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Allegations of Voter Fraud

Foreclosures Could Cost Votes

By Thaddeus Kromelis – 07/29/08

We don't need more reasons to worry about foreclosure rates. Digby, nonetheless, citing this AP/CBSnews.com story, provides one: the high rate of foreclosures in Ohio and the affect election officials believe it could have on their voting rolls. (Digby cited the voting issue in the context of a 7/26 longer posting on Hans von Spakovsky, "legal disenfranchisement" and "voter fraud.") There's concern that a wave of voters, still registered to their former—foreclosed—address, will show up to the polls on election day. This could lead to a number of pre-election challenges or a whole lot of voters casting provisional ballots in Ohio.

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Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, Election Day Issues, Other Voter List Issues, Purges, Voter Registration Drives

Thrilling! But No Sequel, Please.

By Michael Waldman – 05/23/08

I just sat through a nail-biting, emotionally exhausting two hour TV movie.  The opening ten minutes were especially nerve-wracking.  The film begins with elderly Floridians squinting at their butterfly ballots, then stabbing at the ballots, scary music playing, over and over, voting by accident for Pat Buchanan.  Think of the shower scene in "Psycho" with your grandmother instead of Janet Leigh. Even more exciting: would the panting, lurching advance man catch up with Al Gore before he walked onstage to concede?

Maybe not everybody would find this as thrilling.  But Recount,which airs on HBO this Sunday, is one of the better political movies I've ever seen.  It "gets" the motives and methods of political players better than anything in years.  More relevant to the work of the Brennan Center, it brings to life the ways our elections can go wrong, and the rickety and often corrupt machinery by which we still cast and count votes.

(Full disclosure: I am an old colleague and friend of Ron Klain, the protagonist; I see GOP lawyer Ben Ginsberg at the beach many summers; and I go duck hunting with James Baker every year.  Well, that part isn't true. But like anyone involved in politics, back then I had a rooting interest in the outcome of the recount.) 

The narrative crackles and does a good job portraying the legal machinations that led to the Supreme Court's 5–4 intervention to stop the counting, thus making George W. Bush President.  It's all here, from the "Brooks Brothers riot" in which Republican congressional staffers shut down the counting in Miami, to the frenzied efforts to read and understand the Supreme Court opinion that announced its reasoning only applied to this case.  The acting is terrific, and the dialogue is sharp and as profane as real life politics (and HBO).

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Tags: Democracy, Voting After Criminal Conviction, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, Other Voter List Issues, Purges, Voting Technology

Well It’s My Birthday Too

By Justin Levitt – 04/24/08

If you weren't reading carefully, then you might have missed an important nugget in a voter fraud story buried in Tuesday's presidential primary coverage. It was in a piece Connecticut's Hartford Courant ran entitled "Dead Voters?" (Note the punctuation, more on that all-important question mark in a moment.)

The report concerned a research project to track down dead voters on the state voting rolls. The researchers first tried to match up computer lists of dead people to computerized voting records, comparing names and birthdates from one list to the other.

Most times, this would have been the end of the research—and you'd have seen screaming headlines about rampant voter fraud. So many matches, so many illegal votes. We saw stories like this, trolling for dead people or double voters by trying to match records from place to place, in 2000, in 2004, in 2005, in 2006. And we'll probably see them again this year.

These stories all share a common problem: trying to identify individuals by computerized matching of names and birthdates isn't all that reliable. Even if the underlying information is accurate—and the lists of who voted, or who is dead, often have mistakes—the matching exercise itself may get the answer wrong.

For example, people are often surprised to find out how many different people have the same name and birthdate. With just 23 people in a room, it's more likely than not that two will share the same birthday (month and day). Throw in the year, and—as proven in a new article on the statistics of double voting (disclosure: I'm the co-author)—the number is about 180.

Which means that if you've got 180 "John Smith"s or "Manuel Rodriguez"s, at least two of them will probably be namesakes with the same birthdate.  When you start comparing millions of voters to millions of other people, you start picking up doppelgängers everywhere. Finding a few name-and-birthdate matches in lists of millions of people shows statistical probability at work, not fraud.

Which is why the researchers behind yesterday's Courant article should be commended for their unusual follow-up. The extent to which their overall match numbers are inflated by the birthdate problem, or other match errors, is not clear—as they noted. But they also recognized that the overall numbers represented the start of an investigation, not the conclusion. With a list of 100 suspects, the researchers apparently applied a substantial amount of shoe leather, tracking down the actual facts behind the voters in question and beyond the match. And lo and behold: "Although the investigation found no evidence of deliberate fraud, it uncovered numerous errors in voting and registration records kept by local registrars."

