Voter Fraud
Mum is certainly the word on voter fraud in most places. While it is reasonable to be concerned about a legitimate voter being denied access to vote it is equally reasonable to be concerned about voter fraud. In a story from the SF Chronicle mail-in ballots are all the rage. No doubt the mail-in option is quite popular. Of California’s 16.1 million voters more than five million will vote by mail. And it seems that in a time when illegal immigration and identity theft are major issues the obvious relationship to voter fraud is dismissed. Yet those crying foul about legitimate voters and the possibility of being denied the right to vote receives considerable attention. The few public officials advocating careful scrutiny of voter registration are being criticized as adding to the probability of someone being denied their right to vote but the concern about voter fraud is muted. Is it that you cannot be concerned about both problems or simply the overall task of insuring fairness at the polls?
“We’re getting inundated with new and revised registrations,” said Guy Ashley, a spokesman for the Alameda County registrar of voters office. “We’re getting as many as 3,000 a day to process.” Is the popularity of mail-in or absentee ballots due to convenience and cost-savings for the government or that the fraudsters who would love to rig an election found a new partner in crime? By now everyone should be familiar with the accounts of voter fraud by a group for whom Barack Obama once worked called ACORN. Apparently the ‘reform now’ aspect of this ‘association of community organizations’ is to register dead people, file other fictitious registration forms and register the underage among other frauds. And yet there is no national outrage and call for enforcement of legal voter registration.
What is the act of voting like in your locale? Here is a scenario for you. You arrive at the designated polling place on election day. After entering the building you get in line with other voters heading to a table staffed with volunteers armed with voter registration records. When it is your turn one of the volunteers asks you for your name and address. You tell the volunteer your name and address and they look it up on their printed lists. Once found you are given a paper slip and a blank ballot to take to the voting booth. When you are finished you place the ballot in a machine and place the voting slip with other ones before you exit the polling place.
The details may be different at other polling places but the process is probably similar. In the example above, how do the volunteers know whether or not a voter is legitimate? They probably do not. They know that someone gave them a name and an address and it was on their list. The voter was then allowed to vote. If another person comes in using the same name and address they would probably be denied access. But what if a fraudster came in first? There would probably be an investigation of some kind and the results may be inadequate. But what would happen if another name was presented for that same address? Could someone present an accepted personal identification with that address and be given the right to vote? By now you certainly get the point. Whether state of the art or relatively primitive means of registration the voter rolls could be populated with an alarming number of fraudulent registrations. So where’s the outrage? More to the point, where’s the solution? Here is a typical concern on voter registration from HuffPo. They present their five top reasons you will not be able to vote. The author of this post has been voting for nearly four decades including several relocations and never had a problem with it. Voting was always done at the designated polling place.
1. 27 states close their voter registration the first week of October.
2. The Social Security Administration shuts down their database for three days which is used for checking voter regs without state issued IDs.
3. A claim that election officials routinely ‘purge’ millions of voters from the rolls.
4. The accuracy of voting machines
5. Long lines at the polls
No where in the list above is a concern about voter fraud listed. To be fair, at least HuffPo’s 4th item is a valid concern. Just as valid as any concern about voter fraud. What is the simple answer for their number one item? Don’t wait forever and expect the system to accommodate you. Register early and be conscientious enough to plan ahead. Think a little.
Their number two reason is as lame as the number one. If you apply for voter registration well enough in advance of an election there should be no problem with verifying your information. Whether that verification is able to catch fraudulent registrations is another question. This blog has absolutely no opinion on HuffPo’s number three. The accuracy of the claim and the source presenting it are unknown here. As for long lines at the polls it is the understanding here that polls will remain open beyond their stated closing time if people are in the building by that time. Perhaps that includes those waiting outside if the lines are that long. Based on the pathetic percentage of eligible voters who make it to the polls overall the long line complaint seems weak.
Again, the point is there seems to be a shortage of concerns being raised about voter fraud.
Stanford Matthews
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