Ann Coulter’s voting ‘problem’

May 11, 2006

I’m usually inclined to pretend [tag]Ann Coulter[/tag] doesn’t exist, but it’s worth noting that she has a bit of a legal “problem” on her hands.

About a month ago, I noted that [tag]Coulter[/tag], for reasons that are still unclear, was registered to vote at two separate South Florida addresses and tried to vote in two precincts on the same day, in the same election. Palm Beach County’s elections supervisor said, “She needs to tell us where she really lives” — or he’d refer the case to the state attorney’s office for criminal charges.

The county gave Coulter 30 days to explain. As several alert readers in South Florida reminded me, time’s up.

The blond Democrat slayer has not responded to an April letter from the Supervisor of Elections office asking her to explain why she voted in a Town of Palm Beach precinct that wasn’t hers earlier this year.

The elections office tried to contact her again last week with another missive. No response. Now, the voting-eligibility watchdogs are losing patience.

“We may start the administrative procedure to remove Ms. Coulter from the voter rolls this week,” said Charmaine Kelly, deputy elections chief. “There will be a public hearing to cancel her registration. If that happens, she won’t be able to vote until she re-registers. It’s a rather rare procedure.”

Kelly said that after the hearing, Supervisor Arthur Anderson also will determine whether to refer the case to the state attorney’s office for criminal prosecution.

As Brad Blog explained, Coulter may have “committed a third-degree felony by knowingly giving an incorrect address on her voter registration form in Palm Beach, Florida, and then knowingly voting at the incorrect polling place last March.”

Schadenfreude was made for times like this….

The most ironic thing is that with Diebold doing much of the counting in the essential districts–it wasn’t even like her vote mattered!

CB, is there any Republican who isn’t a crook? I mean, if you can’t count on Ann Coulter or Dr. Laura, then who is there?

  • Yet another example of IOKIYAR thinking by the Lying.Fucking.Bastards.

    Just goes to show that these _________(s) (choose your own expletive) cannot play by the same rules that we peons are expected to follow.

    Throw all the bastards (and bitches) out with the shitty toilet water they have been fouling since Reagan gutted the fairness doctrine. Hopefully, they won’t resurface for at least 40 more years…..

  • Just to make sure that she can vote, I want to see her witness Austin Powers dance for her in his undies. Yeah, she’s not as good looking as the fem-bots, but I can’t recall her exhibiting any traces of humanity.
    Perhaps Austin would pounce on her, clawing at her hair, while screaming, “Look at that Adams Apple! This is a MAN.”
    I’m just sayin’…..

  • Don’t be to hard onthe poor thing. She’s still grieving over her sister being killed when that house fell out of the sky on her. That would leave anyone bitter and angry.

  • I’m really not convinced that she did anything wrong at all. They say she “tried to vote in two precincts in the same day,” which sounds bad, but a poll-worker’s narrative linked from the BRAD Blog article explains it. She showed up at the precinct by her house where she was told that she was registered at another precinct. She went to the other precinct and apparently voted there. So she did ‘try to vote in two precincts,’ but there’s no evidence that she had any intention of voting twice.

    The precinct at which she was registered is her realtor’s address where she claimed she was receiving mail. This is certainly plausible, and if true it seems the worst she could possibly be guilty of is not remembering to update her address. I wouldn’t even want someone to be deprived of her vote for this, much less arrested.

    Am I missing something? Is she voting in New York as well? That would be serious.

  • neil — One thing that she did wrong was not reply within the 30 days required.

    The other thing she did wrong was register to vote using a mail drop and not a residence. The law says you have to vote where you live, and it is illegal to live in a real estate office.

    She, as a well-paid political pundit, should know the basic rule that you can only vote where you live. If she knew that her voter registration was bad at the second polling place, then she knowingly cast a vote using an illegal registration.

  • Even if this is just a storm in a teacup, it highlights a couple of things that anyone (who isn’t a dittohead) who has ever tried to read her books has noticed:
    1) Ann Coulter got a problem with facts (particularily ones that put her in a bad spot)
    2) Ann isn’t good at explaining inconsistencies when confronted

    Maybe her next foaming at the mouth column will be “Law’s? We don’t need no stinkin’ Laws!”

  • okay, okay – Liam / Fred – you tie for most funny – “truthiness” statement. (thanks to SC for word!)

