Left In Lowell

Scott Brown encourages people to break Mass General Laws. That ought to win him some strong support!

Republican Scott Brown’s campaign for U.S. Senate has hit upon a new strategy: lock voters in by getting as many of them as possible to vote absentee — and by encouraging them to get their friends to do the same.
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Looks like a clever strategy. You get people locked in before they change their mind, or forget to show up on election day. But you’d never know from Brown’s website or emails that, actually, you can’t vote absentee in Massachusetts unless you are unable to vote in person on election day.

And that’s the problem with Brown’s strategy: it’s illegal.
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Now, the Brownies might argue that it’s not their job to ensure that voters comply with election laws, and that they expect voters to read and abide by the restrictions in the absentee voter application. But that’s clearly not good enough. None of the exhortations on Brown’s website or in his emails even mention that you’re ineligible to vote absentee unless you’re unable to vote in person on election day. To the contrary, a reasonable reading of Brown’s materials is that — as the website itself says — “As a supporter of Scott Brown, you don’t have to wait until January 19th to vote for Scott Brown. You can Vote Absentee, and, you can recruit fellow supporters to request the Absentee application.” Not a word about being physically unable to vote in person.

View the actual screenshot of the campaign website page encouraging people to do this at BMG.

I’m also with David, that I actually do support better absentee ballot laws and that anyone for any reason should be able to do it. However, you cannot, and I would never tell ANYone that they could, just in order to win an election.