4500 more Milwaukee votes counted than were cast
Voter Fraud
Some people have suggested that there really isn't any problem with voter fraud in the United States, and that any Republican pressure on U.S. Attorneys to investigate alleged voter fraud was therefore per se improper. As Marty Goldstein says here:
1. There is little, if any, reliable evidence of any serious problem of voter fraud in the United States.
2. After the 2000 election, if not before, Karl Rove and other Republican operatives decided that Republican political prospects would be immeasurably improved if they would only repeat, as often as possible, the unsupported claim that voter fraud is rampant, and take substantial steps to stem such nonexistent voter "fraud" -- all in an attempt to suppress Democratic votes.
Similarly, the New York Times that there have been "only" 86 convictions in the past 5 years, and "many of those charged appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules."
Similarly, election law expert Rick Hasen recently said, "despite tremendous efforts by the DOJ and others to ferret out instances of voter fraud taking place at polling places (as opposed to, for example, vote buying occurring with absentee ballots), there is very little evidence at this point."
Well, it all depends on what you mean by "evidence." Most of these folks seem to be suggesting that unless there's a conviction, there's no evidence of wrongdoing. As Lorraine C. Minnite said in her report minimizing voter fraud, "If we use the same standards for judging voter fraud crime rates as we do for other crimes, which is to calculate the incidence of crime from law enforcement statistics on arrests, indictments and convictions, we must conclude that the lack of evidence of arrests, indictments or convictions for any of the practices defined as voter fraud means very little fraud is being committed relative to the millions of votes cast each year in state, local and federal elections."
No one has ever really defended this definition of "evidence," however. We all know that law enforcement is not 100% perfect. (Thank goodness it's not; only in a totalitarian panopticon-style state could 100% of all crimes be detected and prosecuted.) Moreover, if a crime is unlikely to be brought to the attention of the police, the actual rate for that crime could be much higher than the prosecution rate. Consider date rape or speeding, for example. No one thinks that the number of speeding tickets issued by the police equals the number of times that people actually speed on the road.
So is voter fraud more like murder, where most occurrences are investigated and prosecuted, or more like speeding?
I'd suggest the latter. For example, check out this report on voter fraud in Wisconsin. It is the report of a task force that spent thousands of hours combing through voter records. It was signed by Milwaukee District Attorney Michael McCann (a Democrat); Milwaukee Police Chief Nannette Hegerty, who was appointed a US Marshall by Clinton; James Finch, a Special Agent in Charge from the FBI; and Steve Biskupic, a Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney.
Here are the key findings:
The task force has developed evidence of more than 100 individual instances of suspected double-voting, voting in names of persons who likely did not vote, and/or voting in names believed to be fake.
* * *
The number of votes counted from the City of Milwaukee exceeds the number of persons recorded as voting by more than 4,500.
More specifically, the task force found:
Persons with the same name and date of birth recorded as voting more than once.
Persons who registered and voted with identities and addresses that cannot in any way be linked to a real person.
Persons listed as voting under a name and identity of a person known to be deceased.
Persons whose identities were used to vote, but who in subsequent interviews told task force investigators that they did not, in fact, vote in the City of Milwaukee.
But the task force noted the difficulty of proving criminal wrongdoing, given Wisconsin's sloppy recordkeeping and the same-day registration process:
In addition, for criminal purposes, proof of the identity of the person voting often is best established by the original (green) voter registration card. Yet in the November 2004 election, same-day registrations were accepted in which the card had incomplete information that would help establish identity. For example: 48 original cards for persons listed as voting had no name; 548 had no address; 28 did not have signatures; and another 23 cards had illegible information. These were part of approximately 1,300 same-day registrations for which votes were cast, but which election officials could not authenticate as proper voters within the City.
Even the report by Lorraine Minnite couldn't sweep the Milwaukee situation entirely under the rug:
The Journal-Sentinel reviewed Milwaukee’s voting records and found a number of unexplained discrepancies. The most troubling finding from the newspaper’s detailed computer analysis was that as many as 1,242 votes, three-quarters of them cast by people registering on site on election day, appeared to have come from invalid addresses. Another 1,305 registration cards with discernible flaws such as missing addresses or missing names were accepted from voters on election day who were then allowed to vote.
These sorts of reports don't even count as "evidence"? Why not?
As the task force noted, convictions can be hard to obtain -- someone who voted under a false name, from a false address, or without signing a name at all (!) may be very difficult even to identify, let alone prosecute. It seems disingenuous for commentators to suggest that the difficulty of investigating voter fraud somehow proves that voting fraud should never even be investigated in the first place.
posted by Stuart Buck at 6:43 PM
stuartbuck.blogspot.com
Read the entire report:
soundpolitics.com |
