Voter fraud is a “myth,” cont.
Matt seems vexed that conservatives (like myself) refuse to admit that throwing around allegations of voter fraud is akin to intimidating voters into not exercising the franchise, or some such. From the first (of two) posts on the subject Friday:
What’s needed to make a real case for voter fraud is instances of people actually voting fraudulently — people who aren’t registered to vote voting, or people voting multiple times. But year after year nobody can ever find more than a trivial number of instances of fraudulent voting. Instead, the issue is raised every year in order to raise barriers to voting by perfectly eligible voters.
I think there’s some common ground to be had here: yes, the numbers of actual instances of people casting fraudulent ballots seems to be minimal, but it does happen, right? And efforts should be taken to stop this from occurring, yes? There is another example of fraudulent registration forms being submitted by ACORN again today:
Hamilton County received more than 160,000 documents this year related to voter registration and change of address. Of the more than 40,000 documents received from ACORN, about 10,000 have been duplicates and many have come back with invalid addresses. Of the remaining documents “I do believe fictitious ones are registered,” said Williams “We don’t cross check this. That’s supposed to be done on a state-wide database. So if that isn’t done, we don’t have the resources to do it.”
He said multiple registrations came in with the same name, but slightly different addresses or birth dates. His office has received calls from people saying they never filled out a registration card. [Emphasis mine]
Now, we can argue all day about the real-life impact of voter fraud on elections. I think it’s safe to say that, in a state that is sure to be close, as Ohio is, that even a few hundred fraudulent ballots (a “trivial” number, out of the hundreds of thousands cast) could make a huge difference. Therefore it should be a priority to get fraudulently registered voters off of the roles for the good of the democratic process. When someone casts a fraudulent ballot it’s the same thing as taking a rightfully cast ballot and throwing it in the trash.
But wanting to stop fraudulent ballots from being cast has nothing to do with racism, or suppressing voter turnout, or any other evil plot. What annoys me about Yglesias’s posts on the subject is his assumption that the other side is a collection of malignant racists simply trying to disenfranchise poor black people. It never even occurs to him that there might be, y’know, a principle to uphold.
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4 Comments - add your own
Mike P — October 13, 2008 at 11:35 am
There’s certainly a principal to be upheld and we should all strive to make sure nothing untoward is going on. But, just as we’ve seen with the economic meltdown, there is a little bit of evidence that race does play a part in this (if only at the edges). Recently we’ve seen some on the right attempt to lay the blame for the subprime meltdown squarely at the feet of blacks and other minorities and, with voter registration, we often see Republicans challenging their validity in areas that are usually heavily African-American.
Of course, that is not to say that Republicans are all racists or anything of the like. But I think you’re just seeing a collision of some facts (bad loans did have a lot to do with what happened, but the reasons for why those loans were made isn’t the fault of the people who received them; since blacks vote Democratic in large numbers, it makes sense that Republicans would want to make sure registrations were valid) with projection or wanting to find a scapegoat.
Mark A — October 14, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Sure there are principles to uphold, but some people also want to uphold the principle that everyone should be able to vote easily, which is why they run these registration drives.
You’re concerned about fraudulent registrations, and that’s great, but don’t take it so far as to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And for goodness-sake don’t use it for partisan ends.
We can’t just wave a magic wand and make groups like ACORN disappear and thus disenfranchise many, many more legitimate voters than there are fradulent ballots.
The point Yglesias is making is that the efforts of groups like ACORN are overwhelmingly positive in that most registrations and the vast magority of actual votes cast are legitimate. Basically, if the ratio of good-to-bad registrations is something like 100 to 1, it’s a big plus. If a more significant portion of ACORN registrations were fraudulent, there might be something to be concerned about.
Now, most everyone can agree with the principle that even ~1%ish fraudulent registrations should be minimized (even if they’re just names on the roll and don’t actually cast ballots). Fine, lets find some sane ways to do this, if we can.
But let’s not do it in a way that disenfranchises the ~99% of good registrations, and let’s not expect perfection from the convoluted registration process.
Dan Miller — October 14, 2008 at 5:06 pm
But preventing that tiny handful of fraudulent ballots has a cost. It makes it harder for people to vote–even people who legitimately should be able to. And preventing 100 people from voting legitimately is just as bad as allowing 100 fraudulent votes. For example, consider the ID law in Indiana, which studies have estimate prevents thousands of people from voting. Or consider the impact of erroneous purges of voter lists by overzealous secretaries of state. When was the last time you saw a Republican prominently complaining about that? Let alone the impact of having elections on a Tuesday, of all days.
In short, it looks like the GOP is a lot more interested in preventing poor people and African-Americans from voting than it is in protecting the validity of the ballot process. And it will continue to look that way until preventing people from voting is seen as just as serious as preventing voter fraud.
libarbarian — October 14, 2008 at 11:26 pm
See: http://brennan.3cdn.net/5de1bb5cbe2c40cb0c_s0m6bqskv.pdf
Take, for example, purging lists of “felons” and “name-matching” those names to names in the voter rolls. They don’t just look for exact names. For example, according to the paper above “The Florida purge of 2000 discussed above — conservative estimates place the number of wrongfully purged voters close to 12,000 — was generated in part by bad matching criteria. Florida registrants were purged from the rolls if, in part, 80 percent of the letters of their last names were the same as those of known felons.“
This is sloppy. Furthermore, this kind of sloppyness is going to disproportionately effect communities who are disproportionately represented in the “felon” population. Combined with the fact that these purges are often done with no public notice or notification to those purged, then its really not surprising that some people have interpreted it as more than coincidence.