New Orleans and Absentee Voting

The convenience of absentee voting may please the average citizen, but some elections experts find its growing popularity worrisome...There's little evidence that absentee voting increases turnout, and it opens the door for voter coercion and fraud, they say. "There is virtually universal agreement that absentee ballot fraud is the biggest problem," a recent U.S. Election Assistance Commission report on vote fraud concludes....Absentee voting fosters trickery, trend's foes say, Chuck McCutcheon, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, 10/24/2006

We know about Chicago and dead voter precincts (see the Presidential election of 1960), located somewhere offshore at the bottom of Lake Michigan. We know about Mexicans voting in California (see the elections of 2000, 2002, and 2004). We know about 102% of voters voting in Philadelphia (see the elections of 2000 and 2004). But let's think twice about absentee voting in New Orleans. Exactly how else are two thirds of New Orleans residents supposed to vote? They have nowhere to live in the city. Two thirds of the Crescent City's voters, without absentee ballots, would have no voice in the future of the city. But wait! They didn't have any voice in the city's present before Katrina either, else they would never have been chased away by a flood that the Army Corps, chief contractor for the levees, promised would never happen.

Luther