Democrat's ballot request opens door to election mishaps, fraud

Frontiersman editorial board

You may have received an application for an absentee voter ballot from either the Republican or Democratic party -- or from both -- this year. If you've received applications from both parties, you surely noticed a few differences. The Republican application is to be sealed before being mailed. You have to place your own postage on the Republican application, and the return address on the Republican form is the Alaska Division of Elections.

The Democratic application is in the form of a postcard, comes with postage paid, and has the following return address: ADP, PO Box 231230, Anchorage AK, 99523-9990. What's ADP, you ask? It's the Alaska Democratic Party.

That means, if you fill out one of the Democratic application forms, your personal information, including (potentially) your Social Security number, your party affiliation, your home address, date of birth, phone number and other information, will go zooming, open-faced, through the mail and to the Democratic Party before it ever makes it to the Division of Elections.

Alaska law says that a qualified voter may apply for an absentee ballot to "the director" of elections. It does not specify that the application cannot go through a third party, so the Democratic application form is perfectly legal. But legality is only part of the equation when it comes to elections. There's no telling how many applications the Democrats mailed out, or to whom. We know that at least some of the forms went to people who are not registered Democrats.

The fact that the open-faced forms are received by the party before being sent to the elections division opens the door for all kinds of voting fraud. The party could easily build a database from the information on the cards, but there's nothing fraudulent about that. It's also possible, however, that the cards of Republican voters could be delayed or mislaid. Applications could be tampered with, or simply destroyed. Alaska law requires the Division of Elections to provide an absentee ballot to an eligible voter who accurately fills out an official application. The law does not stipulate that the Democratic Party must forward every request it receives to the Division of Elections.

We think this application sends a bad message to voters and creates at least the possibility for fraud and voter disenfranchisement. We suggest that voters use the official form from the Department of Elections, and we urge the Democratic Party to change its form in the future.