Permanently Absentee Balloting In Texas

The envelope you see here arrived in my mailbox yesterday. In the envelope is my Absentee Ballot.

Being in Texas I had little confidence an Absentee Ballot application would succeed.

Whilst living in the state of Washington, if I remember correctly, I went to the permanent mail-in ballot method in the 1980s. Til moving to Texas I'd not voted in a polling location for decades.

I found voting in Texas to be a clunky experience. Often with long lines, such was the case with the last General Election. I first tried to vote in the Sikes Senter mall polling location. The line was hundreds of people deep. Drove to the next closest polling location. Same problem. So, drove to the downtown Wichita Falls polling location, found the line not quite so long, and so spent an hour or two waiting to vote.

To get an Absentee Ballot in Texas one first had to request, on-line, an Absentee Ballot request form.

You could not just fill this out on-line.

The form arrived in the mail.

The print on the form was small, the information to be filled in was a lot. I filled out the form, checking off the section which requested permanent Absentee Ballot status. I mailed the form to the Wichita County Elections Administrator. 

And a couple weeks later the Absentee Ballot showed up in my mailbox.

I have not yet opened the Absentee Ballot envelope. I am assuming there is a return mail envelope inside, already addressed.

I likely will get to stick stamps on the envelope.

I do not remember doing so when mailing ballots in Washington. 

In Washington there are ballot drop-boxes strategically placed in convenient locations...

Washington's Betty Jo Bouvier Misses Old-Fashioned Texas Style Voting

Lately, problems with voting in Texas has made an appearance on the list of things wrong with Texas.

A few days ago I blogged about this Texas problem in Evidence Corrupt Tarrant County Political Machine Steals Elections.

On Monday, September 26 I mailed a Voters Registration Form to the Wichita Falls County Clerk. Weeks later I still had not received my Voter Registration Card.

This morning I emailed the Wichita Falls County Clerk, Lori Bohannon, asking if I am registered. Ms. Bohannon quickly got back to me with the news that no Voters Registration Form from me had been received.

I will be in Fort Worth next Wednesday. I have already checked to make sure I am still registered in Tarrant County, so I will be doing some early voting at my old voting location.

Changing the subject back to Tarrant County voting corruption, that being the harvesting of votes via absentee ballots.

This harvesting absentee ballot votes has perplexed since before I even knew it was a thing, way back in the last TRWD board election when the two incumbents won with a record vote number, with more than half the votes being absentee ballots.  The stench from that obvious corruption was so strong I figured immediate corrective action would be taken.

I figured wrong.

Ever since I have been in Texas I figure things wrong, usually due to seeing Texas through eyes which grew up in Washington.

I don't remember the last time I went to a polling place in Washington. I think I switched to permanent absentee ballot sometime in the early 1980s. Even then it was easy for a voter, any voter, to vote via absentee ballot.

Unlike Texas.

A couple days ago, after reading on my blog about the Texas voting scandal, Betty Jo Bouvier, resident of Sedro-Woolley, Washington, asked about voting in Texas with the following...

"Do they have actual voting locations in Texas?  We don't have that option anymore. I miss going to the polling place and seeing all our neighbors. It was kinda fun."

See how far Texas is behind a modern location in America? Washington voting is via mail in ballots. Or you can drop your ballot in a ballot drop box.

Now, how is Washington able to use such a method without the type fraud which in Texas has elected people, such as Jim Lane and Marty Leonard, and others, due to thousands of bogus absentee ballots voting for them?

I'm think it likely is not rocket science that explains how Washington figured out how to make mail in voting work. I suspect any sort of tampering is a serious crime. Not a simple little misdemeanor like it is in Texas.

Why is it so easy to register to vote in Washington? I only remember doing so once. I do not remember moving to a new Washington location being any issue requiring mailing in a form to get a new Voter Registration Card.

In Oregon one is automatically registered to vote when one reaches voting age. In Oregon you have to opt out of voting if you do not want to be sent a ballot.

Again, why is Texas so backward and difficult with something which is so simple in advanced, progressive modern American states?

Why is Texas so backward that something as malevolent as Vote Harvesting is apparently an accepted practice? Accepted, apparently, up til  now....

A Noble Look At Probable Election Fraud In The Recent TRWD Board Election

Ever since a week or so ago I have been thinking about a blog comment made on the first blogging on the Mary Kelleher blog.


That comment was made by someone noble......

Noble made a comment on the post "Devastated!"

Here's some thoughts about taking on the TRWD:

--I believe most of you challenging the TRWD come from the conservative Tea Party wing of the Republican party. (Correct me if I am wrong, my apologies.) I think you can and should do a much better job of reaching out to liberals/progressives and minorities to join in the cause. I am a life-long leftist and am just as disgusted by TRWD as you are.

--Mail-in ballots are the Achilles heel of the voter ID controversy. I've often wondered why all those who insist that voters present photo IDs say nothing at all about absentee ballots -- the barriers to voting that have been put in place have no effect whatsoever on mail-in ballots. 

--About the election itself. How does the percentage of mail-in ballots compare historically to other elections in Tarrant County? In Texas you can only vote absentee if you will be out of town, are over 65, or are sick or disabled. Can you track down some of the people who voted absentee to verify their status? Did the ballots come from certain precincts? If there really were 10,000 absentee ballots, you should be able to find out if there were some organized effort to get those voters to participate -- out of 10,000 people, someone will talk. Churches, community centers, shopping malls -- somebody got out there and met with large groups and gave them mail-in ballots. (Before the next election, you can reach out to those same groups and convince them why they should support change at TRWD.) And you don't have to 'prove' it in a court of law; if you can put together enough circumstantial evidence you will win in the court of public opinion.

I look forward to updates about fighting the Fort Worth Way on your blog. Good luck!

________________________________________

I don't know if being associated with the Tea Party in Tarrant County is the kiss of death it is in other locations in America, but that is not the part of the Noble comment that caught my attention.

It was what Noble had to say about absentee ballots which interested me.

In the May 9 TRWD Board Election Leonard and Lane each got over 17,000 votes. In the ;previous TRWD Board Election Mary Kelleher was elected with the most votes in TRWD Board Election history, getting something in the 9,000 vote zone.

How can the fact that there were around 10,000 absentee ballots not raise the red flag of likely Election Fraud?

10,000 voters over 65, disabled, or on vacation allegedly went through the bother of requesting an absentee ballot.

Over half the votes cast were absentee ballots.

The TRWD Board Directors, other than Mary Kelleher, and others in the TRWD hierarchy, like Jim Oliver, had a lot to lose if they lost control of the TRWD Board.

Contractors getting sweetheart, no bid contracts. The opening of the public records which the TRWD has now been stonewalling on for years. The likely firing of J.D. Granger followed by an investigation into America's Biggest Boondoggle. The firing of Jim Oliver, whose heavy handed behavior has been the source of a lot of controversy. The removal from TRWD operations of all beneficiaries of nepotism.

A lot of people had a lot to lose if they lost control of the TRWD.

When a low turnout election has something so out of whack as 10,000 absentee ballots, why does this not trigger some sort of automatic election fraud investigation?

The Wikipedia article about Electoral Fraud covers all the ways the TRWD  Board Election could have been stolen.

No one should be so naive as to believe such a thing could not happen in Tarrant County in Texas....