Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Is incompetent government bureaucracy the greatest threat to an honest vote?

Elections board won’t stop sending dead man’s family absentee ballots


Queens resident Michelle Dimino has a simple request for the city’s Board of Elections: Please remove my late dad from the voter rolls.
Dimino’s father, Anthony Baldomir, died on Oct. 4, 2012.
But according to the board’s records, he could vote in the Nov. 8 presidential election.
The agency has mailed absentee ballots to Baldomir, a registered Democrat, for each of the past four years, for primary and general elections.
“In 2013, 2014, 2015 and again this year, I received absentee ballots for my father. I could have fraudulently voted with those ballots, but I shredded them instead,” an exasperated Dimino told The Post.
But this year, she got fed up and decided to go public.
Baldomir was ill and receiving medical care when he requested an absentee ballot in 2012 to continue exercising his civic duty from his Middle Village address.
What’s upsetting, Dimino said, is that she called the elections board shortly after her father’s death to ask that he be purged from the rolls. 
She said election workers insisted she would have to show up in person at an agency office with a death certificate to confirm her dad was no longer alive.
Dimino, 48, told the workers she’s been on dialysis and asked if she could mail in her father’s death certificate to put the issue to rest. 
She says she was told she couldn’t.
“I called the Social Security Administration. They took my father off the Social Security rolls the next day,” Dimino said.
BOE spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez confirmed that Baldomir, who hadn’t voted since 2011, was still on its “permanent absentee-ballot list.”
She said the agency never received notification of his passing.
The agency did receive a change-of-address notification from the post office in 2013 that Baldomir’s mail was being sent to his daughter’s residence in nearby Glendale.
Vazquez, disputing Dimino’s claim, said BOE policy allows family members to mail in a death certificate to remove a relative from the voter rolls.
“You don’t have to do it in person,” Vazquez said.

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