Voter fraud
April 12, 2007
Remember all the nonsense about voter fraud in Milwaukee? From the New York Times:
Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.
Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.
Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.
122,293,332 people voted in the 2004 election. 86 convictions (0.00007%), after a major, White House-directed effort to “crack down” on voter fraud, is an astonishingly small number. Alleged fraud in Milwaukee has been at the heart of the issue, but:
The Wisconsin prosecutors lost every case on double voting. Cynthia C. Alicea, 25, was accused of multiple voting in 2004 because officials found two registration cards in her name. She and others were acquitted after explaining that they had filed a second card and voted just once after a clerk said they had filled out the first card incorrectly.
The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has professed its “bafflement” at the “mysterious” decisions to prosecute these cases. In addition to the double-voting cases, Biskupic has also brough to court and lost cases involving felons who didn’t realize they were ineligible to vote (*). Of the fourteen cases he prosecuted, Biskupic won five of them.
Since the average conviction rate for felony prosecutions is close to 85%, the fact that a partisan GOP prosecutor, after hand-picking the most credible fraud cases to prosecute, managed to obtain a conviction rate of 36%, is striking. Add to that the fact that all of the convictions involved cases where the crime was inadvertant (one man presented a prison-issued ID card at the voting booth), and one wonders why people thought there was a problem at all.
And then there’s this:
The Justice Department stand is backed by Republican Party and White House officials, including Karl Rove, the president’s chief political adviser. The White House has acknowledged that he relayed Republican complaints to President Bush and the Justice Department that some prosecutors were not attacking voter fraud vigorously. In speeches, Mr. Rove often mentions fraud accusations and warns of tainted elections.
Is Karl Rove really portraying himself as a virtuous defender of electoral integrity? Or is he trying to gain a political advantage by increasing the amount of distrust and polarization in the country?
Of course, election fraud is a bigger problem than voter fraud, which is only a subset of the larger issue. There are far easier ways to tamper with an election than by voter fraud, which requires lots of participants and is easy to uncover, especially if done conspiratorily to a degree that can affect an election.
How much easier to simply miscount the ballots, or to lose ballot boxes from precincts in which your opponent is strong, or to discover ballot boxes with lots of votes in your favor? Or you could get your friends on the Supreme Court to demand that ballots favoring your opponent not be counted?
How much easier to discourage people from voting with arduous registration procedures? Or by limiting the number of voting machines and polling places, so that people are forced to wait upwards of 10 hours in order to vote?
We need cleaner elections, but the administration, by the politicization of the Justice Department, and its disregard for empiricism, is making it difficult to evaluate the various problems with our electoral system on their merits.
Is voter fraud a problem? If so, what steps do we need to take to correct it, keeping in mind that more stringent identification requirements will also have the (desired, from the GOP point of view) side effect of preventing eligible voters from voting.
If voter fraud is insignificant compared to other methods of fraud, or compared to the number of people who are illegitimately prevented from voting by anti-fraud measures, we would be better off with prosecutors that investigated the things that are actually corrupting our elections. Hi, Karl.
(*) Presumably because the continued prohibition on voting after one’s time has been served, is out of step with common notions of fairness and decency.
April 12th, 2007 at 11:46 am
It’s even worse than 0.00007%, since the crackdown stretches over at least three, and probably four elections, from 2000 to 2006. 86 instances of fraud, almost all of them unintentional, for the entire country, comes out to less than one case of fraud per state, every two election cycles.
April 12th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
It has been my contention for over a decade that if you want to know the dirty tricks the republicans are up to, the first and foremost step is to look at what they accuse others of doing. Of course I’ve been told I was paranoid, but in the last year my empirical observation seems to be gaining traction. The evidence has been available for years, and the grade school mentality of calling dibs on accusations should have made it obvious without having to even look into the facts or think about it.
Finally, it is starting to backfire on them. Even their ridiculous claims which remain unchallenged may not be enough to save their credibility. In our state (Washington) the republicans squawked about felons voting, making out like a few gazillion voted, instead of a few. “Of course,” they said, “those pariahs all voted for democrats.” Anyone who has ever worked in fields where a lot of ex-cons work would know they lean towards the republican ideals which appeal to them. Sadly, those include things like the marginalizing of ‘undesirables’ and entitlements for the right sort. I’ve seen it in the fast food industry, construction, and fishing. When I worked in those fields as a college student I generally kept my progressive ideas to myself in the interest of workplace harmony. I was actually surprised to find there were fewer conservatives in places like Microsoft where there is a strong conservative bent.
April 13th, 2007 at 3:52 am
Nice post. I’d add negative campaigning to your list. I think that is by far the greatest culprit of voter suppression.