LOD: Your Absentee Trustee?

North Carolina election officials don’t like the method Americans for Prosperity is using to solicit voters to request absentee ballots. The group has sent hundreds of thousands of mailers to registered voters with instructions for requesting a ballot by mail, but the request form is pre-addressed to AFP’s office in Raleigh rather than to the voter’s election board. “I would discourage anything like that,” said Charlie Collicutt, deputy director of the Guilford County Board of Elections. “When you trust an outside group to handle your request, you’re putting your faith in them that they’re going to get it there and get it there correctly. If there are mistakes, if a request isn’t filled out correctly, if the group waits too long to submit the requests, it could be too late to get out another one,” Collicutt said. AFP is a hard-line conservative group backed heavily by founder David Koch and board member Art Pope. It is spending millions on ads attacking Barack Obama across the country. Dallas Woodhouse, head of the AFP operation in North Carolina, says the group has the ballot requests come to its office because it’s too expensive to print the address of each voter’s county board of elections on the return form (which other organizations do) and because it wants to track the follow up (which can be done through the data file on the State Board of Elections’ website). The process AFP uses is not illegal, but it continues to worry thoughtful observers. The worries are intensified because AFP used a similar mailing campaign last year in Wisconsin that gave voters the wrong deadline date for the returning the absentee ballot request.