October 29, 2006
"Voter fraud" fraud
Election time is coming, so the right blogosphere is, as usual, all a-twitter about "voter fraud," which in their parlance always means voting by those ineligible to vote, not depriving those who are eligible of the right to vote as in Florida in 2000 or Ohio this year, or misrecording or miscounting of votes in badly designed (or deliberately misdesigned) high-tech voting systems.
The latest version of this fan-dance comes from Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy, and has been gleefully linked to by Glenn Reynolds. It seems that the Poughkeepsie Journal has found 77,000 dead people on the voter rolls in New York State, of whom 2600 may have voted. Moreover, "Democrats are more successful at voting after death than Republicans, by a margin of four-to-one, largely because so many dead people seem to vote in Democrat-dominated New York City."
Note first that the operative phrase is "may have." The newspaper report clearly concedes a point that the blog posts ignore: in fact the reporter detected not a single instance of actual voter fraud.
The numbers do not indicate how much fraud is the result of dead voters in New York, only the potential for it. Typically, records of votes by the dead are the result of bookkeeping errors and do not mean any extra ballots were actually cast.The Journal did not find any fraud in the local matches it investigated.
The printed version of the story, pointed to by a VC commenter, explains:
Having deceased residents on the rolls can create records of a vote that never took place. The Journal investigated seven local cases identified in its computerized analysis. Each one was either a database mismatch or an accounting error. The Journal found no examples of fraud. Stairs, the Glasgow native from Beacon, died June 11, 1998 at the age of 87. Computer records indicate he had voted in the 2002 general election.After examining poll books, Dutchess County elections officials determined the computer record was the product of an accounting error. A poll worker had filled a line in the poll books that is used to denote the order in which each person voted. For instance, when the 25th person in a district arrives, the poll worker writes the number "25" next to that person's signature.
In Stairs' case, the poll worker had assigned a counter number to him in place of another voter on the same page in the poll book who showed up to vote. When the poll books were scanned into the database, Stairs' record was updated to show he had voted. But no one signed the poll book in Stairs' name, no absentee ballot was received and no vote in his name was counted toward any election results.
In some cases, the "dead" voters were and are in fact quite alive. They're only "dead" according to the Social Security Administration "Master Death File," which — surprise! — turns out not to be infallible:
In most cases, instances of dead voters can be attributed to database mismatches and clerical errors. For instance, the Social Security Administration admits there are people in its master death index who are not dead.They include Wappingers Falls resident Hilde Stafford, an 85-year-old native of Germany. The master index lists her date of death as June 15, 1997.
"I'm still alive," she said. "I still vote."
Again, the hard-copy version tells more:
The Social Security Administration admits there are people in its master death index who are alive. Typically, these are people who have mistakenly been identified as dead when in fact the person's spouse had died.
So in fact there's no evidence whatever in the story that dead people voted in New York, only that two databases didn't have identical data. The reporters checked seven specific instances of "dead people voting" — that is, someone being recorded as having voted though his or her name was on the SSA Master Death File — and all were some form of clerical error. Those seven cases were among the 2600 statewide cases of "dead people" who "may have" voted. Based on that sample, the actual number of graveyard voters in the state is probably less than 500 and might well be zero.
Moreover, neither the story nor its bloggic derivatives asks the obvious question: is 77,000 "dead" voters, of whom 2600 "might have" voted, large or small compared to the voting population of New York State, where more than 7 million votes were cast in 2004? The answer, of course, is that the (certainly inflated) numbers are so small as to be negligible, certainly much smaller than the number of people who are disenfranchised today, or the number of additional people who would be disenfranchised by a law requiring photo ID for every voter.
To some extent, the misleading blog posts were due to a game of "telephone." The reporter went out to investigate voting by dead people, and didn't actually find any. He didn't want his work to go to waste, so he wrote the story anyway, including all the exculpatory evidence but still breathing heavily to suggest something nefarious was happening. The headline-writer then went beyond the story to claim that "the dead" were voting; Ed Still of VoteLaw quoted the story uncritically, and listed some of its key "findings" including the Democrat-to-Republican ratio; Jonathan Adler shortened the account still further to emphasize its party-ratio aspect, and Reynolds quoted Adler verbatim.
So I don't think anyone along the chain acted dishonestly. But the fact remains that two of the most widely-read conservative blogs in the country reported what is clearly a non-fact: that dead people are voting in New York, and that they're Democrats by a 4-1 margin.
