Franken campaign says some absentee ballots improperly rejected

[Eric J in MN]

http://www.startribune.com/politics/state/34200269.html

MINNEAPOLIS - Minnesota's largest county has declined a request from Al Franken's Senate campaign to reconsider some disqualified absentee ballots.

Franken trails GOP Sen. Norm Coleman by a little more than 200 votes and the race is headed for a recount starting next week.

Attorney David Lillehaug asked the Hennepin County canvassing board to reconsider 461 absentees that he said had been improperly rejected.

Lillehaug said some of the ballots were disqualified on the grounds that signatures didn't match, or that the voter wasn't properly registered. Lillehaug says the campaign knows at least some of those ballots to be valid.

The general counsel for the Minnesota Republican Party, Matthew Haapoja (HAP'-poy-uh), says that the Franken campaign is trying to find more votes where there are none.

Board members said the ballots could be dealt with during the upcoming recount.

Hennepin County did approve 84,002 absentees.

The lousy thing about absentee ballots is that people who aren't handrwriting experts get to toss ballots on the theory that the signature on the request form doesn't match the signature on the return envelope.

Only someone who lived at that address would have access to the ballot under ordinary circumstances.

And if a woman requested an absentee ballot in the name of her non-political husband to fraudulently vote for him, and signed the request form and the return envelope, then the signatures would match.

So the act of testing if the signatures match does more to disqualify real voters then to provide security.

At very least, they should give give someone whose signature supposedly doesn't match a chance to come in after the election and prove his identity.

[dflprincess]

1. This is why I take my mom to City Hall to file her absentee ballot

When you do that, you fill out and sign the request for an absentee ballot and sign & seal the ballot envelope all in front of the clerk. If you mail it in, you don't know what might happen. And, the clerk made a mistake and gave my mother a ballot for the wrong precinct (an easy mistake, the other precinct is the other side of the street Mom lives on). I caught that mistake and we got a ballot for the right precinct. Had we not been there in person and Mom had missed that, her ballot would have been sent to the wrong polling place and rejected.

When you file absentee, if there's anyway possible, do it in person.