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Too Easy to Steal
Why don't liberals want to stop voter fraud?
Tuesday, December 11, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST
It took a year after the Florida fiasco, but Congress is finally moving to overhaul the nation's antiquated election laws, dimpled chads and all. The vital issue now is whether the bills will also curb the growing, but mostly overlooked, problem of voter fraud.
The House is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a bipartisan bill that makes useful strides. But Senate negotiations are still stumbling, because the same liberal activists who are most bitter about the Florida 2000 outcome now object to doing much of anything about ballot manipulation.
Some chicanery is endemic to politics, and the problem is hard to quantify. But cheating may be more common now than at any time since the first Mayor Daley patrolled Chicago precincts. In particular, cheaters got a huge new opening when Congress passed the 1993 "Motor Voter" bill. That "reform"--bad law is always packaged as reform--was designed to make it easier for people to vote by allowing them to register when they applied for their driver's license. Some eight million people have registered this way.
But here's the big con: Only about 5% of motor-voter registrants usually vote, which means there's a large pool of nonvoters whose names can be used to make mischief. Most states don't require photo IDs at polling booths; this makes it easy to vote in someone else's name, either in person or by absentee ballot, especially because Motor Voter hinders states from weeding out the dead and departed.
The anecdotal fraud evidence has been building. A Pakistani man linked to two of the September 11 hijackers has been indicted for illegally registering to vote in North Carolina. A Saudi man detained for similar questioning voted last year in Colorado after registering under Motor Voter. Two noncitizens testified in court recently that a city councilwoman in Compton, California, registered them to vote and then had staffers direct them on casting absentee ballots.
Fraud Central may be San Francisco. California Secretary of State Bill Jones recently conducted a probe after the city's acting elections director claimed that 3,600 votes cast in the 2000 election had somehow been unaccounted for, though the vote had still been certified by his predecessor as accurate. Mr. Jones reviewed 21 randomly selected precincts and found an average discrepancy of nine percentage points between the number of ballots that individual precincts reported in last year's election and the number that the city reported.
San Francisco's performance wasn't any better in this November's election. A few days ago 240 uncounted ballots were found "jammed" in voting machines, and the Coast Guard discovered the tops of eight ballot boxes floating in the bay. Local politicians couldn't care less, no doubt because they do well under the current system. A spokesman says Mayor Willie Brown is "much more concerned about the future than the past." For his part, Governor Gray Davis vetoed $10 million last July for a campaign to educate voters on how to use election equipment.
The good news is that Congress, of all places, is being more responsible. Our federalist instincts naturally tend toward local control. But in the wake of the national trauma caused by Florida, there's nothing wrong with Congress providing money and incentive to states to buy new voting machines, compile better registration lists and educate voters about ballots.
In the bipartisan House bill, Democrat Steny Hoyer of Maryland won the right for people who aren't on election rolls but claim to be eligible to cast provisional ballots; officials would later assess the validity of those votes. But Republican Bob Ney of Ohio won a clarification of Motor Voter that allows states to purge consistent nonvoters who don't respond to inquiries. We'd do more, but at least it's something.
The problem is the Senate, where Democrat Chris Dodd and Republican Kit Bond have been negotiating for months. Senator Dodd says he wants to make it "easy to vote and very difficult to commit fraud," but he's had to fight some in his own party (and even his own staff) to craft a balanced bill.
He must also handle the "gang of 14," a claque of liberal interest groups (People for the American Way, the AFL-CIO) that claim any ID requirement to vote would somehow have a "chilling effect" and "be tantamount to requiring them to pay a poll tax." This is simply bizarre, as if San Francisco today resembles Selma, Alabama, in the 1950s.
The proposed reforms are things that liberals used to like when they were fighting Tammany Hall; maybe they object now because they are the new Tammany. One reform would make those who plan vote fraud subject to prosecution. Another would ask voters who register by mail to show up in person for their first vote, with an ID or a utility bill, rather than cast an absentee ballot. "We want everyone who votes to be a real person," says Senator Bond, who represents St. Louis, where 28% of all registered voters can't be located by the U.S. Postal Service.
The integrity of the ballot strikes us as a lot more central to democracy than the impossible dream of "campaign finance reform." If liberals are sincere in wanting every vote to count, they should also want to make sure that phony votes don't.
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"If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do."-King Solomon
And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,
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