Is Voter Fraud Everywhere?

Bernie Thomas, the Baltimore Examiner News and Traffic Examiner, diverged a bit into the voter fraud fray. The story is worth a read and the video clips worth watching. As with everything on the internet, though, keep your critical thinking cap on.

A couple of minor points, if I may, on the combined article:

Voter ID was challenged and ended up getting to the Supreme Court. At no level in the trial process did the opponents produce one witness who was deprived of their vote because they showed without ID or stayed home because they did not have ID. It is a theory, not supported by evidence.

Registered voters are not removed from the voter rolls because of foreclosure. A person may challenge the residency of a voter, but if the voter produces acceptable evidence of residency in the precinct or election district, they will be permitted to vote without prejudice or further checking. If the voter does not have evidence, but is a registered voter, they will be permitted to vote a provisional ballot and take up to six days to show up at the election office with their evidence. What is evidence? Governments ID, a current bill from a utility or correspondence from a government agency to the claimed residence are acceptable. The challenged voter can display a voter registration card, a social security card, or an employee photo ID. The only legal basis for a challenge is the identity of the voter, not their residency.

Voter-roll purges are not an evil designed by the Republican Party. Changing your address with the Board of Elections is low on most people's priorities when they are moving. If the move takes place within the state, the system will catch up with them when they show at a poll or they will get a prod when they change their drivers' license address or vehicle registration.

The story relates no identified unlawful voters. Not true now. Voters have been identified in several states. Perhaps the AAG in the story was fired for not doing a good job. Government appointees are often fired without any explanation of cause. All of those so fired will plead no fault in their work. All of their superiors will privately find fault with the employee.

The story also mentions something that greatly concerns me. ACORN checks 100% of the voter registrations that their agents collect. Someone other than an election official is looking at those applications before the voter is registered. Who can say that the applications were completed? Who can say that the information reflects the registrant's wishes? What if the registrar advises the registrant, correctly, that they need not affiliate with a party?

Many, many people believe two things about party affiliation. One is that their party primary is always distinct from the primary for other parties. This true in some states, but not in all. The other thing is that they must vote only for candidates of their party, even in the General Election. This last belief ends up in people not voting when they are unsatisfied with party nominee. However, in this case, we have the opportunity for ACORN staffers to review applications and send on the ones they want, with the potential to assign party affiliation. Increases in a party's registrations results in the other party's members staying home. Voter suppression is the technical term for this.

Voter-roll accuracy requires a great deal of coordination between many agencies of governance and the Board of Elections in each county in the country. People who move, people who die, people convicted of felonies, people who served their punishments are all classes of voters whose records should be updated.

Some convicted felons lose the vote. (Are these the people we want choosing our leaders and setting our policies?) The courts are required to notify the Board of Elections of felony convictions. When the felon has served their time and made required restitution, the right to vote should be returned. We ask the voter to notify the Board of Elections to ensure that the voter registers in the correct Election District so that they receive the full right to vote an entire ballot.

Dead people rarely notify their local board. The folks who settle the estate rarely think about notifying the local board. Surely, the Department of Health will take care of that. Until recently, there was no requirement for such notifications. Now, when the notification comes, a typo in an eighty-year-old birth certificate may result in no-match with the voter registration record. The typo issue can work both ways, by the way. Local Boards have received notice of a death with absentee ballots sent in by spouses. Some of the ballots are voted! Can a dead person vote by absentee ballot if the Board of Elections isn't aware of the death? Can a spouse who does not like the other's vote report them dead on the ballot? Can a spouse or caretaker vote an absentee ballot after the death of the voter? Presently, there is no way the local board of elections can know.

(In Maryland, there is a ballot question to amend the state Constitution to permit early voting. If a person votes early, and dies before Election Day, should their vote count? How would we know which vote not to count since every ballot is secret? Can you say, "Early voting is another bad idea."?)

. . . Fear Itself, and Absentee Ballots

Professor Schaller makes several good points against early voting, all of them valid. The proposal in Question 1 has the additional downside of placing the early voting locations in places not necessarily friendly to all voters in the county.

Let's look at some additional factors. Ballots are not finalized until forty-five days before the election, provided that the courts do not uphold one of the several challenges to questions and issues proposed for a ballot.

Each county, as has been pointed out by Marylander, does not use the same ballot. Even within an election district in Baltimore County, there will be more than one ballot. This is worse during Gubernatorial Primaries and General Elections. Adjacent election precincts can have different State senators and Delegates, different Congressional Representatives, different County Council Members and more. To have forty different ballots in a county is not unreasonable. This bill allows any registered voter to vote anywhere in the state! Good luck getting all of the ballots in the state to every county polling place.

Beyond the logistics of producing, printing, distributing and securing ballots, there are the voting equipment, staffing and security issues. Local boards currently pull hens teeth to get an adequate number of election judges and train them before and for one Election Day. This question requires judges for ten days before the election.

The real problem with this question lies in the other part of it.

Absentee ballots are the most fraud prone of all voting methods. It is bad that a person not entitled to vote can cast a vote and cancel the vote of a legally qualified citizen. Most people illegally present in the country do not want to call attention to themselves, but there are significant numbers in some precincts that will lie on the application regarding citizenship and vote.

The less risky way for those voters and those who would try to influence the election results through fraud is through the Absentee vote. Let me explain.

