To sum up: the U.S. Election Assistance Commission was formed to study voter fraud. What they found was that most fraud was plausibly conducted via absentee ballots, not in person voting, despite the huge Republican push to try and make it harder to vote in person based on claimed fraud. It’s of course no coincidence that Democratic voters are generally harmed by restrictions on in person voting, while Republicans are generally harmed by restrictions on absentee ballots.
Republicans who supressed the report lamely complained that the report wasn’t valid because they have examples of dead people being registered… but of course, there are lots of reasons other than fraud for that to happen that do not include fraud, and it doesn’t directly result in any fraudulent votes.
Might quibble a bit with that word “presumed”. Been pretty well established, don’t you think?
But this is marginal stuff. It is tougher to vote in an inner city environment, takes longer, more hassle. Which, necessarily, favors the affluent, suburban, Republican voter.
Is that still true? Absentee voting doesn’t mean what it used to mean-- ie, that you got a special excuse to vote by mail because you would be absent during the election. It’s really vote-by-mail that is the important, no? And lots of people vote-by-mail now. I have been doing so for years. For example, it’s being reported that 25% of Californians will vote by absentee ballot in the upcoming election. In OR, all voting is done by mail.
Really? For me it’s three blocks to the school. There’s almost never a line. It takes me about 15 minutes, all told. And that’s with about 6 minutes of walking, both ways.
Well, that’s not really what they said. They said that in person voter fraud actually is a problem, as evidenced by ineligible people turning up on the rolls in Michigan and Missouri. And there are plenty of other examples of voter fraud in this country, including the fact that 4,609 more votes were cast than registered voters in Milwaukee.
There are also alternative explanations for how absentee ballot voter fraud occurs, but I still think we should do something to prevent that. The mere fact that there are possible explanations doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything to prevent fraud. I’d much rather stamp out all kinds of voter fraud, regardless of which party it helps or hurts.
Wait. According to Kevin Drum, “doing the right thing” involves not suppressing voter fraud? “Hmmm,” indeed.
Yes, depending on what your definition of “huge” is. In the 2004 elections, there were about 4.4 million eligible US voters overseas, about 0.5 million of which are military/DoD personnel and 0.1 million other governmental employees. The overseas military vote is apparently less solidly pro-Republican than it used to be, but still favors the GOP on the whole:
The trend among non-military overseas voters is inferred to be in the other direction, judging from the general trend among US voters who held passports:
However, absentee-ballot “turnout” among the military/government overseas voters tends to be significantly higher than among overseas civilians in general:
The DoD’s Foreign Voter Assistance Program (FVAP) has made military turnout in recent years even higher, according to this DoD report:
The FVAP is supposed to assist both military/governmental personnel and private citizens in overseas voting, but it has been alleged that its performance is somewhat uneven:
So to sum up: overseas US military personnel are significantly fewer than overseas non-government-employed US civilians, but they are more than twice as likely to vote. How the military vote’s pro-Republican bias stacks up to the civilian vote’s pro-Democrat bias, I don’t know. It’s up to you to decide whether you think that meets the criteria for stating that “a huge number of absentee ballots” are pro-Republican military votes.
(This information brought to you courtesy of the work I’m actually supposed to be doing right now, which I now have to go do. Bye all!)
Again: turning up on the rolls isn’t the same thing as turning up at the polls.
No, not according to him. According to him, Republicans are going after only the type of voter fraud that happens to also have the effect of supressing Democratic turnout… despite the fact that their own consultants found that fraud via absentee ballot is far easier and pervasive. In short, it’s as if there are two ways to rob a bank: one that’s easy and one that’s already fairly hard. The easier door is used more often, not surprisingly. Republicans are proposing to make the already harder, already less used door even harder… without doing the same for the easier door.
It isn’t just the military part of the absentee vote that leans Republican: it does in many places just in general.
Again, the mere fact that we can think up an innocent, alternative explanation doesn’t mean that voter fraud didn’t occur. And even if voter fraud didn’t occur in these cases, it doesn’t mean that we should not do something to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future.
Just because the door is used less frequently doesn’t mean that we we act like no one ever goes through it. For example, we should still lock that door at night.
Regardless, the suggestion appears to be that Republicans aren’t trying to do anything about absentee voter fraud because they believe it will favor them. But as pointed out by Kimstu above, it’s far from clear that absentee ballots tend to favor Republicans. In addition, I see no evidence that fraudulent absentee ballots tend to favor Republicans. Even if the legitimate absentee ballots tend to favor Republicans, the fraudulent ones won’t necessarily be proportional with the rest of the sample.
So if voter fraud is going on in absentee/mail-in ballots, everyone should do something about that, too. Any suggestions?
I think Kimstu’s fantastic post above covers this issue very well.
Kimstu: I wasn’t disputing the fact that the majority of the military voting absentee are Republican. I was noting that the number of absentee ballots from within the US is skyrocketing, and might be swamping that out. If half the people in CA vote, and 25% of them vote by mail, that’s ~5M right there. And CA votes largely Democratic in national elections.