Republicans know that disenfranchisement disproportionately hits the elderly, the poor, minorities, and college students, all of them Democratic-leaning groups. Republicans therefore strongly oppose efforts to reduce disenfranchisement, and strongly support efforts to increase disenfranchisement under the guise of preventing fraud, even though there's no evidence of actual fraud in significant volume. (Yes, some people who are paid to register voters cheat the sponsors of those drives by pretending to register people who don't exist, but no one has shown a single instance of anyone trying to vote for one of those phantom voters. Paid signature-gathering for petitions has the same problem.)
The Republicans' favorite maneuver is requiring photo ID to vote. After all, you need a driver's license to buy a drink, don't you? (No, actually, you don't, unless you look young.) They seem genuinely unaware that there are in fact lots of people in this country who are eligible to vote but who don't have driver's licenses, and for whom the expense and inconvenience of getting one would be a problem. Even after they've been told, they seem completely unconcerned. Nor does the much wider problem of absentee-ballot fraud, which is practiced mostly by Republicans and which a photo-ID law wouldn't prevent, seem to bother them either. Nor, of course, does systematic vote suppression and voter intimidation. (Naturally, under Ashcroft and Gonzales the Justice Department has gotten less interested in suppression and intimidation and more interested in voting by ineligibles.)
We're all eager to believe things that make our friends look good and our enemies look bad. But the eager credulity of Red Blogistan toward reports of Democratic voter fraud goes beyond what is normal. The whole thing has a distinct odor of bad faith.
Update Glenn Reynolds has updated, which was honorable of him, and linked, which was generous.
Full text of the "dead-tree" version of the story
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Valley's dead cast their votes Statewide database of registered voters has potential for errors and fraud
By John Ferro
Poughkeepsie Journal
Steven T. Vermilye was a home inspector and general contractor who grew up in Westchester County, went to college in Texas and settled in New Paltz in 1971.
David S. Stairs was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and came to the mid-Hudson Valley in 1927, where as a 16-year-old he pounded hot rivets into the New York Central Railroad at Croton-Harmon and then spent 45 years working his way up through Texaco's research center in Glenham.
Betty L. Johnson came from a small town in Virginia and moved to Beacon when she was 17, raised eight children while boxing duct tape at Tuck Tape and working in the kitchen at the Castle Point veterans hospital.
The three mid-Hudson Valley residents had little in common during their lives, but share one thing now: They all have records of casting a vote after they had died.
Names still remain on rolls
The new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.
The Journal's analysis is the first to examine the potential for errors and fraud in New York's three-month-old database. It matched names, dates of birth and ZIP codes in the state's database of 11.7 million voter registration records against the same information in the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File," a database of 77 million records of deaths dating to 1937.
The state database was current as of Oct. 4, the master death index through the second quarter of 2006.
The same process has been used to identify deceased registrants in other states, but is not yet being used in New York.
The numbers do not indicate how much fraud is the result of dead voters in New York, only the potential for it. Typically, records of votes by the dead are the result of bookkeeping errors and do not result in the casting of extra ballots. The Journal did not find any fraud in the local matches it investigated.
"Of course we are concerned about people voting if they are dead," George Stanton, chief information officer for the state Board of Elections, said in an e-mail response.
Stanton said an updated version of the voter list is under development.
"Any tool that will help us maintain a more accurate voter list will be considered for use," Stanton said.
Among the Journal's findings:
The Journal identified dead people on the voter rolls in all 62 counties and people in as many as 45 counties who had votes recorded after they had died.
One address in the Bronx was listed as the home for as many as 191 registered voters who had died. The address is 5901 Palisade Ave., site of the Hebrew Home for the Aged.
Democrats who cast votes after they died outnumbered Republicans by more than a 4-to-1 margin. The reason: Most of them came from Democrat-dominated New York City, where higher population produced more matches.
Anomaly is not unknown
Tales of votes being cast from the grave are part of elections lore. Last year, at least two dead voters were counted in a Tennessee state senate race that was decided by fewer than 20 votes.
As a result of that and other irregularities, seven poll workers were fired, an entire precinct was dissolved and the election results were voided by the state Senate, forcing the removal of the presumed winner. Three elections workers were indicted for faking the votes.
In 1997, a judge declared a Miami mayoral election invalid because of widespread fraud, including dead voters.
In one of the more notorious examples, inspectors estimated as many as 1 in 10 ballots cast in Chicago during the 1982 Illinois gubernatorial election were fraudulent for various reasons, including votes by the dead.
