This is an amazingly even-handed book, BTW. No one could accuse Hasen (a law prof specializing in elections law) of any partisan bias. He covers every aspect of controversy about voting over which the parties have struggled since 2000, and he cites countless examples where Dems as well as Pubs have not been entirely honest about the whole thing. In his view Dems often cry “Voter suppression!” in cases attributable to incompetence rather than malice. But on the issue of “voter fraud” his conclusions are entirely one-sided: It’s a nonproblem the Pubs have whipped up for their own partisan interests.
His general message is that all these problems arise because of two characteristics of the American election system which are highly unusual in a modern republic:
The system is “hyperfederalized.” Every county’s elections office does things its own way, every Supervisor of Elections is elected locally. Even a state Secretary of State has only very limited power to standardize the process.
The system is partisan. Most elections officials and SOSs are partisan elected officials. In other republics they are usually civil servants.
The quote you offer talks about voter impersonation fraud, but you talk about voter fraud.
What about the case in which Sven Amuldsen votes, correctly identifying himself as Sven Amuldsen, but casts an illegal ballot because he’s not a citizen, or a felon without restoration of his voting rights, or has already voted elsewhere? That’s not impersonation, in the sense your quoted author means, but it’s nonetheless a fraudulent vote.
How does Voter ID prevent Sven from voting? If it doesn’t, then we needn’t consider the Case of Sven when discussing the implications of implementing Voter ID.
Voter ID allows us to successfully prosecute Sven for casting an illegal vote. Without Voter ID, Sven can simply argue he was never there. If he presents ID, we at least have a prosecutable case.
And thus a deterrent for Sven voting in the first place.
Well, his ID can be checked, or his identity somehow checked, when he registers to vote, as the (federal) law (HAVA) already requires (Hasen covers that too). If he is not registered, his name will not appear on that precinct’s voter-list. If he has already voted elsewhere, his name will not appear on that precint’s voter-list. If he wants to do same-day registration and his state’s law allows for it, he must present ID. (Presenting ID – whether at time of voting or time of registering – will not necessarily show whether he has a felony record nor whether he is a citizen, but that is a different problem, which requiring ID will not fix.)
There is also the fact that what you are describing is Mostly Harmless. Sven Amuldsen is not part of any conspiracy to steal an election. Probably he does not even understand that he cannot legally vote. WRT to both voters and officials, Hasen makes reference to Hanlon’s Law: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
Incompetence. That’s the real problem with our election system.
I think the point is that it could possibly be done, but not on a scale that would actually affect an election. Depending on the election, you would need at a minimum 100 people just at the local level, and we’re not talking collaborators of the highest moral caliber. The chances of keeping such a conspiracy secret in an era when tabloids pay big money for big stories are slim to none…and I have yet to hear any such stories from any news source.
Wait – you have no problem demanding photo ID for registering to vote??
By what magic does that happen? I grant that within a state, there may be some system to ensure that voters do not appear in two different precincts; if person who is registered in Virginia, maryland, and DC faces no real obstacles to casting three votes on Election Day.
So what? The problem is not a conspiracy. The problem is that in a close election, the result may have been tipped by votes cast by people not legally entitled to vote. That causes a lack of confidence in the outcome.
Who said the problem was a conspiracy? You?
And then having defined the problem as a conspiracy, you presented a devastating argument to defeat it. There’s a name for that kind of fallacious argument.
Some do, some don’t. Voter ID proposals are often divided by analysts into “loose” and “strict,” with the strict camp generally requiring photo ID and the checking thereof.
Sure. But with nothing to compare the signature to, how is that useful?
Now, as I’ve said before, we could drop this nonsense about photo ID by substituting a fingerprint. Put your fingerprint next to your printed name – that doesn’t cost you a thing, since God issued you ten of them upon delivery. And it’s even better for building a prosecutable case than a photo ID.
Then you can justify all this “voter ID fraud” hoopla by giving us your best example of this happening in real life.
Edited to add: If you are saying that there could be enough fraudulent votes in one direction to sway an election, than either a massive coincidence or a conspiracy is being implied, I would say.
It’s virtually certain that Tom Corbett’s 2010 win in Pennsylvania is legitimate. He had 2.17 million votes to Dan Onorato’s 1.81 million. Even if 150 Svens voted, the result doesn’t change. We don’t know if they did, of course, since the state didn’t enforce a Photo ID law, but even if the Sven parade happened, the result is the same.
But in Washington State, the governor’s race was a bit different: 1,371,153 votes were initially counted for Christine Gregoire; 1,371,414 for Dino Rossi. That’s a difference of 261 votes, with Rossi the apparent winner. A machine recount narrowed Rossi’s win to 42 votes. The final, legal result was a win for Gregoire by 133 votes.
Sven and his buddies could certainly have changed the governor of Washington State.
In 1984, Rick McIntyre was initially certified the winner of the Indiana 8th Congressional District by 34 votes but Frank McCloskey ultimately was declared the winner, by 4 votes.
If only three more Svens voted for McCloskey than for McIntyre, he got in because of illegal votes.
But we can’t know for sure, of course. We simply don’t have confidence in the result.
a federal jury administrator in one U.S. district court estimated that 1 to 33 percent of the people out of a jury pool of 30,000 over 2 years (about 300 to 900 people) said they were not U.S. citizens;
I just gave you an example of three votes changing a US Congressional seat. why does that have to be either a massive coincidence or a conspiracy? (Unless you mean that any election being that close is itself a massive coincidence, in which case I agree – but since we have lots of elections, we can pretty well assume such coincidences will remain rare but NOT non-existent).
