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Read more by Jonathan
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Previous columns:

Street Protests in the New Millennium

When TV Actors Go Bad

A Great Darkness Fell on the Land 

An Open Letter to Fellow Libertarians and Non-Aligned Voters

Coulter Kerfuffle

ROAD TRIP!

Flying the Incarcerated Skies

Intergenerational Corporate Welfare

Fraud is the Bottom Line

Voting by Mail, an Invitation to Fraud


It appears that our City Council has negotiated a deal with the Eastborne Company. They plan to put in a huge development that will include a tract of KB Homes houses, a retail complex (complete with a "big box"), and, of course, some University of Arizona "park" of some sort. It will be located in the South Park neighborhood near Park and 36th. But hey, at least we got rid of those dang Republicans on the City Council who suck up to KB Homes, change zoning for rich developers, and allow more of those awful "big box" stores! (Har, har, har, chortle, chortle).

While most council business goes on as usual, our elected representatives were flirting with a new and very wicked idea – all mail-in voting. Thankfully, in the course of Tuesday evening's meeting, the idea was officially abandoned …for now. Unfortunately, mail-in voting, like "light rail" and herpes, never really goes away. Remember, too, that if they do it in the Emerald City (Portland, Oregon), the Democrats will want to do it here.

This time, the discussion avoided the real issue, and focused on pragmatic problems such as Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance. Frankly, I would be tempted to tell the swinging Richard from Washington to shove it – but that's just me. The City Clerk is faced with the huge headache of bringing all polling places into compliance. Of course, if most of the polling places went away, so would the headache. Expect support from City Clerk Kathy Detrick next time around.

The elephant in the voting booth, about which no one is speaking, is fraud. You know, we have had pens, paper, and a postal system for over two hundred years, yet we go to the voting booths to cast our votes. Why is that?

Here's a hint. When you are in the booth, you are alone with the ballot, you mark it, and then you put it in a locked box that is guarded by people from both parties. It's called a "secret ballot". Secret ballots are important because they insure that your vote reflects your choice, and not that of your spouse, employer, union representative, landlord, etc. Get it? Why do you suppose that the poll worker will not touch your ballot, and makes you put it in the box yourself?

Some say that making voting easy would encourage more participation. We already have mail-in voting on demand with the absentee ballots – but we know it's not about participation; it's about the F-word.

The Motor-Voter law made registering as easy as breaking wind, and now taxpayers from Hyannis to San Francisco are spending big bucks trying to remove fraudulent registrations from the voter rolls.

A number of ACORN people were indicted in St. Louis for submitting fraudulent registrations (it's still against the law, even for Democrats). Voting by mail is an invitation for similar shenanigans a little further along in the process. There is an ACORN chapter in Tucson, by the way.

There was an election recently in which voters resoundingly defeated a ballot initiative that would have created a statewide mail-in voting scheme. In light of this fact, one would imagine that mail-in voting would now be the "third rail" of Arizona politics. Facilitating fraud must be one heck of a motivation.

One last thing, and this is something that every American knows at a gut level (Tom Danehy will back me on this). Voting with a secret ballot is the most important civic duty that a citizen can perform. It is a right that should be exercised with some gravity. It is not the equivalent of mailing in a magazine subscription – 5 years for $50.00, 2 years for $30.00, 1 year for $20.00, Libertarian, Republican, Democrat. If you increase the turnout fifty per cent with voters who do not take the decision seriously, have you improved the process, or cheapened it?

So, the next time that this mail-in vote stuff comes around, call your Councilman and tell him to knock it off, and get back to greasing the skids for developers and building "big boxes" on the South Side.

"There was an election recently in which voters resoundingly defeated a ballot initiative that would have created a statewide mail-in voting scheme."