Action | Material omissions from absentee ballots. |
Stage | Final |
Comment Period | Ended on 10/12/2011 |
I read with alarm the efforts in Virginia to make vote elegibility standards ever more strict, to include legible signatures on absentee ballots. Few adults today ensure their signatures are legible, especially when their correspondence is conducted by computers and their banking performed by credit cards and phone bill payments. Sloppy penmanship afflicts all levels of our Virginia society and is not restricted to poorly educated, economically handicapped. The efforts to restrict "valid" absentee ballots to those which pass a subjective "legibility" test rely on a highly arbitrary set of undefined standards which cannot be subjected to public oversight and which can only lead to abuse - an abuse which could come from either/and "Liberal" and "Conservative" ends of the political spectrum.