Anyone been denied?

Read here

There is absolutely no excuse for this to happen. Where I live part of the year (Southern CA) they tried this decades ago. The homeless in the area used "Fig Tree by the RR Depot" as an address. For a year or two they were not allowed to register to vote. It was decided (correctly, I believe) that even the homeless have a right to vote.

Certainly there is the possibility that one person could vote more than once. However, I am willing to risk that possibility before allowing all the ability to vote.

If Tennessee is still acting in this manner, I hope that they will awaken to the current century soon. There is no justification in keeping a legal citizen of the city, county, sate, etc form voting just because they have no fixed address.

A quick look at the article gives me the impression that the folks denied voting had not kept a domicile that met with the approval of the voting officers.

"they did not have a genuine home address, only a mailbox"

I don't have any problem with folks that don't play by the rules having problems voting. Most every registrar is willing to work with you to get you registered in a manner that allows you to vote.

Now this is quite true, but as long as you meet the requirements to vote it should not be a reason for disqualification:

"But some elections officials say that voters should have a real connection to the place where they are casting ballots, and that RVers are registering in certain states simply to avoid taxes. Some of them rarely, if ever, set foot in those states."

A post office box doesn't sound like a "real" address for a domicile to me either:

"The 286 RV full-timers dropped from the rolls in Bradley County listed their home address as that of a mail-forwarding service in Cleveland, Tenn., called Mail Call U.S.A., which charges $120 a year to receive, maintain and forward mail."

Escapees has a large campground associated with their mail service where an RVer can spend as much or as little time as they like.

South Dakota rules vary a bit from city to city too:

"There is no national standard for voter residency. Many places require a genuine physical address or some intent to become a permanent resident. But the rules differ from state to state, in some cases from county to county."

In most cases it is easy to find a campground willing to serve as your domicile. We found several in Sioux Falls that were happy to support us in exchange for our staying with them when we were in the area. The registrar had no problems with that as it met all the SD rules, she wouldn't allow the mail service address as it had no resident facilities.

Sue is a non-delightful person but she is fair, well except in taking rubber checks for license plates...

"In South Dakota, Minnehaha County Auditor Sue Roust said many full-time RVers are registered in her state, and often list campgrounds as their home address, with as many as 1,100 of them at one site in Sioux Falls."

Different Sue and a nice person:

"Sue Bray, a spokeswoman for the Ventura, Calif.-based Good Sam Club, which calls itself the world's largest RV owners organization, said there needs to be some kind of a national registration policy on RVers."

I rarely disagree with her but in this case I think she is wrong and registration should be a "State's rights" issue and administered by the individual states under the oversight of the federal courts to insure our rights aren't violated.

My suggestion, learn the rules, follow the rules.

Rarely are the rules so bad that you need to fight them.

Stan,

Are you saying that one can't vote there in Tennessee because they don't have a sticks & Bricks house, only a mailbox address, so they need to get a house in order to vote?

Or are you saying they should resolve the problem by claiming residency & voting rights somewhere other than in Tennessee?

Steve Ball

I am with Stan. It is and should remain a state issue. As long as the rules are not in violation of the constitution, arbitrary or intentionally exclusionary of a single group. Personally I don't find not accepting a mail box as a legitimate proof of domicile acceptable. There are, and Stan stated one case if SD, more and better alternatives. Though I have no way of proving it, I suspect if any concerted effort were made at exposure we would all be surprised at the extent of voter abuse and/or fraud. Note I simply said surprised, not alarmed, don't believe it is throwing any elections yet!

Maybe the Feds should allow full-timers to register to vote in national elections inWashington, DC. The residents there don't have any representatives or senators, so RVers wouldn't affect those elections. They could have an absentee ballot that would allow voting for President. No local elections would be affected and no RVers would be denied the right to participate in national elections. I doubt that many are aware enough about local issues to care about those outcomes.

