Today’s court ruling on the challenge to last year’s Washington State gubernatorial election was almost certainly wrong in a factual sense: There can be little doubt that illegal ballots gave Christine Gregoire her tainted victory. The massive malfeasance of King County’s election officials (along with lesser malfeasance in other counties) is indisputable (nor did Judge Bridges deny its existence), and its impact was clearly not random, as anyone who has followed the tortuous contest (best covered by Sound Politics) is aware.
What was wrong in fact may nonetheless be correct in law. Because the ballots cast by ineligible voters or added by zealous election workers (hundreds more votes were counted in King County than the number of people recorded as voting there) can’t be segregated from the mass of legal votes, the plaintiffs faced an insurmountable burden of proof. And maybe that burden should be insurmountable. One can readily imagine that a contrary decision in this case encouraging court battles over every close election and leading judges to find “creative” reasons to toss out results that they dislike.
The central problem with the Washington State election process – and with elections all around the country – is that fraud is easy to commit, difficult to detect, hard to punish and, as Judge Bridges’ ruling demonstrates, nearly impossible to reverse. That is especially true of the phenomenon to which Jim Miller has given the name “distributed vote fraud”: fraud committed by individual citizens on their own initiative, as opposed to the centralized ballot box stuffing of old-fashioned political machines. It is easy to buy or extort votes, because mail-in voting makes ballot secrecy optional. It is easy to register a non-existent “voter” or to keep on the rolls one who has died or moved out of state. It is easy for felons, aliens, nonresidents and other ineligibles to vote. It is easy to cast someone else’s ballot, either by mail or at the polling place (where identification standards are lower than for getting onto an airplane). In Mr. Miller’s words,
An analogy may illuminate what has happened. Suppose that a manager in a retail chain wanted, for whatever reason, to encourage theft by employees. It would be easy to think of ways for the manager to do that, from getting rid of cash registers to keeping poorer inventories. Anything that made it easier to steal would increase theft, since there are always some who will be tempted. But the manager would have no direct connection to the theft. He would have facilitated it, but there would be no way to prosecute him for the theft.
Similarly, increasingly lax election laws have facilitated fraud while diminishing the likelihood that anybody will be held accountable. When one adds the Manichaean conviction of many leftists that conservatives are latter-day Nazis who must be kept out of power by any means necessary, debacles like that in Washington State – or in Wisconsin, where the Presidential election may well have been stolen for John Kerry – are foreseeable and unsurprising.
In the long run, distributed vote fraud is in no one’s best interests. Right now, the game seems to be mostly a left-wing sport, but conservatives can play too if it becomes evident that there is no honest way to win elections. Rather than have that happen, we should stop this downward spiral now. Let me repeat my suggested package of modest reforms:
All votes should have to be cast in person, unless the voter was absent from his home county on election day for a good reason. Casting an absentee ballot without good cause should be a criminal offense. (That may sound drastic, but the practice needs to be reined in, and only criminal penalties will persuade voters and election officials to take a prohibition seriously.) To ease any burden that these restrictions may impose, states should be allowed to set up pre-election day polling stations, as Florida plans to do in future elections. Also needed are stringent standards to make sure that legitimate absentees, such as soldiers serving abroad, receive ballots in time to return them.
Every voter should have to present photographic identification at the polling place. Every state issues photo ID’s, so this requirement is no hardship.
Voters should have to register at least 30 days before the election, and in federal elections states should be required to verify that new registrants are eligible voters who are not registered anywhere else. Congress should appropriate money – even if it means cutting a farm subsidy here or federally funded museum there – to pay for this process. We will need to figure out what to do about people who move within 30 days of an election, who of course should not be disenfranchised, but that is a detail.
Hand recounts, which are prone to unintentional or deliberate human error, should be permitted only under extraordinary circumstances.
Alternatively, we can let democracy degenerate into competitive theft. The choice is that stark. Our children will not thank us for getting it wrong.
Of course our fearless Democratic-controlled legislature passed an election reform package this session guaranteed to move us toward MORE fraud rather than less (if for no other reason than by encouraging all-mail elections).
I think a citizen initiative would have great purchase right now, though it would have to make a strong pitch regarding why permanent absentee balloting is bad for clean elections to overcome the laziness of the electorate.
Posted by: TimF | Monday, June 27, 2005 at 05:56 PM