Why you do it

Mitch Berg and a lot of other local bloggers have been digging around a little bit on the events of this most recent election day, but I was struck by the reaction he got from posting something he'd received via e-mail:

I got this email. The author asked to remain anonymous:

Mitch, in 2008 my mentally incompetent mother at an assisted living facility in St. Paul probably voted. We never had her declared incompetent, but the staff knew she was completely out of it. They also knew she was so afraid of being kicked out of a place she liked she would do whatever the staff person told her to do. She literally didn’t know what day of the week it was let alone who was running for office. I was the responsible party. I never changed her voter registration when she moved. Somehow she registered to vote at her new address. I found absentee ballot application information in her apartment as well as an I Voted sticker on her walker. I was livid, but it was after the election so there was nothing I could do. Before senile dementia had set in she adored Norm Coleman but you can bet her vote went to Franken.

I suspect a lot of this goes on. After all, SEIU represents a lot of nursing home staff.

You file that under the "interesting if true" file. Mitch's somewhat mordant summation:

I have a hunch this state could keep an army of investigators busy.

Yeah, I kinda think so, too. But what was interesting was the response he got from one of his regular commenters, a lefty who goes by Dog Gone:

Beyond that – shame on you, damn it, for spreading more slander about the legitimacy of voters. The responsibility for allowing or denying this woman her legal right to vote is NOT within the authority of health care staff at an assisted living facility.

And frankly, if someone IS involved actively with their relative at such a facility, they would be in better communication with the staff about such decisions and such care.

To promote the idea that low paid incredibly kind people who do a really difficult job in caring for these people, of the most personal and frequently unpleasant kinds of care – a job we all used to do for the elderly much more ourselves – to question their integrity in this way is just beyond vile.

But, you might ask, why would a woman with dementia vote at all? And why would she have an "I Voted" sticker? Dog Gone's reply:

Similarly, there are many occasions where bright stickers are used by the staff for the residents and patients. It is a source of continuing interaction where that contact, that interaction is decreasing daily. The presence of a sticker is so far from an indication of wrongdoing as to be laughable if it were not so nasty.

I don't doubt that many nursing homes use stickers as a visual indicator that something has been done. But they don't sell "I Voted" stickers at Staples.

The vehemence you get from asking these questions is pretty striking. And so we're clear -- even if one could prove malfeasance, there's nothing much that can be done about it once the votes are cast.

No, the reason you raise these allegations and attempt to document them is so people realize they can't get by with it going forward.