Last week the Milwaukee Police Department released its Report of the Investigation into the November 2, 2004 General Election in the City of Milwaukee. The impetus for this inquiry was the discovery that the number of votes counted in the city exceeded the number of recorded voters by more than 5,000. John Kerry’s margin of victory in the state as a whole was only about 11,000, so suspicions arose that the election in Wisconsin might have been stolen. Certainly, that was far more plausible than the paranoid theory that Karl Rove conjured up over 100,000 spurious votes in Ohio.
Jim Geraghty’s reaction was, “Wisconsin’s Voter Fraud Report Ought To Be National News”. It wasn’t, of course. According to Nexis and Google News searches, the New York Sun was the only non-Wisconsin newspaper to take notice. (An Associated Press wire was used on-line by a couple of publications but seems never to have appeared in print.)
This lack of interest reflects, sadly, the media’s habit of turning its eyes away from evidence of the slovenly conduct of U.S. elections. The Milwaukee report spells out how simple it is to cast illegal votes – and how inadequate procedures and incompetent recordkeeping make it virtually impossible either to catch fraud as it occurs or to prosecute it afterward.
The police investigators were never able to track down where the 5,000-plus ghost votes came from, much less determine whether they were legitimate. Along the way, they found that –
The city has no effective safeguards against casting multiple ballots or impersonating other voters, nor against voting by felons, illegal aliens or nonresidents of Wisconsin;
Illegal voting can rarely be uncovered until after the fact, when it is too late to prevent the malefactor’s ballot from being counted;
In any event, the Election Commission’s records and procedures are in such shambles that violations are generally found only through blind luck; and
For the same reason, prosecutions are generally futile, as the official deficiencies render almost any charge subject to reasonable doubt.
How much fraud actually occurred in 2004? The investigators cannot tell. That the will to defraud existed is shown by the clearest possible evidence: At least 16 out-of-state campaign workers, ten employed by “a major political party”, six by a section 527 organization, themselves voted illegally. I doubt that a man who cheats with his own ballot will resist the temptation to aid and abet cheating by others.
At least as disturbing as the prospect of malfeasance by parties or activist groups are the opportunities for “distributed vote fraud” by highly motivated but uncoordinated partisans. An organized effort to generate a few thousand extra votes runs a modicum of risk; an operative may squeal. If, however, a couple of thousand unconnected individuals cast one or two illegal ballots apiece, there is only a minimal chance that they will be either found out or successfully prosecuted. If you believed that electoral defeat would be tantamount to the second coming of the Third Reich, wouldn’t you feel the urge to perform that small, unethical action in pursuit of the Greater Good?
Democrats and liberals – Barack Obama is typical – scoff at the notion of election fraud and urge measures to make it easier to commit. No doubt that is due to innocent naivete, and they will change course after reading the findings from Milwaukee.
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