American Views Abroad

 
Voter registration update:

As Gloria announced in her previous post I am back from an enjoyable and relaxing vacation in Poland. I absolutely wanted to relate my further experiences with registering to vote and receiving the absentee ballot.

On the recommendation of the Cincinnati League of Women Voters I had sent an e-mail to John Williams, director of the Board of Elections in Cincinnati, and another e-mail to the Ohio Secretary of State, J. Kenneth Blackwell. These mails would have been received in the morning of the Friday workday, October 1st. I mentioned my concerns about my initial registration getting lost, and how could I be sure that my second registration would go through. Mr. Williams answered my mail about an hour after we left for Poland on Saturday morning. He assured me that Democratic registrations are not discarded and suggested I send my new registration via express mail. I had already sent it registered mail Thursday afternoon (September 30th). I was able to answer his e-mail that Sunday morning and asked if it would be possible for someone to notify me after my registration was processed. He assigned an employee to check the voter records each day and report to me when my ballot was sent. I received occasional messages that I wasn't yet in the system, one I will quote here:

We have 16,000 registration applications yet to process not counting the ones that have not arrived. For example, many people send their applications to the Secretary of State's office and then they forward those forms to us. We may receive thousands more from them. These forms would be from people who had the October 4th, or before, postmark. My point is, at this time, registration forms are not being processed the day they come in. It could be five days.

I had already felt appreciative at the way the Board of Elections took my request for help seriously and went out of their way to help me. I was sure that the weeks before the election would be their busiest. They are not just working banker's hours either. Mr. Williams' first answer to me was sent Friday 10:30 PM, Cincinnati time, and the employee searching for my registration wrote once after 8 PM. I had the impression of professional people doing their job well, and I would like to thank them all publicly. It also made me a little proud. That's how we Cincinnatians are. It also went a long way towards restoring my faith in the system.

So now I am waiting for my ballot, and hoping it will arrive here on time.

J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Secretary of State by the way did not answer my October 1st e-mail. Upon returning I could guess why. Reading through all the recent news I discovered that he had attempted to block registrations not printed on standard paper: see Dailykos. I might add that anyone printing the registration form in Europe will not have a form on 8 1/2 by 12 inch paper. I have some I brought with me from America, but you can't buy that size here.

On the Tuesday, October 5th I began receiving spam mails at the e-mail address from which I had written my three (mostly identical) mails to the League of Women Voters, the Board of Elections, and the Secretary of State (election@sos.state.oh.us). The spams multiplied and as of this writing they seem to be coming in at an average of one every ten minutes. But it gets weirder: Some of the spam mails use information that could only have been obtained from my mail sent aboout four days before the first spam. It pairs my name and e-mail address with a street address in Norwood, Ohio that I haven't used for years, but which I mentioned in my mail. It certainly does not appear anywhere in the Internet in connection with my name or current e-mail address.

My suspicion is that this has something to do with my mail to the Secretary of State's office. I do not wish to make any accusations, as there are other explanations, even if they seem to me as far-fetched and absurd as the notion that Ohio's Secretary of State, or someone at his office, would place my address on a spam list. E-mails can be intercepted and read as they are underways, and that may be what happened, although the address returned in the spams was subtly changed, adding a zip code, abbreviating the state, dropping the . following the ave. abbreviation, although an apartment number immediately follows. I'm sure an automated program could do that: parse a street address from an e-mail and put it in a standarized form. But does that ever happen? I've sent my current address in e-mails dozens of times, ordering things, etc. Never once has it bounced back to me as spam. The spams begin on October 7th.

Is this just some isolated incident of e-mail interception or does anyone know of similar occurrences? Another unanswered question is what happened to my original registration? Did the U.S. Consulate send it to the Ohio Secretary of State's office, where it then was discarded or lost? I will contact the Consulate in Hamburg and try to find out the path my registration would have taken.

To be continued...

Footnote: The spam mails as a whole (I had more than 500 waiting for me this Monday) seem to be for quasi-legitimate products. No scrambled headers, no viagra ads, et al. It looks like they might be mailings you can subscribe to when registering for something/anything via Internet and you are offered all these checkboxes to click "Would you like information about..." I am going through and clicking the unsubscribe link in the mails in hopes that the stream of spam will eventually die down.
- posted by Fred @ 8:18 AM