In one reported case, a dead man's signature was clearly spelled out on voting records even though he could only mark an "X" because he had no fingers or thumbs.
In most cases, instances of dead voters can be attributed to database mismatches and clerical errors. For instance, the Social Security Administration admits there are people in its master death index who are not dead.
They include Wappingers Falls resident Hilde Stafford, an 85-year-old native of Germany. The master index lists her date of death as June 15, 1997.
"I'm still alive," she said. "I still vote."
State and federal laws require dead voters to be purged from the rolls, but that requires a tricky balance of commitment and restraint. Failing to do so enhances the opportunity for fraud the case of one person pretending to be another.
Balancing act
"The only reason it's a potential problem is that elections are very contentious," said David Gamache, Dutchess County's Republican elections commissioner. "And there is a reason why the election law takes up almost 500 pages. If there is a way to cheat people, people are going to look at it and see if it is viable and whether or not they should do it."
Removing dead voters also can save boards of elections the cost of sending unnecessary mail-checks and absentee ballots. But overzealous matching can result in legitimate voters being removed.
"It's almost damned if you do, damned if you don't," said Doug Chapin, director of the nonpartisan Election Reform Information Project in Washington. The nonprofit clearinghouse was formed in 2001 with a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts to track election reform developments around the country.
Other states have used the death index to supplement data collected by their health departments.
This year, officials in Washington state used health department records and the death index to remove 19,579 deceased people in the first four months after its statewide database was created. The effort there was underscored by the results of the 2004 gubernatorial election, in which Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire won by 129 votes after two recounts of the more than 2.8 million ballots cast.
Federal mandate
States are creating statewide databases to comply with the Help America Vote Act, the federal legislation that was sparked by the controversy surrounding the 2000 presidential election. The deadline for compliance was Jan. 1.
In March, the U.S. Department of Justice sued New York over its failure to meet that deadline. In response to a court-approved settlement, the state completed a preliminary version of its database in time for the 2006 fall elections. The database merged each of the 62 county files into one. It is updated daily with changes sent in batches by the counties. The final version will allow county officials to log in and make changes directly to the database.
New York has not decided whether it will use the Social Security Administration's database to search for dead voters, according to Stanton, the manager of data processing services for the state board.
Stanton said one concern is the state, by law, can only ask for the last four digits of an applicant's Social Security number.
"Nobody wants to remove someone from the voter rolls who may not be dead," Stanton said. "I got one of those calls once."
For now, the responsibility of removing dead voters falls on county boards of elections. Each month, counties receive a list of recent deaths from the state Health Department and cross-check that information against their rolls. In August, 21 people were removed by Dutchess County's board this way.
System isn't foolproof
That system does not always account for all deaths.
"You are going to miss people that went across the border, who may have gone hunting or fishing someplace" and then died, said Steve Excell, Washington's assistant secretary of state.
In Washington, 5,006 of the nearly 19,579 deceased residents it identified more than one in four would not have been removed from the rolls if the state had not matched their information against the master death index, officials said.
Having deceased residents on the rolls can create records of a vote that never took place. The Journal investigated seven local cases identified in its computerized analysis. Each one was either a database mismatch or an accounting error. The Journal found no examples of fraud.
Stairs, the Glasgow native from Beacon, died June 11, 1998 at the age of 87. Computer records indicate he had voted in the 2002 general election.
After examining poll books, Dutchess County elections officials determined the computer record was the product of an accounting error. A poll worker had filled a line in the poll books that is used to denote the order in which each person voted. For instance, when the 25th person in a district arrives, the poll worker writes the number "25" next to that person's signature.
In Stairs' case, the poll worker had assigned a counter number to him in place of another voter on the same page in the poll book who showed up to vote. When the poll books were scanned into the database, Stairs' record was updated to show he had voted. But no one signed the poll book in Stairs' name, no absentee ballot was received and no vote in his name was counted toward any election results.
"He would have had a laugh over that," his son, David Stairs, said.
Johnson, the Beacon woman, died June 22, 2003, of heart failure. She was 59. Her record indicates she voted in the 2004 general election. The reason: When her daughter, Betty J. Johnson, arrived to vote that day, she signed in her mother's space. In what appears to be a case of mistaken identity, no one noticed the two different signatures and the younger Johnson said she had no idea she had signed for her mother.
"They're still sending my mother's mail," Johnson said.
