oh, work

[marcicat]

Yesterday I sent an email to a person at work -- I had to take a guess at who might be able to answer my question, since the company no longer has an HR department. Anyway, I was all polite and stuff, and requested to know the company's plan for the overlap between the mandatory 'all employees must be present for this Very Important Work Event' day and the state's primary voting day.

It was a short email, but I did include a couple sentences regarding the challenge of travel time and the event schedule compared to the time available for voting.

The reply I received included a suggestion that perhaps I could simply vote in the town where the event is being held.

Now, I'm not entirely sure where the person I emailed lives, or even what their job is in the company (the upper echelons of the company are far removed from my little "individual contributor" role). So maybe they did not know that you can't actually do that! On the other hand, one might like to think that one's employer would check the relevant laws before replying to questions!

In conclusion: 'recommending voter fraud' was not a square I expected to be able to check on my workplace bingo card this year, but I guess you never know! The future truly is a mystery!

Comments

[lannamichaels]

Oh. Oh no.

How are the absentee ballot rules by you? Even when I was in a place with bad absentee ballot stuff, "I will be away for work" was a valid excuse.

[marcicat]

I will definitely be looking into getting an absentee ballot! I was hoping to get over to the town office today, but it didn't quite fit into the day. Soon!

[china_shop]

Wait, you can only vote in your home town? /foreigner whose country has very different, much laxer rules and still strangely no election fraud ;-p

[marcicat]

Short answer is yes! Individual states have a lot of wiggle room to make their own rules, but in my state, you register to vote in the town you reside in. Proof of residence is required to register, and then when you show up to vote, they check your name off on the voter rolls.

(I've only ever lived in towns small enough to have one polling place for the whole town, and the voter rolls are literally printed sheets of paper that the volunteers mark up with a pen.)

(Anyway, the point of voting in your town of residence is to make sure you are voting in the races that will actually impact you. Even our little state has multiple congressional districts, and then the state government has all sorts of other districts and counties and wards. Gotta get the correct ballot for your town!)

[china_shop]

*nodnod* Thanks for explaining. Your system is more complicated than ours by an order of magnitude, for sure.

Good luck sorting it out. ♥

[alexseanchai]

You can only vote in your polling place. (Unless you get an absentee ballot or live somewhere that everybody votes by mail.) Wherever your precinct votes, precincts being determined by address; the first vote I ever cast was in the dugout of the baseball field attached to a city park or community center or some such thing, one bus stop before the one I usually got off at on the way home.

One method of doing election fraud legally is, have fewer polling places per capita in areas whose demographics tend to vote Democratic: nobody likes waiting in line, and the longer the lines get, the more likely it gets that someone has obligations that need them to ditch the line. Public schools are almost always polling places, so the kids get the day off because voting on Tuesday instead of Sunday is a religious obligation apparently, so lots more people than usual need childcare that day. Employers are required to provide time off work for employees to go vote, but only like two hours per employee. Anyone in line when the polls officially close still gets to vote, but given how often my white ass has been in and out of the polling place in under twenty minutes and how often a polling place that officially closes at 9p has people still waiting after 10…

One method of doing voter fraud, and please observe that of these two methods this is the one that gets talked about a lot, is by going to a polling place that isn't yours and, when the election worker fails to find your name on the list of registered voters in that precinct, ask for a provisional ballot, and then hope nobody notices the duplication.