Story in this editorial by law professor Richard Hasen in the Dallas Morning News. Also at BradBlog. Info on the American Center for Voting Rights at SourceWatch.
It appears that, in light of Congress’ investigation of the DoJ attorney firings – clearly part of a strategy to use “voter fraud” as a pretext to challenge poor/minority/Dem voters in future elections – the people involved in ACVR realized the game was up and folded their tents.
Is there any other plausible explanation?
Will all this be sufficient to take “voter fraud” off the national agenda? Hasen doesn’t think so:
Is Hasen right?
The Election Assistance Commission, BTW, in 2006 commissioned a study of “voter fraud”. The authors found practically no evidence of it, but the EAC, without their consent, altered the report prior to publication to say the pervasiveness of voter fraud is “open to debate,” and gagged the authors from discussing it publicly. See this thread.
I’d like to toss out a hypothetical to you BrainGlutton.
If I flew in as a tourist from Australia and managed to get through the US legal immigrant defensive perimeter at some international airport.
If I then, during my visit, decided it would be fun to register and cast a vote at a US federal election, (It should be easy, I don’t need to show ID or any other kind of proof of eligibility) would you consider that to be a case of voter fraud?
(Disregard the fact that the premise of the hypothetical is ridiculous. No one from Australia would actually want to do something like that).
I’ll take a stab at the hypothetical. It might be possible for you to cast a ballot in a US election. But if preventing you from doing that keeps more legitimate votes from being cast, then the cure is worse than the disease. The number of voter fraud cases is very small. The number of people that would be disenfranchised by tightening up the requirements or their enforcements is larger.
In the 2006 election, Michigan voters passed the Michigan Civil Right’s Initiative that prevented colleges and universities from employing affirmative action programs. To get this initiative on the ballot, MCRI went to areas in Detroit and purposefully lied to minorities signatories by claiming the initiative was for the continuation of Affirmative Action programs. The Governor did nothing. The Legislature did nothing. The Michigan Board of Canvassars did nothing.
On August 29th, District Court Judge Tarnow ruled that MCRI had engaged in "systemic voter fraud"and that michigan citizens should be concerned “by the indifference exhibited by state agencies who could have investigated and addressed MCRI’s actions but failed to do so.” In any case, despite the voter fraud, he still allowed MCRI to stay on the ballot where it won 58% of the vote. You can see the opinion here. It’s a hilarious read.
Voter fraud is real and its not enforced at the state and federal level. It boggles the mind. It burns me up me that someone like Paris Hilton is wasting air in jail, while Ward Connerly (who defrauded mostly minority voters in the petition) is walking the streets free as a bird. Where is the justice?
I vaguely recall that article. I see someone has just provided a cite.
But just because it’s in a report, official or quasi official, partisan or allegedly non partisan, why do you assume it’s truthful and valid?
Assuming you don’t automatically believe anything you read in a newspaper, why lend more credence to this kind of report?
And this would be bad?
An invalid vote is a fraudulent vote. A vote cast by someone who has entered the country illegally is not valid, whether they vote the way you approve or not.
If the voter is not eligible to vote then the term ‘disfranchisement’ does not apply.
A party that gains power because of a preponderence of covert fraudulent votes is no better than a government that takes power through overt military force.
I think we’re talking apples and oranges here. What I’m concerned about is that stricter registration requirements and new ID cards place an undue burden on the lower economic class and will discourage voting among people who otherwise are fully entitled to do so. As we saw in Ohio in 2004, when the election officials want to rig an election, one way to do so is to distribute the voting machines in such a way so that those that will tend to vote the “wrong” way have to wait for hours to cast their ballots while those that will tend to vote Republican will breeze right through. This “concern” about voter fraud is a fig leaf to cover their intent which is to minimize electoral participation by the underclass.
I’m having a hard time understanding how a small cabal can see to it that enought fraudulent votes get cast to sway the results of an election. But it’s easy to see how such a cabal–well placed in state government–can sway an election by suppressing large numbers of votes. They can feed misleading information to minority communities, be excessively strict in processing registration forms, minimize the number of available voting machines, use flimsy pretexts to purge the rolls, etc.
It seems we have a strawman vs strawman battle going here. Is there any proof that requiring that an ID be shown would keep people away from the polls in droves? Or even in trickles? How many people who are entitled to vote, don’t have some form of ID already? Drivers/non-drivers ID, military ID, school ID, passport. Every job that I’ve ever had has required ID before I can be hired, and often multiple forms of ID. Every paycheck I’ve cashed, every bank account I’ve opened, every apartment I’ve rented.
If you consider it strawman vs. strawman shouldn’t you be asking about the other side of the question as well? Or are some strawmen more equal than others?
A carefully-researched report establishes a prima facie case for its conclusions. They’re certainly not unassailable, but absent a convincing assault, yeah, I’ll assume it’s truthful and valid, especially when it’s saying, “This thing that nobody’s demonstrated is a problem? we can’t find any evidence that it’s a problem.”
The ball is now in the court of those who claim that voter fraud is a significant problem to make their case. Hell, it’s been in their court for awhile, but now it’s even more in their court.
And it’s an excellent point that a suppressed vote is at least as bad as a fraudulent vote: any solution that suppresses even one more legitimate vote than fraudulent vote is a system that’s worse than doing nothing. A proposed change must demonstrate that it is unlikely to be worse than the current state of affairs, as any true conservative will by definition agree.
Nobody has yet addressed the most interesting question: Why did the American Center for Voting Rights simply and suddenly and without explanation disappear up its own asshole?
Here in Minnesota, you have to have either a Minnesota Drivers License or a US Social Security Number to put on your application. I suppose you could do a mail-in application, and simply make up some numbers, but they are checked (at least, the Mn Drivers License one is).
Plus there are registration deadlines & waiting periods, so unless it’s a fairly extended visit (several weeks), you would have to be in one of the seven states that allow election-day registration. As far as I know, all of them require documentation when you register.