Boards of elections use mail checks as one way to verify the status of registered voters. If a card is returned by the postal service, the voter is flagged as inactive. That method does not work if the card is not returned if family members are living at the same address and still collecting their deceased parents' mail, for instance.
Ballot was misrecorded
In Ulster County, Vermilye, the general contractor from New Paltz, voted for the last time in his life in 2000. Vermilye had a malignant brain tumor and needed a wheelchair to get around. He asked his daughter, Lydia Weiss, to take him to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Senate primary.
"Something like that with a wheelchair and a 200-plus pound man who was immobilized was no easy endeavor," Weiss said. "He lived five miles away, and the whole thing took maybe an hour and half. The whole reason we went and made such an effort is he thought it was going to be his last. He knew that Hillary had the primary in the bag, but wanted her to have one more vote on her side."
Vermilye lived long enough to cast one more vote, by absentee ballot, in the November general election. He died June 19, 2001, at the age of 54.
So it came as some surprise to his daughter that the Ulster County Board of Elections had a record of him voting in the 2004 general election.
Again, there was no fraud. Ulster officials found an absentee ballot cast by Vermilye's son, Jamie, had mistakenly been added to his father's record.
"I was willing to assume it was a clerical error," Weiss said. "I am so proud to be from New York, and not a state like Florida or Ohio. But it is discouraging to see even a state [such as New York] that hasn't been revealed to have problems that have made it onto the national radar is rife with problems of its own."
John Ferro can be reached at jferro@poughkeepsiejournal.com
How we did it
The Journal identified records of deceased voters by comparing the first name, last name and date of birth in two databases the statewide voter registration database, dubbed Nysvoter1, and the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File."
Nysvoter1 contains 11.7 million records. The master death index has roughly 77 million records of deaths that have been reported to the administration since 1937. The voter list was current as of Oct. 4. The master death index was current as of the end of the second quarter of 2006.
The Journal identified 165,846 matches based on first name, last name and date of birth. Because it is conceivable there could be two people with the same name and date of birth, the Journal narrowed its list to 80,926 matches by cross-checking ZIP code information contained in both databases.
The final estimate of as many as 77,000 deceased registered voters was derived by eliminating any matches whose status was listed as "Purged" in Nysvoter1.
The Journal did not report a specific number because of the potential for database mismatches. The Social Security Administration admits there are people in its master death index who are alive. Typically, these are people who have mistakenly been identified as dead when in fact the person's spouse had died.
Other database mismatches can result from duplicate records for the same person. The Journal found 70 instances in its matches where the same person had two separate records in one of the two databases.
To calculate an estimate of the number of dead voters, the Journal compared the date or year of death in the master index with the last date or year voted in Nysvoter1.
The Poughkeepsie Journal is a left wing Mommystate type of newspaper.
Why would they run this story if it was not true?
thedaddy
Posted by: thedaddy at October 29, 2006 05:48 PM"there are in fact lots of people in this country who are eligible to vote but who don't have driver's licenses, and for whom the expense and inconvenience of getting one would be a problem"
As for expense, the Vote ID bill recently passed by the House specifically provides for government payment of the cost of obtaining ID in those cases where it would have an adverse impact on the voter.
As for convenience, if it is too "inconvenient" for someone to obtain the necessary documentation to vote, is this the sort of voter we want determining the representatives of our nation?
Posted by: mh at October 29, 2006 05:51 PMLet's see, you need ID to cash a check at a bank, pay by check at a store, borrow a book, CD or DVD from a library, and buy alcohol (if you look too young).
Yep, voting's less important than all that.
Posted by: Bill Peschel at October 29, 2006 06:30 PMBut don't you see?
It's not the abuse, it's the POTENTIAL for abuse.
If potential rather than actual abuse was enough to justify compromising a program targeting terrorists, then it should be ample justification for scrutinzing voter rolls.
Posted by: John Dunshee at October 29, 2006 07:32 PMIn Massachusetts, where I live, people who don't have driver's licenses can obtain an official photo ID from the state. It is generally used as a proof-of-age for alcohol-related purposes. I assume it would also serve as proof for voting.
I'm don't know if any other states have a similar ID but I would assume some do.
Posted by: Roger Sweeny at October 29, 2006 07:32 PMThe Democratic party has a long and illustrious history of recruiting dead people to vote. JFK wouldn't have been elected without the support of the deceased in Chicago. Jimmy Carter, in one of his books reminiscing about his early career in politics in Georgia recounted all the dead people he discovered on the rolls. Of course, in those days, Georgia was solidly Democratic.
