while my other kids were in school so I was very happy to be able to do something.

Hopefully, the party will do an analysis and see how effective this was in the election.

[berniew1]

1. widespread manipulation of absentees & provisionals by officials was a maj

major factor in the Bush win. There was a huge amount of malfeasance by officials with major clearly partisan differences in who was able to get absentees that swung many thousands of votes in states like Florida and Ohio, and similar for widespread malfeasance by officials in manipulating minority voters to vote provisional and lose their vote. Systematic dirty tricks were also carried out in many states as part of this effort. Again many thosands of votes were lost by Kerry.
Florida
http://www.flcv.com/palmbab.html
http://www.flcv.com/browarda.html
http://www.flcv.com/dadeab.html
http://www.flcv.com/dirtytrf.html

Ohio and 20 other states
http://www.flcv.com/ussumall.html

[KerryReallyWon]

2. We worked absentee ballots hard in Florida because

we did not want to vote on the machines!! We don't trust them, so we thought paper would be better. They messed with those too.
:shrug:

[berniew1]

3. dirty tricks and malfeasance in Iowa cost Dems lots of votes re: ABs

016411 10/27/04, 4:54 PM PST Registration-related problem Johnson County County, Iowa Voter moved from one county in Iowa to another. She mailed in a request to her new county (Johnson county) to register there and to recieve an absentee ballot. When she did not receive her absentee ballot, she called the registar's office and was told that they threw away her registration and absentee ballot request form because she was not already registered in that county and they were receiving too many registrations. Yes
042764 11/02/04, 1:42 PM PST Registration-related problem Iowa City, Johnson County, Iowa Re-Registered 3 times and never received a absentee ballot.
047876 11/02/04, 4:51 PM PST Other County Auditor's Office, Johnson County County, Iowa Republicans challengers have challenged over 4000 absentee ballots. Got email from friend, currently at auditors office. Grounds for challengingng are unknown.
060429 12/27/04, 6:05 AM PST Absentee-ballot related problem; Registration-related problem Johnson County, Iowa Reported via mail to eirhelp: Want a case study of dirty voter fraud tricks? called me last night, upset because she got a letter in the mail yesterday (Nov. 9) saying her absentee ballot was challenged, and she had until noon on Nov. 4th to reply or her ballot would be thrown out. She's having her mail forwarded from IC to DC while she's there, which explains why it took a week for her to get this letter. So called the county auditor's office to complain. Apparently, the auditor's office had received a couple *thousand* similar calls complaining this week. Some committee challenged a bunch of absentee ballots in Johnson county, and really didn't give voters a chance to respond: the letter regarding the challenge (sent from Dubuque) was postmarked Nov. 3, and they required a response by noon Nov. 4. They invalidated her voter registration, in fact. So not only didn't her vote for Kerry count, she now has to re-register to vote in the future. and I voted in the last congressional election 2 years ago, and she hasn't changed addresses or anything since then. She checked to make sure her registration was still valid when we got our absentee ballots, in fact. I wonder how widespread this is? If they were able to invalidate ballots from people who were clearly legitimate voters, simply by a technicality whereby they challenged the ballot and didn't give the voter a chance to respond, how much did this occur nationwide? There is a serious flaw in the system when the burden of proof is on the voter. If someone wants to challenge a voter registration, they should have to prove there is a reason it should be invalid. It's ludicrous that someone can challenge a ballot without reason, and require the voter to jump through hoops to prove that they should be allowed to vote.
060738 12/31/04, 6:30 AM PST Voter Intimidation Johnson County, Iowa According to http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041103/NEWS09/411030376/1056 Republicans challenged the legality of several hundred absentee ballots, forcing them into a pile of challenged votes that will be sorted out later. Challenges included different spellings of a person's name. "There's no one particular group that is being targeted that we can tell, other than the fact that they're all Democrats," said Sarah Swisher, the county's Democratic Party chairwoman.

[ISUGRADIA]

4. Some of these complains sound bogus

Johnson County is the most Democratic County in the state and the Auditor is a strong Dem. I seriously doubt anyone told her that they "threw away her registration and absentee ballot request form".

As for the challenging of Dem absentee ballots by Repubs, that is one of their dirty tricks but I am sure that every ballot that was legally able to be counted was in Johnson County at least.

[ISUGRADIA]

5. Thye Dem Party in Iowa was having people scamper after

ballots into the last days of the race instead of using their efforts to track down undecided voters. And their staffers used a hard sell pitch in amny cases while soliciting absentee ballot requests. More than a few people were pissed off by this.

It would have been wiser to have a targeted absentee program at the elderly and handicapped, those who have trouble getting to the polls or could be discouraged by the weather if a storm occured.