An incident happened last year….as the story goes from a friend of mine, who said she would sign an affidavit stating the following things did indeed happen…
My friend is the POA for her 92 year old mother in a nursing home. The mother hasn’t signed any documents for ten years. A Democrat voting registrar came by with the activities director and the director asked the elderly woman if she would like to register to vote. The 92 year old said, well I guess. The registrar put the voting record in front of her. She did not fill it out. She scribbled something in the signature line, per my friend. The registrar and director looked at it and said, yeh, we can read it. The 92 year old’s daughter said, “Really? Let me see it.” She looked at it and said it was a scribble, unreadable. She told me later she was surprised her mother agreed to it since she had not signed anything for so long. She said she didn’t say anything at the time because it caught her by surprise and she wanted to see how the whole thing would play out.
My friend told me that she called the county clerk about the incident a couple of days later and was first told, “Well she can’t vote”, but then the person spoke to someone else and backed off of that statement.
On the day that the nursing home residents were scheduled to vote, I was at the nursing home working as a poll watcher. My friend also was there because she knew that was the day they were to vote and was there to help her mother vote.
There was no ballot for my friend’s mother. There was a person on the list with the mother’s last name but the first name was wrong. She called the clerk’s office and insisted that since they registered her mother to vote, they needed to bring a ballot to the nursing home so her mother could vote. And by the way, only two residents in that facility had family voting assistance that day as the nursing home had not notified any of the other families. Is this possibly deliberate? Most all of the residents needed assistance and it slowed down the election judges immensely. Two residents had assistance because my friends had been told when voting would take place, but the families received no other notification.
So my questions are these: How can a person who cannot even fill out the registration form even vote? People with POA’s are usually not allowed to sign anything, so how was this incident even allowed to happen? And how did the registrar even begin to figure out the rest of the information needed on that registration form without going through the woman’s records? Is this even legal? How did she get the woman’s social security number? Can anyone show up and get a social security number? This seems not only unethical, but extremely lax and open to fraud to me. If the person cannot fill out the form, I would challenge their ability, not necessarily their right, but their ability to vote. Everyone has the “right” to drive, within certain parameters, but maybe not everyone ought to drive, you follow?
But I suppose if it’s the head of the county Democrat party doing registrations, they wouldn’t do anything unethical, right?
Nursing homes provide the largest number of voters “needing assistance” in the whole voting process, and I bet they get it too. How do we know it’s actually their vote being registered? We don’t. Because we were not allowed to observe the process due to “ballot secrecy,” we watched someone else (the person involved in the voting registration incident) from a distance fill out the ballot for several residents. I can’t tell you how they were filled out because the balloting is supposed to be “secret” (except for the person filling it out) and poll watchers were not allowed to observe that part….
What do you think? What is the answer to these issues?
Watching The Nation 