Tag: Vote fraud

I’m not sure whether to laugh, cry, or pound my head against the wall in frustrated rage.

1. For years, Republicans have accused Democrats of systematically stealing elections by, e.g., voting dead people. They have used that as an excuse for a variety of voter harassment, intimidation, and suppression efforts, from having armed men at polling places to making spurious challenges to slow down the lines to “voter ID” laws which have been shown to reduce participation especially among the poor, the elderly, and minorities.

2. After Bush’s friends stole the 2000 election in Florida by, among other things, running a purge of the voter rolls that, as they knew it would, disenfranchised thousands of eligible registered voters because their names resembled those of felons, his appointee as Attorney General, John Ashcroft, announced that a crackdown on voter fraud would be a major DoJ priority.

3. In pursuit of the supposed massive set of conspiracies to steal elections, Ashcroft and his minions changed the previous DoJ policy providing that voter fraud would be prosecuted only when it was part of a systematic effort. Now any individual who happened to mistakenly violate local election laws was potentially facing Federal prison time.

4. After six years of vigorous effort, DoJ has discovered not a single organized attempt to steal an election for a Federal office.

5. They have, however, managed to indict a number of innocent people, for example people who filled out a voter registration card, were told they had gotten it wrong, filled out another card, and voted, once. Nonetheless, they were indicted for “vote fraud” for multiple registration. They were acquitted, as were the majority of the people charged with vote fraud by the Wisconsin U.S. Attorney’s office that also brought the bogus corruption case the Seventh Circuit just contemptuously tossed out.

6. At least one alien who innocently voted, not understanding the citizenship requirement, has been deported. Another, who filled out a registration form at the motor vehicle office and who never attempted to vote, faces deportation.

7. A woman who voted despite being on probation, and who tried to undo her vote after discovering her mistake, has spent more than a year behind bars.

Footnote Lest you imagine that the green-card holders caught in this trap were making an incomprehensibly stupid mistake, recall that the link between citizenship and the franchise is a late-19th-Century invention. Previously, resident immigrants were allowed to vote, as a literal reading of the principle “No taxation without representation” would seem to require.

When the Federal Election Assistance Commission asked a pair of experts to look into voting fraud, the team &#8212 a Democrat and a Republican &#8212 concluded that voter fraud (attempts by ineligibiles to vote) was not a serious problem, but that voter intimidation was a serious problem in some places, especially in Indian country. Or so reports the New York Times, based on a review of the original document, produced with more than $100,000 of public money but never released.

If that’s true, of course, it’s no surprise that the Bush Administration has been having trouble getting even its own appointees as U.S. Attorneys to prosecute crimes that mostly aren’t being committed. (Voter intimidation and other forms of vote suppression have never been among the Administration’s concerns, except for its concern not to get caught at it.)

The report as published says something else. It says there’s dispute about both topics, adding that the dispute over intimidation has to do with “what constitutes actionable voter intimidation.” (I guess a little bit of intimidation is OK.)

The authors are forbidden by their contract to discuss the matter. [That wouldn’t, of course, apply to testimony under subpoena before a Congressional committee.] The commission, which could of course release the original report as well as the edited version, has chosen not to do so. According to one Congressional Democrat, the methodology (and presumably the “balanced ticket” of consultants) was agreed on in advance, and the commission only changed its mind when the team produced politically incorrect results.

Sounds like a good topic for a National Academy report, which the Congress can order the Administration to commission. In the meantime, anyone who mentions “voter fraud” and doesn’t mention the experts’ report should be assume to be … well, fraudulent.

Update John Cole &#8212 who, unlike those of us who were born Bush-bashers or achieved Bush-bashery, had Bush-bashing thrust upon him by the presistent stench coming out of 1600 Penn., sees a pattern.

Just in case you had any doubts that Republicans’ attempts to gin up hysteria about “voter fraud” are … well, fraudulent … consider that Bush fired his own appointee as U.S. Attorney in Seattle for refusing to prosecute where he and the FBI had found no evidence of a Federal crime.

Forgery is a crime. Fountain pens can be used to sign other people’s names. Outlawing the use of fountain pens is not a sensible response to the forgery problem.

Making harassing telephone calls ought to be a crime. Deceiving voters about the source of campaign communications, for example with “false flag” materials that purport to come from your opponent, also ought to be a crime. Robo-calls can be used to harass and deceive. But outlawing robo-calling is not a sensible response to the problem of harassing false-flag calls.

What appears to have been a nationally coordinated and somewhat successful multimillion-dollar Republican effort to harass voters with robo-calls that seemingly came from Democratic Congressional candidates in swing districts ought to be thoroughly investigated, and the perpetrators jailed if some law can be stretched to cover their truly disgusting activity. For good measure, “false-flag” and harassing campaign telephone calls ought to be explicitly made federal crimes. Barack Obama has proposed such a law. But robo-calling itself, while undoubtedly annoying, is also highly useful as a way of conveying political information and encouraging people to vote.

“Robo-call” was the blog shorthand (and the journalistic shorthand for the tiny number of newspapers that bothered to cover it at all) for this fall’s display of tele-thuggery. It would be a mistake to embody that shorthand in legislation.