They've gotten more sophisticated about it but, we got a glimpse of the modern Democratic machine indulging in its gangster politics in the recount of the 2000 Presidential race, when Gore attempted to recount votes only in those districts where he believed he would pick up votes. Johnny Rocco in Key Largo described the game well:
"I made them. Yeah, I made 'em, just like a -- like a tailor makes a suit of clothes. I take a nobody, see? Teach him what to say. Get his name in the papers and pay for his campaign expenses. Dish out a lotta groceries and coal. Get my boys to bring the voters out. And then count the votes over and over again till they added up right and he was elected."
Posted by: Brutus at October 29, 2006 07:46 PMRoger, AFAIK every state has such a program. In most cases the ID is done by the same people on the same machinery as drivers' licenses, and the ID issued is physically identical to a license. All the states require a nominal payment ($10-25) for the ID. In cases where the cost may be an insurmountable burden it can be forgiven. There are also both formal and informal methods of getting support. Hell, I'm a low-income Republican, and if somebody told me they needed $10 to get their state ID I'd probably give it to them. I couldn't do many, though.
No one can cash a check without ID, which means no Social Security, no Medicare/Medicaid, no disability payments, no AFDC or any other welfare, in fact no access to public assistance of any kind. In most places you can't get prescription medicine legally without a legal ID, and few if any doctors will treat people without enough ID to at least create a plausible expectation of payment. Those requirements, plus the crackdown on liquor and cigarette purchases by teenagers, were the motivations for the ID laws in the first place.
There may be a few hundred people in teenyweeny communities 'way out in the country who are known well enough by their neighbors to get by without ID, but it simply can't be done any more in any urban area or even large towns, whether the individual is poor and disadvantaged or not. Even the homeless tend to have ID, though they often throw them away because they, sadly, aren't sane enough to manage their own affairs.
So the sad song of the Left about poor minorities and old people without ID is, simply and flatly, a lie. The question then is the motivation for the lie, and intent to commit fraud is sufficient and plausible. "Liberals" need to come up with another lament. The ratings on that one are abysmal.
Regards,
Ric
I'm not sure a work of fiction is good evidence.
Voter fraud occurs most often in cities, because it's easier there. Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Kansas City are notorious. Chicago used to be, but I don't know if that still holds. Cities are largely Democratic. Even if there is more fraud in cities, it doesn't mean that Democratics are intrinsically more dishonest, just that it's easier to cheat in dense areas.
Dead people still on the voting lists are a problem. Again, it is more likely to be a problem in densely populated areas, where it is harder to keep track of people. That likely gives Democrats more opportunity to abuse the glitches, but I don't know that means they actually have.
The Florida and Ohio stories linked above are long on supposition, short on fact. In the current overheated climate, the fact that groups bring suit and make accusations is not evidence.
So what do you propose we do about people on the rolls who are suspected of no longer being, technically, alive? Because your current position indicates that you agree with the Republicans that there are more dead Democrats on the list, but you oppose attempts to remove them because it might produce errors.
Posted by: Assistant Village Idiot at October 29, 2006 08:14 PMThe post states: "Republicans know that disenfranchisement disproportionately hits the elderly, the poor, minorities, and college students, all of them Democratic-leaning groups."
There is no proof for any of this.
The idea that requiring someone to produce an ID is some kind of "hardship" is such a joke it isn't worth serious discussion.
Posted by: Dexter Westbrook at October 29, 2006 08:31 PMVote early and vote often!
Posted by: Richard Dailey at October 29, 2006 09:00 PMTwo points:
1) Whether voting by inelligible voters is or is not a significant (in numerical terms)issue is a subject of debate. But to the extent that it occurs it is a real problem - and quite obviously an instance of dis-enfranchisement. In a 2 candidate race (which, for all practical purposes, is damn near every race in America), every single vote cast by an inelligible voter disenfranchises one elligible voter who voted for the other candidate.
2) I find it perfectly plausible that Republicans are only pushing for ID checks at the polls because it will result in more Democratic voters dis-qualified. But I also find in perfectly plausible that the only reason Democrats are opposing what otherwise seems to be a commonsense procedural check consistent with good government principles, is that it will result in more Democratic voters dis-qualified.
The height of political immaturity is to spot all of the nefarious maximizing moves by the Other Guy but to suppose that My Guy is fighting them out of selfless regard for capital T Truth.