  • O! Eek! Alas and Alack! Heavenly days! The elections supervisor MAY initiate action to remove Ann Coulter from the voting lists? Will the torment never cease?

    These bastards think nothing of striking thousands of people (without cause) from the voting lists. These bastards think nothing of making black and latino voters stand in line for six hours in order to vote. These bastards think nothing of replacing human counters of paper ballots with easily riggable and uncheckable Diebold voting machines.

    Pardon me while I place my Levi’s-enshrouded butt up against “Charmaine Kelly, deputy elections chief” on the screen above and let a long, loud fart.

  • Oh, c’mon. When a Rethug commits a crime, it’s just a youthful indiscretion. This third-degree felony was sooooo last year. And she was probably just confused. Eating Dem babies can do that to you.

  • Oh hell, it’s Florida, the conservatives’ haven. (S)He’ll get off the hook like Limbaugh

  • A ‘mail drop’ can be a residence, particularly for people who travel a lot or are in transition. I’m against unfair barriers to voting, and I think that since nothing Coulter did evidences intent to commit any sort of fraud, there is no reason to disenfranchise her, much less punish her.

    From the article, it sounds like the election board is going to take the appropriate step of nullifying the invalid registration, and hopefully nothing more will happen. It’s a useful argument, I think, against putting unreasonable barriers to voting, but not a condemnation of Coulter.

  • “Then, you see, the dog ate my voter registration. Then, after the dog barfed it up, I tried to put it back together but could not read the address where I was supposed to vote. So I decided to walk outside and vote at the first place I saw. But I got chased by an alligator into another neighborhood, so naturally I had to vote there.”

    This is not hard: You have a house. You live in it at least some of the time
    — even if you travel a lot. You use the address of this house to register. Local election officials send you a card telling you where to vote, based on the address of the house you gave. Go vote there.

    I’d like to say one more thing about Coulter. Liberals sometimes call her a bimbo. This is unfair. Ann Coulter is NOT a bimbo. Bimbos are young and pretty.

  • neil –

    Coulter’s mistakes were:

    1) Registering to vote using an address at which she does not live. Whether she travels a lot or is in transition is irrelevant; there is a some address to which her subscription to Harpy’s Bazarre is delivered (as well as bank statements, bills, legal documents) and that most certainly is not her realtor’s office.

    2) When her mistake was pointed out to her at the polling location and she was told she neeeded to complete a change of address form before she could vote, her response was ask where she would be allowed to vote using the address on record and then storm off, with the polling supervisor in pursuit. She was told what she had to do in order to cast a ballot, to her face, and she decided to ignore those instructions. Big mistake.

    3) She was contacted by the election board after the fact and given 30 days to rectify the situation. If you look at the documents posted at BradBlog, it was a simple 1 page form stating “I, (state your name), live at (state your address)”. FIll it in, sign and date it. Mail it in. End of story. She chose not to comply. Bigger mistake. To that point she could have claimed that in her rush to cast her vote, she misunderstood what she was supposed to do, whatever. Now she’s just being contemptuous of the local officials.

    4) Let’s not turn a blind eye to the real motivation behind all this. Annie’s claiming a $25,000 homestead tax break using her address in West Palm Beach to which she is really not entitled.

  • The other interesting aspect of this story is that for some reason Ann coulter did not answer the gender question, “sex:m or f?” on the form. PageOneQ has the details.

  • “4) Let’s not turn a blind eye to the real motivation behind all this. Annie’s claiming a $25,000 homestead tax break using her address in West Palm Beach to which she is really not entitled.
    ……….Comment by Jim”

    So much for voter-fraud; we’re now talking falsifying income tax documentations. Out of curiosity—is this on her Florida state return—or are we talking IRS here?

  • Steve –

    The homestead tax exemption reduces the assessed value of the property by up to $25,000 for property tax purposes. So the actual savings is probably in the several hundred dollar range.

    If Coulter got herself in hot water over a few hundred bucks – that just makes it all the more delicious.

  • MadProfessah,

    She didn’t check the box for gender because there weren’t enough choices. Specifically, there wasn’t an “I” listed. “I” for “It”.

    Recently, Al Franken referred to this creep as “an attractive woman”. He meant attractive in the context of a female impersonator.

  • there is a some address to which her subscription to Harpy’s Bazarre is delivered (as well as bank statements, bills, legal documents) and that most certainly is not her realtor’s office.