Irony? You want irony? How about a clearly false result in the election for Katherine Harris’s old seat?

No, of course the Democrats in the House shouldn’t put up with another Florida election decided by a mass of obviously unintentional undervotes from mostly Democratic voters. The fact that this is in Katherine Harris’s district means that any set of hearings would be intolerably embarassing to the Republicans. The Constitution makes the House the judge of the returns of its members. The Democrats should give Jeb Bush and his cronies a simple choice: a re-vote in Sarasota County, or the immediate seating of the Democratic candidate, who certainly had more votes cast for her, though not counted for her.

OK. The Justice Department won’t investigate. But can’t Kweisi Mfume sue?

To review the bidding (which Josh Marshall has been all over):

Bob Ehrlich and Michael Steele brought in busloads of homeless African-American people from Philadelphia to black precincts in Prince George’s County, Maryland, to hand out fliers headed “Ehrlich-Steele Democrats” and showing the pictures of three important African-American Maryland politicians, including Kweisi Mfume (former Congressman, former President of the NAACP). One of the three had indeed endorsed Steele, who is black, against Ben Cardin, who is white and who beat Mfume in a tough primary; none of them endorsed Ehrlich.

Some of the homeless folks claimed that they’d been told they would be handing out Democratic ballots.

The natural inference is that they were brought in from Philadelphia rather than being recruited from the plentiful supply of black homeless folks in Prince George’s County and in Baltimore because (1) they didn’t want the news of their recruiting efforts to hit the newspapers and (2) it was easier to fool out-of-towners into thinking that Erlich and Steele were Democrats.

And no, this wasn’t some rogue operation run by a consultant. They’d done it before; Ehrlich’s wife greeted the buses bringing in the Philadelphians; And Ehrlich ackowledged the program, unapologetically.

Arguably, the program was an attempt to defraud both the Philadelphians who were misled about what they were being asked to do and the Maryland voters who were misled about which candidates the people pictured in the fliers were supporting. (The Marylanders weren’t fooled; it turns out that, in Prince George’s County, even the poor and poorly educated residents are politically sophisticated, and an eyewitness I met on the subway that night told me that the flier-distributors were laughed at by the voters.)

The use of interstate facilities to carry out that fraud could have supported Federal charges. But the Justice Department has decided not to investigate. That seems to me like a reasonable call; I don’t want to see FBI agents making decisions about whether particular pieces of campaign literature were or were not dishonest enough to constitute fraud.

[By contrast, the Republican National Congressional Committee’s massive use of repeated false-flag robo-calls to harass voters and fool them into thinking they’d been harassed by Democratic campaigns was clearly over the line. I’d be happy to new legislation explicitly regulating that sort of activity, what happened this year &#8212 the RNCC spent millions of dollars to make tens of millions of calls &#8212 was already clearly illegal under the laws about interstate wire fraud (it’s established law that a vote is a “thing of value,” and fraud consists of any attempt to deprive someone of any “thing of value” by trick) and the use of interstate wires to annoy. DoJ should investigate and prosecute, and the Judiciary Committees in their oversight role ought to ask, and keep asking, tough questions if DoJ ducks.]

But if a company had used Mfume’s picture to promote one of its products when Mfume had actually endorsed a rival product, he would clearly have a right to sue under the “right of publicity” doctrine. Why doesn’t that apply here? A civil suit is, for many purposes, as a good as a criminal prosecution. The point is to humiliate the Republicans, not to send them away. And in one way a civil suit is better: a witness asserting his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself in a civil suit can have that refusal held against him by the judge and jury.

I can imagine a PG jury awarding Mfume very large punitive damages in such a case. Wouldn’t that be fun?

In comments on my “Democratic Agenda” post (scroll down two), Bernard Yomtov lays out an agenda of voting-related issues for the Democrats to push early in the new Congress:

*Require states to allocate polling places and equipment in such a way that voting is roughly equally convenient statewide, in terms of likely waits, access to polling places, etc.

*Prohibit the use of any voting system that did not provide a paper audit trail.

*Make it a felony to deliberately misinform voters about voting places or days.

*Extend the do-not-call list to cover political robocalls.

*Establish expedited methods for dealing with problems that arise on voting day or shortly before.

*Require a serious non-partisan analysis and testing, and appropriate certifications of voting equipment before it can be used.

In general, I think a Voting Rights Act of 2007 would be a great idea. As I understand it, there are Constitutional limitations on the capacity of Congress to dictate vote-casting-and-counting practices to the states, but almost anything can be achieved by tying it to Federal funding. (The lack of adequate numbers of highly competent pollworkers is a major problem; I’d propose to solve it by offering a $500 federal scholarship to any college student willing to undergo training in local voting procedures and work the polls at no fewer than three elections.)

I wouldn’t back Bernard’s plea for banning political robo-calls; instead, how about a ban robo-calls of any kind that call back on hang-up, unless the recipient of the call has consented in advance? (False-flag repeat robo-calls of the kind the RNCC spent millions of dollars on this year are already covered by laws against use of the telephone to harass and annoy and against the use of interstate communications facilities to defraud, and if the Justice Department isn’t aggressive about pursuing the cases from 2006 the authorizing and appropriations committees should ask why, and keep asking.

