This is the background. My mother, who is a disabled retired person that I take care of, and I moved from Florida to Oregon about 2 years ago. Just today my mom got an "absentee ballot request" form from the Republican Party of Florida. The odd thing about this is that it was correctly addressed by them to our permanent address here in Oregon (there was no redirection sticker). There's a pair of vote-by-mail request tear off cards. These have her former address in Florida as the return address printed on them and are pre-addressed to the County Supervisor of Elections in Orlando. Click for lots more.
This is a verbatim description of the cards:
Election Supervisor: Please consider this my formal request for an absentee ballot for the 2008 General Election.
The card then has has a check box that you can check to "extend my request to 2010" as well.
I am a qualified voter in the county, registered at the address on the reverse side. Unless otherwise indicated below, you may mail my ballot to the address as listed.
There is then a block to fill in her birthdate, a line for signature and another check box with "Instead, send my ballot to the following address:" and lines to write that in. Then a place for a daytime phone number.
The mailing also contains some mendacious bullshit trashing the Dems for "trying to abandon the troops by stripping their funding" with a nice color propaganda shot of a friendly soldier giving the thumbs up to some smiling Iraqi youngsters also giving the thumbs up. Amusingly, in the background, which they have greyed out partially, there are giant piles of debris and rubble. Even the foreground show some broken pieces of plaster and other crap that probably fell in the street after some Iraqi was "liberated" from his housing and probably this mortal coil by some giant munition. These people can't even get good bullshit made anymore can they?
Well, sorry for the brief rant but my question is: What the hell is this? How did the pubbies get my mom's addresses (both the new one in OR and the old in FL) anyway? Can anyone get a list of registered voters of both parties? Is this perhaps some scheme to reregister her as a Repub as mentioned in a comment below? Are they playing a timeout game in other words, throwing her registration status into chaos just long enough so she never gets her ballot. This all has me worried as well since we both moved together. My mom filed a permanent change of address when she moved. She's registered to vote as a Democrat in Oregon now and voted in the primary. She's eagerly awaiting her ballot (it's all done by mail here in Oregon, there's none of this waiting in line at the polling place nonsense). If she filled out this fucking card (say because she was visually handicapped and didn't notice that it's a Florida ballot request, which incidentally she is, what would happen? It seems a trick to get her to try to vote in two places at once. Entrapment? A basis for a legal challenge to absentee ballots in general (which are probably disproportionately soldiers who aren't happy with McBush's plan for 10,000 years war? This thing stinks but I don't know the laws that apply. I can post a scan of the thing but I need to know the legal issues associated with that as well. I'm a broke ass student and my mom is an impoverished SS retiree. Neither of us has the time, money or energy to fight some Repig legal attack on us for some "copyright violation" or some such bullshit. Even if we won, we'd lose.