Posted by: sd at October 29, 2006 09:10 PM"So in fact there's no evidence whatever in the story that dead people voted in New York"
Like there is no evidence whatsoever that there are ANY "who would be disenfranchised by a law requiring photo ID for every voter".
Let's face it, the "voter disenfranchisement" theory peddled here by Klieman is just as theoretical as "voter fraud" theory peddled by Adler.
Posted by: Joe at October 29, 2006 09:52 PMOh, I forgot to mention the most hilarious thing about Klieman's post.
Kleiman says that Glenn "gleefully" linked to Adler's post. What possible evidence of "glee" could there be? Glenn's post consisted of NO COMMENTARY WHATSOEVER. And the portion of Adler's post that Glenn quoted was purely factual in nature.
If you ever wanted evidence of Kleiman's inherent nastiness, this is it. The is no possible basis AT ALL for Kleiman's assertion of Glenn's glee, since Glenn provided no personal thoughts on the matter at all. The only possible explanation is that Kleiman wanted to take a gratuitous swipe at Glenn. There cannot be clearer evidence that Kleiman is just a bad-hearted, nasty person.
Posted by: Joe at October 29, 2006 10:01 PMJoe: You are right to point out that Mr. Kleiman's use of "gleefully" was a non sequitur and likely was based on projection of what he expects he would feel in Mr. Reynolds's situation. However, judging his whole personality on the basis of one injudicious comment seems a bit harsh. Can't you settle for something like "prone to suffer from spite and envy"?
Posted by: sammler at October 29, 2006 11:01 PMAll that you need to do to get picture ID is travel to an authorized agency (usually someplace you can only get to by car, because they issue driver licenses), wait in line for about half a day, produce two picures of yourself with printed identification of yourself (a highschool yearbook or newspaper article that showed your photo) and pay a fee of $35-$50.
I've helped a disabled person do this and it is a real PIB, believe me.
It is very striking that Republicans commenting here haven't learned a thing from the results of stealing two presidential elections.
Far from realizing that democracy is best because it produces better results, they seem to think that Bush is doing a heckuva job. Why do they hate America?
Posted by: serial catowner at October 30, 2006 04:56 AM"gleefully linked to by Glenn Reynolds"
How can you tell when someone's link is 'gleeful'? I asm trying to write a script that only accepts gleeful links and need some help. Thanks in advance!
Posted by: Kevin at October 30, 2006 04:56 AMDarn, I should have read the comments first. I thought I was being original :(
Posted by: Kevin at October 30, 2006 04:57 AMI'm a democrat, and I'm all for a free national ID card issued to every citizen eligible to vote. I'm also for suspending the laws that prevent felons from voting, and for making voting a legal requirement--and for penalizing states and counties that don't get every person to vote. Voting day should be a national holiday, and there should be a paper voting trail for every vote.
I firmly believe under those circumstances democracy would be served. Why will that never be proposed by a republican government or these republican ID freaks? Because they aren't interested in seeing everyone vote--they prefer hidden and obvious hurdles to prevent those who aren't good enough, or those who aren't republican enough, from voting. I'm willing to see the government, and my tax dollars, used to make sure everyone has a usable, free, voter ID and that every single person can vote at a time and place convenient to them--why aren't the republicans?
aimai
Posted by: aimai at October 30, 2006 05:19 AMMaintaining dead voters is very much like maintaining zombie computers, one wants them to still have something of a paper trail in the case of the former and to retain most of their functionality in the case of the latter. People who are dead but still show up as live on the SS rolls are actually far more valuable and far more difficult to detect.
As for felon voting, I don't particularly feel happy with the idea of Charles Manson contributing his electoral voice. That strikes me as horribly flawed.
Posted by: TM Lutas at October 30, 2006 06:04 AMI am firmly AGAINST forcing everyone to vote. There is no way to ensure everyone who votes is informed about the issues; by forcing the ignorant to vote, you increase the number of votes by people who either don't care or are being completely manipulated. How can this be good for anyone in the political arena?
Incidentally, Louisiana has held most elections on Saturdays for a long time--that certainly hasn't helped their turnout or helped in producing competant leaders.
Posted by: Tom at October 30, 2006 06:23 AM"is this the sort of voter we want determining the representatives of our nation?"
Dear mh -
The Founding Fathers made no such distinictions among the citizens to whom they gave the right to vote. The implicitly moral test of fitness that propose can, of course, be justly applied only by a moral elite. And who would that be? Oh, obviously you. But who else? What if you are sick or dead? Who else belongs to the moral elite? Wouldn't it be safer to put the definition of the moral elite in the Constitution?
