LETTER: In defense of paper ballots
I was intrigued by the letter about Cody the (dead) cat (July 16, Observer-Reporter) receiving the paperwork to register to vote by mail, so I checked it out on Snopes.com. Yes, this actually happened in Georgia. The secretary of state said the application did not come from its office and that third-party groups often use mailing lists to get names and addresses. The writer of the O-R letter thought this should “give us all time to pause and think about the validity of mail-in ballots.”
My handwriting is nothing to boast about, but I maintain that it is better than that of my cat, Junko. And if Cody somehow rose from the dead and filled out the application in a reasonably undetectable manner, it would still only be accepted if he was already a registered voter. I know our president is against mail-in voting, but it seems to me having a real paper trail would make it much easier to track down any fraud. If some Russian computer whiz added three or four votes to every computer voting machine, how would we even notice it?
I think paper ballots, whether we send them in or drop them in at the polling station, are much safer.
Gerard Weiss
Washington