A person not entitled to vote registers fraudulently, and then requests an absentee ballot. They execute the ballot and mail it in, never having to risk physical apprehension or identification and challenge. They merely submit a copy of the driver's license issued by the MVA to thousands of aliens every day. But it can be worse.

An organization of individuals could obtain a list of voters, active and inactive, from the local board of elections. They could then identify individuals who, by their history, are not likely to vote. The perpetrators of the fraud would then send in a change of address for each identified voter. When the change is effective, they send in a request for an absentee ballot and then vote that ballot. If the voter shows up at the precinct, the poll book will show that an absentee ballot was requested and the voter will vote a provisional ballot.

Absentee ballots are counted on the Thursday after the election. While that counting is going on, the Provisional Ballots are reviewed and entered into the election files. If an absentee ballot has been received, the provisional ballot is rejected. The fraudulent absentee ballot is counted. The real voter is confused. Confidence in the electoral system is undermined. Very few voters will have shown up and even fewer will challenge what happened. None of the votes will be changed because the systems ensure that each ballot counted is not identifiable with a voter.

What if such an effort only resulted in fifteen votes in each precinct? There are 219 precincts in Baltimore County. Fifteen fraudulent votes in each would result in 3285 votes.

There are about 487,570 registered voters in the county according to the State Election website as of October 1, 2008. If there is 75% turnout, 365,678 voters, one percent could be fraudulent. The numbers could easily be higher without raising an alarm.

In the past ten Presidential elections there have been, on average, five states with more than fifty electoral votes total that have been decided by less than one percent of the popular vote. Those numbers could have changed three of those elections.

I do not have actual vote totals for the states in those ten elections, but I think that several states might have turned on less than one percent of the vote. This is how an election can be stolen with the help of legislatures.

Instead of making it easy to register and vote, we should make it harder for frauds to be committed. Perhaps we can ask for new signatures every five years. Or, sit down for this one, requiring a photo id at the polls and with absentee ballots. Copies are easy to get. A person's agent can take the id to the local copy center, library, post office, or law office to get one.

States should spend the money on signature recognition software and hardware. It's on the market. It processes the applications and flags the signatures that don't match for a human to deal with. Currently, we rely on humans, very few of them and none of them trained in handwriting analysis, to catch this. The results are abysmal.

By the way, it is not the ACORN attempts to register Mickey Mouse and the NFL Cowboys that will result in fraudulent votes. It is the fictitious persons, registered by mail with fraudulent identification cards, made for just that purpose, which will defraud the voters.

Voter Registration Numbers Are Not Reliable Indicators of Results

On October 5, 2008 Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks blogged about the voter registration for young people in Maryland. This was preceded on October 2 with a post about an elected Republican changing his party affiliation to unaffiliated and the dire condition of the Republican Party in Maryland.

Dan: Some facts.

The State Board of Elections didn't whimsically reinstate a policy allowing 17-year-olds to cast ballots or register to vote. The Attorney General opined that since someone who was eighteen on General Election Day could vote in that election, the same person should be entitled to vote in the Primary Election that selected the nominees for the ensuing General Election.

In Baltimore County, Republican registrations had been gaining on Democrats for the ten years prior to 2004. The gains were in hundredths of points, but they occurred every month.

In the last five months, the months for which I have figures handy, the Democrats have been registering three for every Republican registrant. Unaffiliated registrations were running even with Republicans, but in the last four months have been edging to a 1.25:1 ratio.

Your conclusions about what is happening and mine differ. Registrations have tended to follow the money. One party control of government always drove registrations. I know it is hard to believe, but many people are sure that their party affiliation affects their earning ability. I have lost two jobs in quasi and state government based on my affiliation. I have never gotten a job because of that.

First, let's get rid of the affiliated bases, the eighty percent of all voters who are Republican or Democrat.

Of the remainder, in Maryland, people register as Democrats to maintain jobs and receive contracts. They also donate to campaigns for those reasons. People who wish to avoid problems with affiliation register as unaffiliated. People who wish to staunch the flow of campaign literature register as unaffiliated. (This no longer works as it did decades ago because all campaigns target the unaffiliated.) One of my sons registered as unaffiliated out of a) rebellion, b) a desire not to be pigeonholed by others, and c) to avoid partisan mail. He received more mail than the three affiliated voters in the house did!

Democrats were very aggressive in conducting voter registration drives in high schools and colleges in the last four years. They were particularly effective in 2008. On Primary Election Day, people were flooding into election precincts demanding to be allowed to register and vote, or to vote in the Democrat Primary in spite of their registration as Republican or something other than Democrat. How this plays out in the General Election cannot be known.

Historically, the elections that had great turnout were the elections that presented contests to the voters. People stay home if the result is a foregone conclusion. However, if there is a contest the proverbial wild horses will not keep them home. In this respect, the media hold the cards. Gore was declared dead four weeks out. Same for Kerry. Then, the media kicked in with new poll numbers and people showed up in unprecedented numbers and the races were all too close.

During the 2008 Democrat Primary, the media declared Hilary dead in January, and then discussed how close each subsequent race was. Voter turnout was through the roof. If you build a race, they will come.

As for conclusions about Maryland, let me point to the last four gubernatorial contests. The registration numbers for each gave the Democrats a 2:1 advantage going in, but no result was even close to that. Every race was decided in single digits. My conclusion: registration numbers in one party states do not provide a sound indication of the results of political contests.