Actually, Michael, the Founders let the determination of who could vote be made by the States; most of the States used a property qualification, a knowledge qualification, or both.
I don't see how you could get through life with no ID. If you have a bank account, you needed ID to open it, and need ID to withdraw from it; if you don't have a bank account, you need ID to cash a check, and to access social services. Is there really a significant number of mentally-competent people who do not ever receive a check of some kind?
Posted by: SamChevre at October 30, 2006 06:47 AMJonathan Adler has also updated and linked.
Posted by: SamChevre at October 30, 2006 06:56 AMSeveral commenters above are exactly right: You can't get Medicaid, welfare, unemployment, and a bunch of other benefits without ID. But for the most part you can't get a job or open a bank account without ID either. So who are these people who are so desperately poor that 1) they don't have a job; 2) don't have a bank account; 3) don't have a car; 4) never engage in any of the many societal activities that require an ID; and 5) can't even afford $10 bucks to get an ID, but at the same time, 6) spurn all of the government welfare programs that also require an ID? And despite the fact that they live on nuts and berries in a cave in Wyoming, or somewhere similarly disconnected from the rest of the world, they nevertheless intend to vote, such that an ID requirement would disfranchise them?
Come on. Try to make up something more believable than that. If you want evidence that dead Democrats have voted, give some solid evidence that one actual voter in the entire country is going to be disfranchised by a properly-crafted ID requirement.
Posted by: John Doe at October 30, 2006 07:06 AMI've always found it harder to register to vote, and vote than to get a ID.
All honest people should be in favor of ID, and computer programs that assist honest voting.
I'd like to see a story on say New Yorkers getting absentee ballots for New York and voting at their winter home in Florida. How much of that goes on? One vote, one time for one election.s
Posted by: Paul at October 30, 2006 08:18 AMaimai --
I lean more conservative, but here's what I think. ID, along with the measures inacted by the House to prevent it from disenfranchising the poor (hey, I was a broke college student not too long ago), should be required to vote. But a human-readable paper-trail should be required of every ballot to prevent voter error, programmer error, and malicious fraud (I'm not buying into one party controlled electronic machines; I've seen each side blaming the other and it's counterproductive). Furthermore, while I've liked the idea of national holidays, let's face it: people have to work during national holidays, too, and it's the hourly worker that sees the most of it. A different idea that I'd heard is a requirement that every full-time employee who has a shift during polling hours must be allowed time off to go vote.
I'm not for suspending the laws against felons voting, but I think there ought to me a much more clear-cut method for return of voting rights to prior felons who have cleaned up their act. I also don't think that people should be forced to vote -- some people don't want to vote if they don't know the issues, some people don't want to vote if they don't like the candidates, and I think these are valid reasons. Furthermore, by inforcing penalties on the counties that don't have everyone voting, you set the stage for rampant fraud (Question: Voter A was in a car crash and is in a coma. Now what? Answer: Vote for him!).
So, does Mark actually have any evidence that absentee ballot fraud is practiced mostly by Republicans, or is this just a partisan cheapshot?
In California, there is a sitting Democrat State Senator (Ed Vincent) who was found by a court (published opinion, called Hardeman v. Thomas) to have been personally involved in absentee ballot fraud in an Inglewood city council election while he was Inglewood mayor. He was coercing elderly voters (mainly women) into voting as he told them to or giving him their unmarked ballots (with signed ballot envelopes). After leaving the Inglewood mayorship but before being elected to the State Senate, he served in the State Assembly, where he chaired the Elections and Reapportionment Committee.
That's the sort of wink-and-a-nod at fraud that tars an entire party, not just one individual.