JMHO

Bill

Are you saying that you agree that RVers that use a mail service as their address should be excluded from voter registration? Didn't Escapees have a similar problem in Polk county a few years ago? Yes, Escapees has a campground associated with their mail forwarding. So what! Can the campground possibly accommodate the 10,000 or more RVers that use the mail service and are registered in Polk county?

I think that this is a slippery slope that we want to avoid. One excuse to refuse registration was that the RVers have little or no connection to an area and could sway a vote. So what's next...refuse voter registration to college students because that have little connection to an area or could sway the vote? What about "boat people". In coastal areas there are thousands of people that live on boats. They generally have a mail service address and frequently move from port to port. Should they be allowed to register to vote? What about legal itinerant workers? What about OTR truckers that rarely get home? The list goes on.

To exclude an entire class of voters based upon an assumption that all persons that use a PMB don't care about the local area or are not knowledgeable on local issues is dangerous. If voter apathy or knowledge was used as a test for registration to vote, we would have very few registered voters.

Maybe we should give literacy tests to exclude certain voters? Oh yeah...that was tried!

When someone is not allowed to register locally, that also negates their right to vote in the state and national elections. That is not a direction that I am willing to support.

quote:

Originally posted by ADAGADAK Class of 06:
Stan,

Are you saying that one can't vote there in Tennessee because they don't have a sticks & Bricks house, only a mailbox address, so they need to get a house in order to vote?

Or are you saying they should resolve the problem by claiming residency & voting rights somewhere other than in Tennessee?

Steve Ball

Neither, They should deal with the voter registration folks and find something acceptable to both sides of the dispute. That is what was done in Sioux Falls, SD and it has been working well for anyone that wishes to vote.


Art, you might want to go back and re-read the information on the voting issue for Escapees, the campground was a key issue there.

Also it wasn't directly a voter's rights issue but rather a dirty political trick to flip the election results and the party in power in the Texas legislature.


Domicile, voting and licensing are all sticky issues and are only going to get worse as more policies are implemented for (political rant on stupidity and ineffectiveness omitted) reasons.


Our options in securing our rights are limited, surrender, a negotiated settlement or heading to court.

Surrender is the easy way out, lots of folks opt for this anyway to stay off jury duty or just through sloth.

Negotiation usually works and while it can be time consuming and not make both sides completely happy in most cases a workable compromise can be reached.

Court is iffy, there is no telling which judge you will be assigned or how they will rule regardless of what you think the law says.

If you don't win and appeal you end up in courts more concerned with politics than law and if your issue isn't politically correct you face a hard and expensive row to hoe.

Ask Escapees how much their case cost them and the other organizations that chipped in. Ask them what kind of tricks they faced and what hoops they had to jump through to get anything close to a fair hearing.


I'm not saying not to fight when it is necessary but not to fight if a reasonable accommodation can be reached.

I can go for reasonable accomodation but my problem is who gets to decide what is reasonable. This has always been a problem in search of an "honest" solution. I would like to be sure there is only 1 vote per person but not at the expense of limiting folks form voting. I just don't trust the deciders. They have proven themselves to be untrustworthly. I would like to leave it to State rights but I can't as I believe it is a federal responsibility to make sure everyone has as close to an equal vote as is humanly possible. If not what is all this constitutional stuff about?

quote:

They have proven themselves to be untrustworthly.

Where? I'm not aware of any recent problems that were not fairly resolved.

The only recent problem I'm aware of was the Escapee voting issue and that wasn't really related to the folks being RVers, just how they voted. That is what party they voted for, not how they cast their vote.

Stan,

I am very glad things worked out there in Souix Falls. Seems like some common sense prevailed and a reasonable solution was reached.

My limited experience with county officials has led me to believe that generally they are not very receptive to any suggestion nor are they very cooprative. (This experience is limited to California so I don't say it's the law of the land!)

Regardless, in my case, as a direct result of that lawsuit in Polk County I elected Livingston, TX, for a home base. I also have no desire to miss jury duty when my number comes up. I think it is our privledge to sit on a jury!

