Yesterday, while at my mother’s nursing home in Florida, one of the managers called me into her office. She told me she did not have my mother’s absentee ballot, but the Board of Elections was sending the ballot, and it would arrive in time for voting next week.
While telling me this, the manager is holding a stack of absentee ballots for all the other residents. Pointing to a smaller stack she said, “These are the ballots for the ones who have died.” My immediate response was, “They should be voting too.” She answered, “Well, they really could vote if we wanted them too.”
We both laughed.
Now, because I know and trust the management, I can state with 1000 percent certainty that there will be no deceased residents voting at my mother’s nursing home. However, this incident left me wondering just how many deceased Florida residents would be voting at other nursing homes.
With months between the time a manager requests absentee ballots and when the ballots actually arrive, there naturally occurs what one nursing home manager once called a “census reduction.”
At my mother’s relatively small nursing home, from the stack of ballots I saw, it looked as if 12 census reductions had occurred.
If you multiply the number of census reductions across the nation, especially in battleground states, it is conceivable that in a very close election, politically active nursing home managers could sway this election with ballots sitting on their desks cast by former residents from that great voting booth in the sky.
Now here is the second part of this story.
Recently, I also received in the mail an absentee ballot for my mother because I had requested one earlier. She will not use that ballot. She will be voting for the Republican presidential candidate, for the first time in her 86 years, at the nursing home with that second absentee ballot. (My mother is from the “FDR saved the world” generation and voted for Obama in 2008.)
When I told the manager about the ballot I had received she joked, “Well now your mother can vote twice.”
We both laughed again.
But what really hit me is just how easy it is to vote the “Chicago Way.”
Voting irregularities at facilities for the elderly are a real problem. What is harder to police than outright fraud such as filling out the absentee ballot for someone who died is the undue influence that can be applied by the managers and staff in elderly housing facilities and other facilities. Remember, SEIU has organized the workers at many facilities. Residents come to see the staff as akin to family. They are used to following the instructions of the staff. Many of them have irrational fears of being kicked out if they don’t follow all those rules to the letter. This is especially true if it is a public housing facility. If they are suffering from dementia they can be highly susceptible to suggestion.
If you have a loved one living in an elderly housing facility let the staff know in no uncertain terms that you will be the person who assists them in getting to the polls or completing an absentee ballot and that you will be extremely unhappy if they don’t follow your wishes. I sure wish I had done so. My late mother, who suffered from dementia and didn’t have a clue there was even an election underway, voted in 2008. She was in a deep blue city in Minnesota. The assisted living facility happened to also be the polling place for the local precinct. (Such facilities often serve as polling places.) By then my mother did not know what day of the week it was and modern voting machines were way beyond her capabilities to manage. I had been dumb. When she could no longer manage living at home and I had found the assisted living facility I had intentionally left changing her voter registration off my moving checklist. Voting was well beyond her capabilities. It hadn’t dawned on me that someone would “help” mom sign a voter registration form at her new address and later “assist” her in completing a ballot. I found out after the fact when I found in her apartment a couple of mailings addressed to her as a registered voter and the proof of voting sticker.
When she was in her right mind there was one politician my mother simply adored- Norm Coleman. It’s a pretty good bet that as a resident of a unionized complex for the elderly she cast her last ballot for Al Franken.
Thanks so much for sharing this.
By the way, be wary of government sponsored programs for seniors, too. Three days a week the county ferries low income elderly people who sign up to a community center for a free meal and social activities. On election day the vans from this program ferries all the elderly residents they can round up to the polls.
A neighbor told me that two elections in a row he and his mentally failing mother had discussed who she was going to vote for when he got home from work and took her to the polls. Two elections in a row the county van came by in the middle of the day- unsolicited by her. Like many elderly people, she doesn’t like to burden her son with a special trip so she took the offered ride. Both times when my neighbor called her later that day and she told him she had already voted it was for different candidates than they had discussed. It seems this taxpayer provided ride to the polling place included electioneering passengers on the need to vote the straight Democrat ticket.
After the second time my neighbor has made a point of having his wife or daughter stop by to early vote when they take him mom to town to shop for groceries.
I’m old enough to remember people going into cemeteries and getting the names of dead kids and using them to get government IDs. The government finally ended this practice by cross-referencing death records with birth certificates. Seems like we could do the same with registered voters and death records. We do have computers now, so it doesn’t seem impossible. But then, you have to WANT to solve the problem…