    You don’t know that. If Coulter was in the process of moving to Palm Beach when she registered to vote, she very well may have had her bank statements, bills and legal documents forwarding to her realtor’s house. In absence of other evidence, this does not condemn her.

    When her mistake was pointed out to her at the polling location and she was told she neeeded to complete a change of address form before she could vote, her response was ask where she would be allowed to vote using the address on record and then storm off, with the polling supervisor in pursuit

    Again, if you insist on reading every fact as an implication of Coulter, then it’s not surprising that you are going to find her guilty. The way I read it, the pollworker told Coulter she wasn’t registered in this precinct, she asked him where she was registered, and she went there. A technical violation, but what harm was done? Coulter didn’t vote twice or attempt to, and she didn’t intentionally shop her vote out to another district.

    FIll it in, sign and date it. Mail it in. End of story. She chose not to comply.

    And for this she’s supposed to go to jail? There’s also the possibility that she hasn’t even received the letter yet. In any case, this is all great evidence that her incorrect voter registration should be removed from the rolls, but nothing more.

    I believe that voting should be easy. This country has a long, ugly tradition of using procedural tactics to disenfranchise or harass voters. It’s no better when it’s done to Ann Coulter than when it’s done to the poor. I don’t want to see hate for Coulter drive the liberal blogs to endorse voting roadblocks.

    I’m certainly not endorsing this theory, but a friend of mine pointed out that Coulter makes her liveliness out of accusing liberals of stupidity. Perhaps she intentionally ignored the 30-day letter in order to try to bait her detractors into saying hypocritical things.

  • I have no idea about the tax exemption thing, by the way, but the story that Brad Blog tells indicates that Coulter really does live at her Seabreeze Ave. home. If she didn’t live there, why would she show up to vote at that precinct?

  • OK neil, I’m gonna assume your last name is Bush and just ignore you from now on. It’s obvious you’re one of the 29%. True believers never need facts.

  • Has anyone noticed that Katherine Harris is better looking than Ann Coulter? And that Harris sometimes makes sense in what she is saying? She might not always be competent, but she certainly isn’t full of hate like Coutler is. As far as I’m concerned, Coulter is the spiritual child of Joseph Goebbels. I hope that she does get at least some notoriety over this, instead of being continually fawned over by media figures as if she were some font of wisdom. The penalty for Coulter, if any, should be that she has to rescind her PhD for academic fraud.

    And what about presumed innocence before being convicted? Maybe we can waive it in her case–she’s all too eager to waive it for anyone who disagrees with her. Her hero has waived habeas corpus, so why should she be even entitled to that? Lock her up now and let her scream about it from jail. She’s a terrorist of the literary kind

  • Jim, there are two sides to every story. Neil has presented his interpretation of the story. Agree to disagree. It weakens your argument when you attack him personally.

    We’re all better off if we stop drinking Kool-Aide served from the right and the left.

  • I’m pretty sure Ms.Coulter is not some naif wandering aimlessly from polling place to polling place. The apologists for her actions forget that this is, despite her unpleasantness, a fairly sharp person, and not likely to fumble about viz a viz her addresses and precincts. Please. As I am married to a former accountant, and have heard countless stories concerning things like the extra address for tax purposes, it doesn’t surprise me that she might do something like that. Whether it saves hundreds or thousands of dollars, it’s curious, don’t you think? I’ve voted for decades, without much hassle, and never was ambiguous about my residence. People who travel might use other addresses, mayhaps, but this doesn’t smell like that sort of solution. Why else did she storm away? We see this is lots of celebrities, when they begin thinking that they are more ‘special’ than the rest of us. Cutting in lines, avoiding responding, etc…..well, she’s now a fully self-involved, and not very ethical, person. I may disagree with someone’s politics, but respect them. I’m not shoulder to shoulder with Chuck Hagel, but he’s a basically decent guy. She, on the other hand, has made a salacious living off her hate. I wouldn’t care if she was the queen of the liberals. She is still a very nasty version of a human being.

  • Good post. You make some great points that most people do not fully understand.

    “About a month ago, I noted that [tag]Coulter[/tag], for reasons that are still unclear, was registered to vote at two separate South Florida addresses and tried to vote in two precincts on the same day, in the same election. Palm Beach County’s elections supervisor said, “She needs to tell us where she really lives” — or he’d refer the case to the state attorney’s office for criminal charges.”

    I like how you explained that. Very helpful. Thanks.

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