How to Worry about Vote Fraud

Maybe the publication of John Fund’s Stealing Elections was the spur needed to prompt conservatives into taking seriously the possibility that a Bush victory at the polls may be fraudulently reversed. The book is just a string of anecdotes, but they are appalling anecdotes, recounting ballot box mischief that is easy to carry out, difficult to thwart and almost never prosecuted after the fact. Mr. Fund presents, for example, compelling evidence that Al Gore came so close to winning Florida (and the Presidency) only because thousands of felons and non-citizens illegally cast votes, while up to 15,000 Bush ballots were surreptitiously voided in Palm Beach County.

The 2004 election has the potential for unprecedented skulduggery. On one side is system that makes fraud a simple, low-risk enterprise; on the other the zealots of the Angry Left, convinced that George W. Bush is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. If registering dead people to vote and casting multiple ballots under pseudonyms would have stopped Hitler, who would condemn those who did it? The logic of America Coming Together and other extremist groups that have already been detected in fraud is transparent. In their own minds, they are breaking a would-be dictator’s laws in pursuit of a higher moral good. We can’t expect occasional exposure to deter them. (The HobbsOnline Voter Fraud Project has links to news accounts of illegal registration and voting practices.)

There is much reason for concern. There is also a danger that concern may metastasize into anger like Bush Derangement Syndrome, particularly if the President loses narrowly. The wrong reaction by too many conservatives could push the nation – I say this fearfully and with literal intent – into civil war. Anyone whose righteous indignation is starting to lead him down that path needs to pause and think seriously about he really wants to destroy America in order to save it. Read the Democratic Underground loons (Right Wing News keeps track of their ravings), and ask whether you would like to look in the mirror and see those faces reflected back.

Before alarm turns into alarmism, we should also remember that the Electoral College is a great structural bulwark against successful fraud. Vote stealing in a particular area can affect only a single state’s electoral votes. If elections were decided by popular vote, the Cook County Democratic machine, for instance, would have an incentive to bring out the dead to vote for John Kerry. Under the Electoral College system, it doesn’t. The number of places where fraud would make a difference is thus limited, as are its consequences. That is a major reason why the world’s sloppiest election procedures have so rarely led to a seriously disputed outcome. (Vide the Addendum on 1960.)

Congress’s impeachment power is another bulwark against dishonesty. The candidates know that they would expose themselves to removal from office and lasting disgrace if they were to get too close to dubious practices. Hence, most fraud this year will be perpetrated by amateurs whose effectiveness and ability to escape detection are limited.

Then, too, we must reflect ruefully, Republicans and conservatives bear a portion of the blame for the dilapidated state of the election process. Not since the days of Tammany Hall has there been such a golden age of vote fraud. By and large, we have bemoaned it with ritual laments, then hurried on to other issues. After controlling Congress for a decade, the GOP has built up no momentum for election reform. Had we been as negligent of welfare reform, the aid rolls would be expanding exponentially.

The most important lesson to be drawn from our present discontent is that there can be no more foot dragging. Instead of the anodyne Help America Vote Act, the nation needs a root-and-branch elimination of the shady practices, ranging from registration without verification to lax absentee ballot rules to inadequate ballot security, that invite fraud. Reform will be controversial. Those who benefit from the status quo will shout “Racism!”, just as they did when welfare reform was debated. But we are past the point where we can prudently trust that luck will keep us from eventual electoral disaster.

Addendum on 1960: In 1960, John F. Kennedy’s electoral vote margin was provided by victories in Illinois (27 electoral votes) and Texas (24). Had those 51 votes gone the other way, Richard Nixon would have been elected, 270 to 252. (Fifteen electors voted for Harry F. Byrd.) Kennedy’s official popular vote margins in the two decisive states were 8,858 in Illinois and 46,257 in Texas. Both states had long histories of Democratic ballot box stuffing. There is almost no doubt that Nixon would have carried Illinois if the votes had been counted honestly. There is a strong chance that the same is true of Texas. The election may, then, have been decided by fraud, but it took shenanigans in two states to change the result. Mayor Daley didn’t, and couldn’t, make the difference on his own.

Suppose, however, that elections were decided by popular vote. One of the little appreciated facts about 1960 is that Nixon got more votes than Kennedy. The figures that appear in standard reference works are 34,226,731 for Kennedy and 34,108,157 for Nixon, but the Kennedy total includes 324,050 votes for an unpledged slate of Democratic electors in Alabama, where Kennedy’s name was not on the ballot. His actual vote total was 205,476 less than Nixon’s. With the electorate so closely divided, there would have been maximum incentives for fraud everywhere. The New York City, Philadelphia and Boston Democratic machines, to pick three examples, were fairly quiescent, because their states’ electoral votes were not hotly contested. The picture would have been different if, as the vote count dragged on, the local bosses had realized that a couple of hundred thousand votes were needed to put their man over the top.

It was bad enough that Illinois turned on fewer than 9,000 votes. Imagine the potential for an historic legal battle if that had been the margin in the entire country!

Further Reading: Joseph Perkins, “Voting Rights, Voting Wrongs”

Comments

[Fred]

Just thought I'd point out a slight error regarding the 1960 election -- it didn't take "shenanigans in two states to change the result." Either Texas or Illinois would have been enough to provide Kennedy with an Electoral College majority, it just happened to be the case that he won both. It would have taken the absence of "shenanigans in two states to change the result."

[I see]

so Republicans are just honest folk getting their elections stolen by Democrats...

RIIIIIIIIGHT.

Me: If you believe that Republicans routinely steal elections, I presume that you too favor measures to prevent vote fraud. Right?