The Orange County, North Carolina Republican headquarters was struck by a firebomb over the weekend, and while that in and of itself is a pretty crappy thing to have happen regardless of the fact that it was a Republican campaign HQ, one piece of news that slipped out in the aftermath has been getting some attention. The North Carolina Republican spokesperson Emily Weeks told NBC News that it was possible that completed absentee ballots had been destroyed in the fire.
The problem with that statement is that, according to North Carolina law, there shouldn’t be completed absentee ballots at the party HQ. Absentee ballots are supposed to either be mailed to the county or delivered in person by the voter or a close relative. There is no legal reason that those ballots, if they were there, should have been anywhere near that office.
But a big stack of absentee ballots being where they shouldn’t be sounded familiar to me. I live in Dallas, and about fifteen years ago, the local alternative weekly, The Dallas Observer, published a series of stories about accusations of organized fraud using absentee ballots.
After a digging down, Observer reporter/columnist/curmudgeon Jim Schutze figured out the open secret of absentee balloting in South Dallas, and it wasn’t very pretty.
There were vote harvesters — people who would stake out specific neighborhoods and ‘vote the people’ in those neighborhoods. And it worked one of two ways. At the time in Texas, the county was required to publish a list of the people who had requested and been sent an absentee ballot within 72 of the request being granted. In those cases, the vote harvesters would know when those ballots were expected to arrive, and they’d arrive at the same time with an offer to ‘help’ the voter fill out the ballot.
Sometimes the vote harvesters cajoled or coerced the voter to vote the way the harvester wanted. Sometimes the harvester just filled out the ballot without regard as to who the voter wanted to vote for. And then, the harvester who was so nice to come over and help get the ballot filled out would offer to mail the ballot for the voter. The harvester would then leave with the completed/signed ballot.
Other times, the vote harvesters would be the ones who requested the absentee ballot in the first place. According to the Observer stories, there was one vote harvester who signed out thousands of absentee ballot applications only to have those applications come back with suspiciously similar signatures. In those cases, the harvester knows when the applications are submitted and knows when the ballot should show up in the mail. So he just stakes out the mailboxes until the mail comes and steals the ballot out of the mail, voting it without the voters knowledge.
Either way, the vote harvester ends up at the end with a ballot that represents a legal vote for or against one of the candidates. In Dallas, these harvesters were known to go to the candidate these ballots were votes for and offer to sell them for, according to the article, something like $3 each. If the candidate said ‘sure’, those ballots would be delivered to the campaign and the campaign would turn them in, usually en masse close to the deadline (there are signed receipts from couriers showing that large blocks of votes showing up at the county with the campaign office return address). If too many ballots were delivered too early, the opposition might catch wind and step up their own vote harvesting efforts.
If the candidate said no to the vote harvester, he just goes to the opposition and offers to toss those ballots in the trash for $3 per vote.
It was all done with a wink and a nod. Plenty of evidence that the law wasn’t being followed and votes were being stolen, but in Dallas it was just how things were done. Besides, it was a bunch of poor black people, so the theft of their votes didn’t move a lot of compassion needles down at the Texas Legislature or at the County Courthouse.
Texas did ultimately change some laws to make vote harvesting at least officially against the law (putting in some of the same ‘have to be mailed, can only be delivered by a close family member’ rules that are in place in North Carolina), and many of the people mentioned in the Observer story linked above have since gone to prison or otherwise faced legal trouble in the years after this story broke, though for reasons largely unrelated to their vote theft.
But I’m not sure that vote harvesting ever went away in Dallas. It was a very quiet scandal, and for all the sound and fury from Texas officials about the need for VoterID to prevent in-person voter fraud, the ID requirements for absentee ballots hasn’t been beefed up by the state. For all I know, it’s business as usual in South Dallas.
And if I had to guess, I’d say that it’s the same business over in North Carolina.