Given the distances rural voters have to drive, it would be hard to come up with standards that would really make voting equally convenient everywhere. An alternative would be to require that every precinct have paper ballots available for those who want to use them at any time when the wait to vote exceeds 30 minutes.

To the oft-heard query “Why don’t we just go back to paper ballots?” there are four good answers: they’re not adequately handicapped-accessible; they’re not actually hard to cheat with (although the cheating is mostly decentralized; they suffer from high rates of voter error, leading to many votes not counted; and they would extend the counting process for at least hours and perhaps days. Yes, lots of countries use paper ballots, but none of them elects dozens of officials at once or uses plebiscites routintely, as we do.

But all of the advantages of paper ballots except their being cheap can be matched by touch-screen voting, as long as the machine prints out a paper ballot for the voter to drop into the ballot box. The voter can review the ballot to make sure that the names the machine printed were the same as the names he voted for, and the machine-printed ballots can be made machine-readable. Yes, it would be possible to futz with the count, but the physical ballots would be right there, subject to spot-audit simply by running a random sample of precincts (selected after the first tally has been submitted) through a different counting machine located centrally, and subject to subsequent review in case of a recount. It would be very hard to alter a machine-printed ballot undetectably, and the rule should be that the ballot counts regardless of any stray marks, so every vote cast would count.

I have been told &#8212 I don’t know how reliably &#8212 that one voting-machine vendor actually offered such a machine, but didn’t make many sales, and that one of the big three vendors bought up the company and discontinued the product line. If that’s true, the patent covering that technology looks like a good candidate for taking by eminent domain and placing in the public domain, so that multiple companies could compete to produce touch-screen paper-ballot systems.

This is a case where the Democratic fundraisers (such as Steny Hoyer) have to be told that no amount of money the voting-machine companies could give deserves any weight at all compared to the other interests at stake here. To solve that problem more generally, we need to fix campaign finance, but that’s a topic for another post.

I guess that’s what you call it when you recruit black folks from homeless shelters in Philadelphia for $100 each and send them to black precincts in Prince George’s County, Maryland, to hand out phony “Democratic” fliers for Republican candidates and claiming falsely that they have the endorsement of local black leaders. Some of the workers claim they weren’t even told they were going to be working for Republican candidates.

And no, it’s not a rogue operation; the Governor’s wife greeted the buses as they came in.

I’ll be updating this all day. If you spot something interesting that isn’t here, post a comment or send an email to markarkleiman (at) gmail (dot) com.

Virginia:

Fake phone calls purporting to come from elections officials threatening Democratic voters with arrest if they try to vote.

Guns and fake badges in Tucson, AZ:.

Nina Perales, a senior poll-watcher for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), called me from Tucson’s Iglesia Bautista precinct, where the three men are approaching Latino voters and videotaping them on their way to vote.

“As voters are coming out of their cars and walking up towards their polls, one person is videotaping the voter as he walks towards the polling place,” she said. Then another person, wearing an American flag bandana and a shirt with the image of a badge ironed or embroidered on it, approaches with a clipboard to talk to the voter. “While the clipboard person is. . .talking to [the voter], the cameraperson comes up and starts videotaping their face,” Perales said.

As this happens, the third man — with a gun visible in a sideholster — stands next to the voter. According to Perales, he is wearing a shirt with an American flag on it, and camouflage shorts.

The men only approach Latino voters, she said, and noted they have been doing so since early this morning.

Perales’ group has contacted the Department of Justice and the FBI. The Feds have asked her group to keep an eye on the situation.

“Keep an eye on the situation”?!

I’d like to hear the “armed-society-is-a-polite-society” gun-rights advocates address this one. Obviously, the gun, along with the simulated badge, is intended to intimidate, not just the voter, but anyone who might otherwise try to interfere with the harassment, for example by videotaping it. Do we need armed bands of voter escorts? Would armed confrontations around polling places contribute to democracy? But of course if one side is armed and the other isn’t the rights of the disarmed are entirely determined by the forbearance of the folks with the guns.

“False flag” robocall harassment has finally made it into the mainstream media, sortakinda. ABC News’s “Political Rader” has a story; not clear if anything was shown on the evening news.

The story isn’t much use. The General Counsel of the DCCC wrote an incredibly lame “Cease and Desist” letter, which burbles on about noncompliance with FCC regulations without ever making it clear that the calls are (1) intended to harass, (2) intended to deceive, and (3) are in fact deceiving many voters. That allows the RNCC guy to make a superficially plausible “you-do-it-too” response. Someone who had received one of the fake calls and thought it came from a Democrat could read the whole thing and have no idea it applied to the calls he’d received.

I posted a comment on “Political Radar.”

The issue isn’t “robo-calling.” The issue is harassment and deception. The calls paid for by the Republican National Congressional Committee are designed to annoy the people being called, and they’re designed to appear as if they come from Democratic campaigns.

It’s probably worth the effort to post something brief on that site, just to show there’s interest in the story and to ward off the GOP trolls.