If you’re family/friends from Wisconsin, a lot of this probably isn’t news to you. If you’re blogstalking me from Europe, prepare for an education.
After the November 2010 elections when the Republican Party took over the Governor’s Mansion and both houses of the State Capitol, the legislature was able to very quickly send a wide variety of bills to Governor Walker and these bills became law. One of them was a bill greatly strengthening the requirements for voter identification at the polls, leaving Wisconsin to have some of the strictest voting laws on the books in the entire country. Since this isn’t a politics blog, I won’t go into full details of how this law is complete bullshit. We can save that for a face to face conversation once I return to the States.
I had ten days between coming home from my internship in Washtington, DC and leaving the United States for ten months. On my list of things to do was to go town to Village Hall, and register to receive absentee ballots while I am abroad. I filled out some forms and they explained that I would receive my ballots by email, and I’d just have to print them off and mail them back to be counted. However, yesterday I received an email from a village clerk saying that there were going to be some issues with this process.
Apparently there were some changes to absentee voting that meant that after the February primary election, absentee ballots could only be emailed out to members of the military and “overseas voters” (a person who is residing overseas indefinitely). Since I am neither of those, there’s an election in April where I will not be able to receive a ballot via email—it will have to arrive via standard US Post. This becomes a problem because I only have about twenty days for them to mail me the ballot and me to get it back to them. Mailing things across the ocean isn’t exactly the quickest and easiest thing, and having to do it twice will obviously take twice as long. So in theory, for me to be certain that I wanted my vote to count; I would have to pay an arm and a leg to overnight/express mail my ballot back to Wisconsin to be counted.
There are a number of things that I do not understand:
· How does physically mailing a ballot versus emailing a ballot reduce voting fraud, when in both cases the voter is physically mailing the ballot back for counting?
· How does a citizen living abroad indefinitely have primacy in this situation over me if I’m the one who definitely is coming home and will be more directly affected by the outcome of the election?
· How is it more cost efficient to the tax payers to be paying to physically mail ballots to certain people instead of emailing?
· How does leaving me to pay the hefty fee for express international shipping not count as an obstacle for me to practice my right to vote?
Over the summer, I tried to do my own research on this voter ID law once it started to receive more and more press. I decided to write to Mr. Jeff Stone, who is not only my representative in the Wisconsin State Assembly, but he coauthored the voter ID bill in question. I explained to him that I was researching the bill, and was looking for information regarding absentee voting while overseas and any changes that might be made to the procedure after the new law is implemented. A few weeks later I received a response in which he called my concerns “unfounded and unnecessary” and said that everything about absentee voting remains “relatively intact”.
At this point, a girl can’t help but feel deceived. I began to realize that this could not only pose a problem to me, but to any Wisconsin student who wants to practice their right to vote while they are studying abroad in the future. I asked the village clerk with whom I was in contact if the same twenty day window would apply to the elections in November, and she said that there was a 47 day window between which ballots could be sent out and received for counting. So this isn’t even an issue for all elections, just some of them.
I might be preaching to a niche market, but this is important. The right to vote—the backbone of democracy. America goes to war in all corners of the world to spread democracy yet at the same time we have stuff like this going on in our own country. I am one of the last people who you should try to tell that she won’t be able to vote.
I am going to get answers, and no one is going to get in my way.
**please excuse weird coloring and formatting, blogger is being dumb
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