Well, that’s not really what they said. There were 4,609 more votes than they had listed, not more than had registered, the latter of which would have set off more alarms than Hillary being elected head of the National Rifle Association. There is nothing that I could see in that article that would cause me to believe that the difference was due to fraud, versus poor accounting. Basically, one method of counting says 277,000 voted, while the other method says that 281,609 voted, a difference of a little over 1%.
The Colorado mail-in/absentee vote is quite high as well. I’ve spent a fruitless half-hour at the Secretary of State’s website trying to find a cite, but I remember being astonished by seeing in the paper that ~20% of the voters in Colorado last election mailed it in.
Frank, there’s been a lot of reporting on voting machines here, as you know. For myself, I’m not satisfied that they are sufficiently error free or auditable and, for the first time, am going to use an absentee ballot.
But, as was pointed out, correctly, above, using an absentee ballot is the easiest way to perform voter fraud, if you are interested in doing so.
No picture ID is required to get the ballot or other proof of address.
But not only is the alternative explanation the most plausible… you don’t have any evidence of voter fraud. Did any of these fraudulent people actually vote? If they did, it would be VERY easy to know and to show it. Yet someone all the big talk peters out before we get to that easy test.
Well, yes. But most of the things that cause registrations to be on the books when they are not have nothing at all to do with what Republicans are proposing to make voting more complex. They are things like doing a better job of cleaning the books when people die. No one opposes that.
Sure. But again: it’s solutions to a problem that seems to be nowhere near as big of a problem as Republicans want to paint it as being, while meanwhile something else is a much bigger problem that they want to largely ignore.
But that’s not what’s happening, no? Instead, the Republicans are burying results of their own studies on it.
???
Kimstu only covers military and foriegn ballots regardless. But suppose absentee ballots don’t favor anyone in particular. Why is the fact that this form of voter fraud is far easier and even far more common something that seems to so deeply upset Republicans intent on painting voter id as the number one problem?
Of course, all the examples I personally know of in modern times of dead people voting, absentee ballots were used, and it was Republicans who organized the scheme. For instance, Jerry Kilgore’s family political machine rigged a mayors race like this.
Frankly, does it make any difference whether the absentee ballots actually favor Republicans.
There are three issues I see here. The first is “we should tighten the more abused route to voter fraud before tightening the less abused route - or at least simulatenously.”
The second is that the report was surpressed, possibly under the belief by the people who surpressed it that tightening absentee ballots would harm them. If that was their motivation, regardless of whether tightening absentee ballots would help them or not, thats kind of scary.
The third is whether the ballots themselves favor Repubs or Dems - and that sort of really isn’t important. The important thing is we fix our voting issues. If that means that the party I don’t like wins, that’s part of democracy - but the tighter we make the elections, the more confident I feel in that democracy.
I don’t see how absentee ballots are worse than voting in person. You request a ballot and it gets mailed to the address that you registered under. No registration=no ballot for you. Then they keep track of who they sent ballots to and if you vote absentee and then show up, they’re going to say “sorry, dude, only 1 vote per election”.
Not to plug HBO, but I understand they have a show about voter fraud coming up on November 2. I don’t get it myself but if you do, you may want to take a look.
Looks like the Ohio vote is going to be another mess this year.
Ugh. I typed out a long response with cites and all, and lost to frenzied gerbils. Let me try this again.
I apologize. I believe you’re absolutely right. There were more votes counted than people who voted. So I might have been fine with “registered votes” or “voters,” but certainly not “registered voters.” I apologize for any confusion I’ve caused.
But I still think it’s sufficiently shocking that there were 4,609 more votes in Milwaukee than people who voted.
I disagree. I had a huge post – complete with cites and figures – that’s now gone. But rather than spend another 45 minutes trying to come up with them all, I’ll just say that I disagree and try to explain why in short terms.
First, it’s a huge error. Any firm charged with counting votes, that double counts more than one in every 100 votes, isn’t doing its job competently. When you consinder that they probably dropped some votes, too, that means that they would have needed to double count even more votes.
Second, Kerry won the state by 11,000 votes. 4,609 votes isn’t insignificant next to that.
Third, if you extrapolate the 1+% error rate over the entire state (about 3 million people voted), then the margin of error is almost three times larger than the margin of victory.
Fourth, turnout in Wisconsin was over 75%, compared to the national average of 59-60%. So either people in Wisconsin were really motivated to vote (which is certainly possible, since it was a battleground state) or there were some extra votes slipped in there.
I’m not saying this was certainly voter fraud. However, it was certainly big enough that we shouldn’t shrug it off as de minimus.
In that case, Democrats were convicted of voter fraud.
The cited article also discusses Democratic voter fraud by absentee ballot in Alabama, California, and Texas, all of which implicated Democrats (the article also notes voter fraud by Republicans).
Here’s an extended excerpt from and article on Democratic voter fraud by absentee ballot written in 1996 by Rich Lowry (now editor of the National Review, and therefore a partisan source):
Or, you could do a Google search for ACORN, a liberal voter registration group that was apparently responsible for numerous improper tactics.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that only Democrats commit voter fraud, or even that Democrats commit more voter fraud than Republicans. But if you’re not aware of any voter fraud by Democrats, then I think you’re not looking very hard.