Here’s a trick the Voter ID crowd may like to adopt in Indiana to supplement efforts to reduce voter turnout.
The Michigan GOP in Macomb County Michigan is proposing to add insult to injury for those who have lost their home to foreclosure.
“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,†party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week.
Man, that’s cold. But, I guess if they can’t pay their damn mortgage, they don’t deserve a vote — doesn’t matter if the bank has kicked them out yet or not.
Pretty tonedeaf.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but if your house has faced foreclosure, then you’re not living there anymore. That would seem to imply that you’re living elsewhere,which may or may not be in that district anymore.
I fail to see how forbidding someone from voting who doesn’t live in the district can be perceived as a bad thing.
You’re wrong — potentially. Just because a foreclosure action has been filed, or even a foreclosure order entered, doesn’t mean that the person doesn’t live there anymore. Michigan law may differ, but I believe that before someone can kick the voter out of the home, they have to have a foreclosure order, then sell the property at tax sale. Once the Sheriff has issued a tax deed, the new owner can bring an eviction action and seek a writ of assistance from the Sheriff.
In any case, a foreclosure list is pretty sketchy evidence that someone doesn’t live there anymore. There are many steps between foreclosure action and the person being kicked out of the house and, all along the way, there is the potential for the property owner and the bank to work something out.
But, it’s a great way to identify who is in financial trouble, might be angry about the economy, and might not be terribly happy with the GOP just now.
What if you are sleeping on whatever friend’s couch is available, some in the district and some not? What if you haven’t firmed up your next residency enough to re-register?
Well you don’t get to vote, my friend.
Seems fair. That has to be how the founders intended it to be.
I think I see a path to a permanent Republican majority. Have the obligatory Republican Recession each time they’re in office, but make sure to time it so that maximum homelessness is right before the election. Then prohibit the homeless from voting, err, I mean challenge the residency of the homeless so as to protect the integrity of the vote. Because you know, the homeless probably have pretty sweet sets of wheels and full tanks of $3.75 gas and are just going to drive around from precinct to precinct voting all day if you don’t stop them.
T –
Even if you’re sleeping under a bridge and keeping your worldly goods in a plastic bag, you can register to vote.
You do have do provide some kind of specific ‘point on the ground’ address so they know what precinct you are part of, so you get to vote in the right set of electoral districts.
If your voter registration is referencing an empty house, you need to update the address. If you are still living there, or have legal residence there, you should not need to.
If your home has been foreclosed on, whether not you are living there becomes a reasonable question for voter registration purposes – but as Doug points out, the mere fact of foreclosure does not definitively answer this question.
This is similar to what happens with data drawn from the USPS Change of Address database – this can be used to send postcards to folks asking them if they have moved, and if so to cancel/update their registration as appropriate.
State laws vary about how the registration lists are maintained – it might be that Carabelli is actually doing something reasonable in Michigan – although he comes off sounding pretty arrogant and confrontational…
If you have lived somewhere twenty years, but it stopped being your residence due to losing your house in the last month, why should you have to prove residence there? Last I checked, being landed (owning property) is not a requirement to vote. If you live under a bridge, how is any address you give any more or less legitimate than putting your former home, if you haven’t established residency elsewhere yet? By the definition they’re trying to employ, many people probably won’t be a resident of anywhere.
I had a friend that was “homeless” for a while. Not poor, just homeless. He did contracting work all over the country at around $200 an hour, and since he was gone all the time, he didn’t have a home. He just kept moving from one long-term hotel to the other and kept his gear in storage.
He is more “landed” now, but during that time, did he give up his voting rights?
If you are already registered to vote, it should pretty much be presumed that you can vote, unless some compelling reason can be found why you shouldn’t–such as you are registered somewhere else. In that case, you should be made to vote in one place, and the other registrations voided.
It shouldn’t be that you have to jump through all these hoops to register, and then once registered some “concerned citizen” can call you out for more attention on voting day and make you prove your worthiness some more.
I’m registered to vote. But I can never know for sure if some vote caging letter to my place has been returned undelivered, or some other means has been used to make my ability to vote come into question. But I can tell you, as a veteran, a taxpayer, etc., if I were denied the vote by some method, and it wasn’t rectified readily, it would be somebody’s ass. I can’t imagine I’m alone in feeling that strongly about it.
Imagine that, yet another creative way to stop people from voting! I remember a time when this country did everything in its power to get people to the polls. It seems the USA has really lost its sense of direction…
I think the way to think about this issue has more to do with a person (homeless or not)voting more than once for a candidate using two or more seperate addresses.
Am I missing something here?
Most will agree that verification ought to be done otherwise fraud will run wild. Case in point, the banking industry, right?
Eric Pointer
Ann Arbor Real Estate