REDDING, Calif. - A former Redding landlord is in hot water today after recent Reddit posts he made were shared across the app.
Charles Pierce is a 70-year-old former landlord of the Manzanita Manor Apartments in Redding. Pierce says he was fired from his role after his reddit posts came to light.
Pierce told Action News Now that under a now-deleted account, he posted that he received mail-in ballots of four previous tenants at the Manzanita Manor Apartments.
In a post to Reddit, Pierce claimed that he used all of the four ballots to cast votes for former President Donald Trump, and to vote “no” on all rent control and school bond measures in Shasta County.
Mail in ballots require a valid signature to be counted and it has to match the voter registration.
But I suppose, if he had access to former resident lease paperwork, he could have forged the signatures, but now on top of voter fraud you’re entering identity theft territory.
What the elections team needs to determine is a full accounting of which ballots were sent to the apartments and then cross reference that with current residents, and who returned ballots.
It’s kinda crazy to me that we still use signatures for official validation. I’m not saying I have a solution but it seems archaic
It’s an interesting problem. How do you maintain the privacy of anonymous votes while ensuring the integrity of the larger process and all without making it too hard to vote that people don’t have access?
I mean, that’s the way in person voting works too. You sign the voter registration check in and the signatures are compared.
And I’m always sweating bullets, because my signature is never the same…
Yeah when I registered to vote at 18 my signature is nothing like it is today. I try to replicate it. It was such a shitty signature. My votes might be getting tossed for all I know. Does anyone know how to update your signature for voting?
Well, that’s where ballot curing comes into play.
For mail in ballots, they’ll actually get returned. “Sorry, signature doesn’t match, try again!”
Just like how you sign a credit card payment and those are always verified?
Those always pass verification, but I always read that in addition to the security theater they are likely to be looked at when there is fraud to help establish the scope
Oh, no, those are never verified!
I remember, years ago now, a comedian ran a bit about just how bad it had to get before a purchase was denied.
I remembered exactly what you are talking about. This was the closest thing I could find at a glance. Zug seems to have been archived on the Internet Archive so it may have the actual post on there. I also got a good laugh out of the p-p-p-PowerBook saga from SomethingAwful around the same time.
https://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2009/08/put-your-shamu-on-the-bottom-line-and-join-the-revolution.html
Link for the PowerBook story. It’s hilarious.