4 voters charged with intentionally voting twice in Michigan primary election

She said four people who had already cast absentee ballots for the Aug. 6 primary showed up to vote in St. Clair Shores on that day. It's not legal, Nessel added, to cancel an already-processed absentee ballot on Election Day and then vote in-person.


I think this brings up (even in a non-improper voting context) yet another challenge or "headache" that gets introduced when expanding early, mail-in, and absentee voting rather than the way it used to be where one needed a more bona fide reason to do it.


The major potential for a mess, as I saw it (it's less of a concern now because on of the old guys decided not to run again)...

Early voting & Early mail-in absentee voting starts up to 45 days before election day in some states...many other states have earlier voting starting nearly a month before election day.

My concern was going to be "we've got two guys who are quite old, one appears to be in the throws of mental decline, the other is overweight and regularly drinks soda and eats Big Macs"...it's not unheard of for people that age to kick the bucket. When you're taking about people in that age range, a lot can happen in 30 days.

What would've been the procedure for if a very large number of people cast early/mail-in votes for either Trump or Biden, and one of them happened to pass away between then an election day... That would've created some serious headaches to try to "un-do" all of those votes, and then somehow get in touch with all of the people who voted and them know they needed to re-vote.

RileyG said:

I’m happy they were caught.

Click to expand...

I think, unfortunately, this is one of those types of things that when you factor in the time and resources it would take to catch every instance, it's probably a case where for every one you catch, there's more that you don't.

For the record, I don't think there's anything to suggest that the level of improper/fraudulent voting would've changed any election results.

However, I also don't buy the, almost comically low, numbers that they release to try to re-assure people.


I think this is more like drunk driving, one of those things where due to the sheer volume of people driving, and the limited amount of people policing it, it'd be nearly impossible to know exactly how many people were doing it.

For instance, last year, Cleveland ramped up targeted enforcement of drunk driving laws. They ran a newspaper article stating that they made 16 apprehensions for DUI in a single Saturday night. Does anyone actually believe that those were the only 16 people driving under the influence on a Saturday night in a major city?

Same mathematical and human limitations applies to this.

You've got 150 million people voting, and only about 800,000 poll workers policing the process (with varying aptitudes and "sharp eye for catching things that appear to be off". Despite their absolute best intentions, they're not going to be able to catch everything.