Travel Safe,

Steve Ball

Most county folks are pretty easy to deal with as long as you keep them on topic. Try making these points since outside a few areas they aren't used to dealing with full-time RVers:

You want to make their area your legal domicile.

You intend to return from time to time and stay for various amounts of time. As a full-timer you are on no fixed schedule so the dates and time stayed can vary from year to year.

You are not doing it to promote any agenda or to try and skew local elections.

You want to pay all local taxes just as any other resident.

You don't want an exception to any rules or special treatment.


If you make these points and are willing to pick a "home address" that doesn't upset the apple cart by being in a non-residential area or has other issues for the registrar you should be able to get them to register you at that address but send your mail to your mailing service.

In Sioux Falls the only sticking point was that the initial voter's registration card had to go to your "home address" not the mail service and it could not be forwarded.

That was no big deal, you just left the campground or hotel manager (yep hotels were just fine for a home address) a self addressed envelope that they could drop your registration letter into. That was legally re-mailing not forwarding and didn't upset anyone.


From what I've heard about CA I'd think the registrar would jump through hoops to get to keep your tax money rather than have you move to Texas and take your money with you.

There's one interesting angle that hasn't been mentioned. The county's position was

quote:

David Ellis, the former Bradley County Election Commission director who started removing full-time RVers, said they have no connection to the area and are simply "dodging their responsibility to pay their fair share" of taxes.

In fact, the county is making money off the RV community: every federal grant, state grant and fund source that is based on population includes the residents who list their address with the mail service. If the county believes these are not 'real' residents then they should be asked to return all the funds that they received based on their inflated population.

I'm not a big supporter of the leeches legal community, but it would be right interesting to see some aspiring young lawyer file suit to return the funds to the RVers whose illegal presence resulted in the county's fiscal windfall.

Roger

I have read this thread three times and you can call me dumb but I don't understand some of your answers. I am not full timing yet but if I were I would be upset that I could not vote. If I didn't know enough about local issues or candidates than I would skip those issues or candidates. But not to allowed to vote because I had a mail forwarding address rather than a "campground address where I could spend as little or as much time as I want to" doesn't seem to cut the mustard. My wife and I served all over the world while we were in the military and guess what we also voted in every election and that included local elections. Can you somehow tell me the difference of a person spending a year in Nam or four years in Germany and a full time American citizen traveling throughout the USA? I can not agree with Stanley when you say "a post office box doesn't sound like a "real address" for a domicle. My address for about 15 out of 20 years was indeed a post office box, ie APO or SPO ######, box number ###. That is my 2 cents!!!

firepup, Service people and dependents are covered under specific laws for domicile. Government workers and contractors assigned overseas have their own rules too.

Civilians not overseas are covered under different laws entirely that do not deal with full-time RVers directly anywhere but at Escapees and the state of Oregon (listed as continuous travelers) as far as I am aware.

Your voting address while serving was not your APO, it was your address at the time of your enlistment unless you undertook to change it. Do not confuse the address your ballot was mailed to with your domicile/voting address, very different legally.

I voted every election for 20 years from 1204 North Avenue, Sunnyside Washington 98944 as that was my address at time of enlistment, my ballot got mailed either overseas or to another state for that entire time with no hassle.

The only folks in general that have been denied the right to vote are folks that have not been willing to work with the local election officials to reach a reasonable accommodation.

The special case of the election scam tried on Escapees stands out as a victory for mobile voters.

You do not have the right to pick any address you choose to vote from or as a legal domicile, each state and possibly smaller entity has laws, regulations and rules that must be met for an address to be acceptable.

Digging in your heals and demanding your rights might work in some cases but in this instance you have neither right or law on your side and need to abide by the laws just like folks with houses do or even folks living under a bridge or in the city park.

So far nobody has come forward with an instance of anyone being denied the right to vote who followed the rules that apply in the place they wished to vote. Until someone does this is really a non-issue.