At the September 16 joint chamber luncheon Assembly Member Bill Smith answered questions about the vote by mail advisory vote to be considered on October 7.
First he presented reasons the borough has considered the change.
Smith: “We have a long history of people coming to the polls and voting and lot of people are really comfortable with that. I had one person say that they had learned about voting by going to the polls with their grandfather and I think that’s real admirable but if you look at all the education efforts in the schools in our tradtion and in our families has only gotten us 20% turn out. It’s not going to hurt to try something different because if it doesn’t work out we can always go back to the old precinct system.”
When the public questioned how the borough would ensure the vote by mail would not increase fraud, he answered by saying that there will always be dishonest people, but that’s no reason to throw the system out.
Smith: “Out of the six precincts that we have vote by mail now, there’s been no evidence of voter fraud. The ballots are checked against a voter list to make sure that people are qualified to vote and there is no way to eliminate the possiblity of voter fraud except most of the people by a far margin are pretty honest.”
He said that the budget is a bit unclear as to whether it would be a wash since the borough would not have to hire 90 election officials for election days, however Smith said that the more people who voted by mail, the less it would cost the borough.