U.S. voting in advance raises fraud possibilities
Michael Moss/NYT
Monday, September 13, 2004
iht.com
NEW YORK As both major political parties intensify their efforts
to promote absentee balloting as a way to lock down votes in the
presidential race, election officials say they are struggling to cope
with an array of coercive tactics and fraudulent vote-gathering involving
absentee ballots that have undermined local races across the country.
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Some of those officials say they are worried that the brashness of the schemes and the extent to which critical swing states have allowed party operatives to involve themselves in absentee voting - from handling ballot applications to helping voters fill out their ballots - could taint the general election in November.
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In the last four years, prosecutors have brought criminal cases in at least 15 states for fraud in absentee voting. One case resulted in the conviction this year of a voting-rights activist for forging absentee ballots in a Wisconsin county race. In another case, a Republican election worker in Ohio was indicted and charged with switching the votes of nursing-home residents in the 2000 presidential race. And last year in Michigan, three city council members pleaded guilty in a vote-tampering case that included forged signatures and ballots altered with white-out. The increasing popularity of absentee voting is reshaping how and when the country votes. Since the last presidential election, a growing number of election officials and party operatives have been promoting absentee balloting as a way to make it easier for people to vote and alleviate the crush of Election Day. At least 26 states now let residents cast absentee ballots without needing the traditional excuse of not being able to make it to polling places. That is six more states than allowed the practice in 2000.
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As a result, as many as one in four Americans are expected to vote by absentee ballot in the presidential race, a process that began Monday, nearly two months before Election Day, as North Carolina became the first state to distribute ballots.
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But some experts say that concerns about a repeat in problems with voting machines is overshadowing the more pressing issue of absentee ballot fraud. "Everybody was worried about the chads in the 2000 election," said Damon Slone, who investigated election fraud in West Virginia, "when in fact by loosening up the restrictions on absentee voting they have opened up more chances for fraud to be done than what legitimate mistakes were made in Florida." Yet many states - including battlegrounds in the presidential campaign - have abandoned or declined to adopt the safeguards on absentee voting that election officials have warned they will need to prevent rigged elections, an examination by The New York Times has found.
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Only 6 of the 19 states where polls have shown that voters are almost evenly divided between President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry still require witness signatures to help authenticate absentee ballots. Fourteen of the 19 states allow political parties to collect absentee voting applications, and seven let the parties collect completed ballots, raising the possibility that operatives could gather and then alter or discard absentee ballots from an opponent's stronghold.
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Most of the swing states even let party operatives help voters fill out their absentee ballots when the voters ask for help. And political parties are taking advantage of vague or nonexistent state rules to influence people who vote at home.
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In Arizona this month, a county judge ruled that a campaign consultant had improperly held on to more than 14,000 absentee ballot applications he collected this summer to help nearly a dozen Republican candidates in the primary. But holding on to such applications for at least a few days is now common practice by both major parties in states like Arizona, which require only that they be turned in within a "reasonable" period of time. This allows campaigns to bombard voters with mailings and house calls just as their ballots arrive.
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Some operatives boast that this absentee electioneering lets them avoid the century-old antifraud rules that force them to stay out of polling places. But while acknowledging the value of legitimate get-out-the-vote campaigns, election officials say absentee voting is inherently more prone to fraud than voting in person because it has no direct oversight.
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"Loosening the absentee balloting process, while maybe well intentioned, has some serious consequences for both local races and the general election," says Todd Rokita, secretary of state in Indiana, where fraud investigations are under way in at least five communities.
Since 2000, when mail-in votes became crucial to Bush's narrow victory
in Florida, several groups that studied election irregularities have issued
warnings about absentee voting. One commission, whose co-chairman
was former President Jimmy Carter, found that most election officials
had grown lax in handling absentee ballots. "For practical reasons,
most states do not routinely check signatures either on applications
or on returned ballots, just as most states do not verify signatures
or require proof of identity at the polls," wrote John Mark Hansen,
a Chicago political scientist who directed research for the commission's
2001 report. A 2001 report by the Election Center, an international
association of election officials, noted the growing importance of absentee
voting and concluded, "Strict procedures and penalties to prevent undue
influence and fraud must be adopted by jurisdictions seeking expanded
absentee access or all-mail elections."
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