The ability for Maine voters to cast their ballot by mail via the state’s absentee ballot laws is a good thing.
Ensuring access to the polls for Maine citizens abroad, like those serving our country in Afghanistan and Iraq, or for those unable to get to their polling places on election day is vital for a vibrant democracy.
But recent confusion and subsequent costs generated by campaigns tacking pre-printed, personalized ballot-request forms to pamphlets mailed and meant to influence voters is not.
Intended to inspire a voter to their cause, and at the same time ensure that a voter will actually vote, seems a politically clever and practical idea on the surface.
For years candidates or campaign workers going door to door have handed out absentee ballot requests to voters.
But when the campaigns sending this material make mistakes in the information they are pre-printing on the request forms, as some have done recently, problems occur.
Clerks have received pre-printed ballot request forms from the Republican Party with requests for ballots from voters not on their rolls or even residents of their towns. The cost of sorting all this out has been left largely to the towns, according Maine’s to Deputy Secretary of State John Smith.
As Election Day nears and mis-addressed requests come in, Smith said towns will be encourged to courier the wrongly addressed forms from town to town in order to ensure voters get their ballots in time to return them by Election Day.
This is not a huge expense in the case of neighboring towns, like Livermore and Livermore Falls, where some of these mistakes have been seen. But in the case of Livermore and Brunswick those costs escalate, plus the additional time it takes clerks to sort through mis-addressed ballots.
Smith says the state won’t cover these costs and the campaigns that have mailed the requests with errors have, so far, not offered to help.
They should.
Smith said that the goal of helping voters by pre-printing forms does the exact oppsoite when the information printed is incorrect.
“I think the objective was to make it easy to fill out because these are presumably their supporters . . . they thought they were making it easier by prepopulating these forms (with information)” Smith said Friday. “In fact they are hindering that process and/or slowing it down.”
Each year lawmakers make changes and adjustment to Maine’s voting laws and Smith is optimistic they will do so again as a result of recent snafus.
Lawmakers shouldn’t prohibit campaigns or parties from providing potential voters with the information they need, up to and including blank request forms, to get an absentee ballot.
But they should prohibit campaigns from filling in any information for the voter. The possibility for error is too great, as we’ve seen recently.
The practice of pre-printed voters’ dates of birth on ballot requests forms needs to also stop and the legislature should act to ensure that.
A birth date is a key component for anyone seeking to steal another’s identity and this concern has also been heard loud and clear by both Smith’s office and local election officials.
It’s one more reason campaigns and parties should be prohibited from pre-printing information on request forms sent with campaign materials to individual voters.
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