Lend us the means to steal an election?
This year, New Jersey’s registered voters can request a mail-in ballot for any reason. (Before 2005, voters needed to provide a reason for why they needed an absentee ballot.) The state received about 150,000 absentee-ballot applications this year.
On about 2,300 of those applications so far, the signature on the request form does not match the signature on the voter’s registration forms with the state.
In a development that is depressingly predictable, the New Jersey Democratic party is asking the state to provide provisional ballots for all these voters. Those ballots could, presumably, be used to overcome any narrow lead by Republican Chris Christie over Democrat Jon Corzine on Election Day.
A mass distribution of provisional ballots, at the request of a political party, would represent a significant change from established law. Currently, when a county clerk rejects an absentee-ballot request, the clerk tries to contact the voter — through mail, by phone, and in some cases, by attempting to contact the voter in person. And a person who has spoken to some of New Jersey’s county clerks says they’re granting wide latitude on signature styles; for them to reject a ballot request because of the signature, it has to be dramatically different from the one on file.
Could some of these cases be an election official misjudging the natural deviation in two handwriting samples from the same person? Certainly, and that’s why the current system has clerks reaching out to rejected voters (presuming they actually exist) to sort out the discrepancy. But Democrats want to short-circuit the established methods of sorting out the problem, and in fact to ban rejections based on signature mismatches entirely.
I wouldn’t put it past the NJ ACORNites to go about breaking people’s hands so they can’t sign their ballot properly.