So, thanks to a little more effort than usual, we know the answer to the headline's question. Dead voters? No. Responsible research? So it would seem.

Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, Other Voter List Issues

Voter ID: Tamping Down Turnout

By Chisun Lee – 11/13/07

*Cross-posted from Huffington Post's OffTheBus

You'd think that with a presidential election looming next year, people would pay more attention to the restrictive voter ID laws that keep popping up across the country. These laws will play a big role in determining who can and cannot vote in the 2008 election. And anyone who thinks the officials pushing strict new ID laws must have sound reasons might pause for a moment on the example of Justice Department voting rights chief John Tanner.

Last month, he said "statistically," ID requirements that disenfranchise the elderly who do not have, and cannot easily get driver's licenses, would not harm racial minorities, because "minorities don't become elderly the way white people do - they die first." He said "the math is," a measure that "disproportionately impacts the elderly has the opposite impact on minorities."

His reasoning won him a congressional grilling. A member from his boss's party demanded to know if his "statement was supported by empirical data." Tanner could only say, "I . . . apologize."

Yes, Tanner is the nation's top voting rights enforcer. He is also the one giving the green light to certain state voter ID restrictions proposed in the last few years, despite warnings from his veteran staffers that these laws would unfairly and impermissibly restrict the right to vote. Proponents insist the new measures are necessary to combat rampant "voter fraud"--a claim that holds up as well as Tanner's "math."

This reasoning will be tested in a Supreme Court battle this term over Indiana's new voter ID law and some dozen others waiting in the wings. Depending on the outcome, millions of voters could face ID restrictions in the 2008 presidential election.

Indiana's law is among the most severe of the new genre. It forbids citizens from casting a regular ballot if they cannot produce an unexpired, government-issued photo ID that matches registration records. Utility bills and other documents previously allowed for identification would no longer be valid; neither would military IDs or even Congressional IDs.

The widespread adoption of ID restrictions could effectively bar millions of citizens from voting. Over 10 percent of Americans lack a current driver's license, passport, or comparable photo ID, according to a 2006 survey analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice. Certain groups are more likely not to have ID: the elderly, for instance (over 6 million nationally lack ID), the poor (15 percent of adults earning less than $35,000 annually), and racial minorities (over 5.5 million African Americans nationally).

The majority of Americans who have ID may find it difficult to believe so many don't. But in Wisconsin, almost a quarter of seniors, 59 percent of Latinas, and nearly 80 percent of young black men don't have a driver's license. Obtaining ID can cost money and workday time and require supporting documentation - such as a birth certificate - that may be difficult or even impossible to get.

Federal appellate judge Richard Posner, who wrote to uphold the Indiana law , put it squarely: "[M]ost people who don't have photo ID are low on the economic ladder." Posner nevertheless opted to uphold the law, and thus propelled the case towards the Supreme Court, demonstrates the power of the voter fraud myth.

Supporters of ID requirements say they are necessary to stop voter impersonation at Indiana's polls. Yet as the state's lawyers concede, there has never been a single documented instance of voter impersonation in the history of Indiana. Nationally, voter impersonation happens about as often as someone gets killed by lightning - in the 2004 election in Ohio, for instance, once in 2.5 million votes. Maybe that's because voter fraud is already punishable by a $10,000 fine and five years in prison, and there's just very little to gain from pretending to be another voter.

Asked by the Indianapolis Star to explain the state's lack of impersonation evidence, Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita gave this Tannerist response: There is no proof of voter impersonation, because voter impersonation "is hard to prove." Rokita nonetheless insisted the ID law is sound policy "[w]hether you want to believe fraud exists or not."

But investigations into alleged voter fraud - from Missouri to New Hampshire to Wisconsin, and beyond - consistently reveal that the problem is bad bureaucracy not bad, or fraudulent voters.

Those who input data botch birth dates and misspell names. Computers and officials, failing to realize that people commonly share names or birthdays or sometimes both, flag mere coincidences as "fraud." Dead voters turn out to be alive. So-called "vacant-lot voters" often live in legitimate residences, but on property with outdated commercial zoning. And, most commonly, state databases don't keep track of voters who move or pass away.

These problems scream for solutions - mainly, better administration, which existing but under-implemented federal law already requires. But none has anything to do with people showing up at the polls pretending to be other people.

It might still be okay for Indiana to police an imaginary problem - Posner calls this "preventive action" - were it not for the constitutional protections for fundamental rights.

Requiring official photo ID is an exclusionary policy premised on a phantom menace. It won't fix real problems, but it will sacrifice real people's fundamental right to vote.

Tags: Democracy, Voting Rights & Elections, Allegations of Voter Fraud, Voter ID