Nick
Posted by: NickM at October 30, 2006 10:38 AMOne of the most famous cases of a vote being stolen by absentee ballot is the vote for mayor of Miami in 1997, where Xavier Suarez, the Democrat, was found to have cheated his way to victory by way of absentee ballots, as determined in court by uncontradicted statistical evidence. His election was overturned by Florida courts and the Republican, Joe Carollo, eventually declared the winner. The passage of the 1998 state voter fraud law was a direct consequence of the Miami election, and the law was an effort to prevent it from happening again. In addition:
An expert documents examiner, Linda Hart, concluded that 225
illegal absentee ballots were cast, in contravention of statutory
requirements.[fn3] An FBI agent with 26 years of
experience, Hugh Cochran, identified 113 confirmed false voter
addresses. There was evidence of 14 stolen ballots, and of 140
ballots that were falsely witnessed.[fn4] In addition,
evidence was presented that more than 480 ballots were procured
or witnessed by the 29 so-called "ballot brokers" who invoked
their privilege against self-incrimination instead of testifying
at trial.[fn5]
URL: http://election2000.stanford.edu/inreprotest.html
If , in the 2000 election, Republicans in Florida were fearful of widespread Democratic voter fraud, they were more than justified in feeling this way. Nor did it help matters when elected Democratic officials in the four Gore counties decided, more than once, to change the standards by which they were counting paper ballets. Nor did it help that they tried to disenfranchise enlisted men and women. And gee, Miami? Isnt it located in one of the contested counties? Its also the city were Democratic officials at one point tried to count the ballots behind closed doors.
"I'm also for suspending the laws that prevent felons from voting, and for making voting a legal requirement--and for penalizing states and counties that don't get every person to vote."
Tyranny exists when that which is not forbidden is required.
Posted by: Jason at October 30, 2006 10:44 AM"by forcing the ignorant to vote, you increase the number of votes by people who either don't care or are being completely manipulated. How can this be good for anyone in the political arena?"
I have noticed that there are two different views of voting in a Democracy.
One view is that it's a mechanism for setting policy and chosing the people who run the government. From this perspective, ideally you only want informed, engaged people voting, and the idea that people who can be easily discouraged from voting are actually contributing something valuable with their vote, rather than just noise in the system, is absurd.
The other view is that voting is some kind of mystical legitimizing process, and that it really doesn't matter if the people casting that vote have the slightest clue as to the issues and candidates, the only thing that matters is that they participated.
I've noticed that most opponents of voter ID belong to the latter school of thought.
Posted by: Brett Bellmore at October 31, 2006 06:13 PM"No one can cash a check without ID [...]"
People keep saying this, and it simply isn't true. I've had an online-only bank account for two years now. I've never met a rep. from the bank, never faxed them anything, and never mailed them anything other than a signature card and checks.
They have never seen my ID. You can get a similar account from a number of providers (I'm not going to link, so as to avoid looking like a spammer, but google it, you can't miss them) trivially.
It is either ignorant or dishonest to keep asserting this.
Posted by: fishbane at November 1, 2006 10:47 PMAnd you've taken these checks to somebody, and gotten cash in return for them, without ID? Which is what "cashing" a check means?
Nobody ever said you had to have ID to deposit checks.
It was clearly implied (if not stated outright) that ID was neccessary to practically anything, so not having an ID was not an option for most people and anyone who said it was hard was being disingenious, if not outright lying.
If you use a debit/credit card (i.e. Visa logo) from a bank where you have always had an account (like my mother has), and have everything deposited by mail (like my mother and most of her friends), then not only do you not need to have a driver's licence, but going downtown to DMV in NYC, waiting for up to 5 hours (the least I ever waited for DL/ID issues: there is usually only 1 window open, and 10's to 100's of people)is going to represent a very different experience than going to her polling place (3 blocks), Grocery store (2 blocks and she's shopped there for years and they know her on sight and no-one ever asks for her ID) etc. etc.
I can't imagine it would be that much different from the resident of a small town in (for example) rural Georgia, known to all but no DMV within 25 miles. Or Miles City, MT. Or and small town OR large city in the US.
It IS hard to get to DMV if you don't drive. And you really don't need a DL/ID for most of your life. Just ask a few people who manage it. Actually go into the innner city and ASK. You'll be surprised. But typically it's the Dems who do this, not the Reps.
Posted by: John Beaty at November 4, 2006 01:43 PMAnd Brett, is it you who decides what a well-informed voter knows? Or me? How do you tell if a voter is well-informed? Do they vote like you? The opposite? Is it polling that tells you? Have you surveryed voters to find out?
Also, how do you know about this mystical process relating to voting being a characteristic of people who are against Voter ID? Any studies you'd like to bring up?
Jason, the comment was:
"penalizing STATES and COUNTIES that don't get every person to vote."(Emphasis mine)
This is not the same as penalizing people who don't vote. We already penalize STATES for not getting people to obey the speed limit.
I don't know about other states, but in California it has been a state law for as long as I can remember, that every person in the state over the age of 18 MUST have state issued ID. If the law already requires people to have government issued ID, then what is the problem with showing it before you vote. Remeber, if you don't have government issued ID then you are already in violation of the law. Should law violators be allowed to vote?
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