Pseudo-Random Thoughts
(Hat tip to Alan Smithee)
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Facilitating Vote Fraud: Changes in our election rules, especially those made by the 1993 "Motor Voter" Act, have made fraud more common. The growth in voting by mail has made vote fraud almost risk free. The stupid errors of most of those who are caught make me think, not that those who commit vote fraud are mostly stupid, but that we are catching only the stupid ones, the ones, for instance, who do not check the obituaries before they mail ballots with some elderly person's name on them.
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.
Few journalists understand this new pattern of vote fraud; they still think that vote fraud is something committed by parties in an organized fashion. To return to my analogy, they look for robbery by a gang, rather than pilfering by employees. You can see an example of this kind of mistake in this Seattle Times column. The author, Danny Westneat, is convinced that, at least here in Washington state, we need not fear vote fraud. In the past, I would have agreed with Westneat, mostly. Washington has had cases of vote fraud, notably in Pierce county, but it is not as common here as it is in many other states.
Let me do two simple, back of the envelope, calculations to show why Westneat is wrong, and that we do have to fear fraud — even in places that have had relatively clean elections in the past.
First, let's look at the vote by non-citizens. Washington state has a population of about 6 million; of these, about 6 percent* are non-citizens. If half of them are adults, then there are 180,000 non-citizen adults, who are encouraged to register when they get driver's licenses. If 1 in 20 vote, as the process has encouraged them to do, then there will be 9,000 votes by non-citizens. These votes will probably go to the Democrats by a margin of 2 to 1, giving the Democrats a net gain of 3,000 votes. Democrat Maria Cantwell defeated Republican Slade Gorton in 2000 by 2,229 votes — officially, that is.
Some may say that 1 in 20 is far too high. It may be. I know of only one race in which we have a good number, the disputed 1996 House race between Robert Dornan and Lorna Sanchez. After the race, Congressional investigators found 2,538 non-citizens on the rolls, of whom 624 had voted. That we have no real estimates, or even other examples, is a scandal in itself. (If you want some striking examples of non-citizens who have registered, see this Michelle Malkin column. And yes, a few of them are terrorists, by any definition.)
Second, let's consider cheaters. In the 2000 election, about 2.4 million people voted in Washington state. Let's suppose that 1 in 1,000 cheated in some way, voted twice under different names, voted for some other person, or set up false registrations. Let's suppose further that each of these cheaters averaged 5 illegal votes. Then there would be a total of 12,000 illegal votes. Given what we know about the tendency of felons to vote Democratic (along with journalists and academics), it is probably fair to guess that at least 2 in 3 of these 12,000 illegal votes went to the Democrats, giving them a net gain of 4,000 votes.
There are other sources of illegal votes, but these two are probably the main ones in Washington state. These estimates are rough, as they must be, given our lack of knowledge. Here is my overall guesstimate for Washington state, which has relatively clean elections. If the Democratic margin, statewide, is less than 100 votes, then illegal votes will certainly have tipped the election. If the Democratic margin is 1,000 votes, then illegal votes will almost certainly have tipped the election. If the Democratic margin is 10,000 votes, then illegal votes probably did not tip the election.
Finally, let me add a question for those who find my estimates far too high. Can you prove that they are wrong? Without tighter controls on registration and voting we simply can not know how many fraudulent votes there are in each election, just as a retail chain without cash registers can not know how much its employees may be stealing.
(*I am taking the 6 percent from the Almanac of American Politics, which got it from, I suppose, the 2000 census. The Almanac actually says 6.1 percent, which is far too precise. Given the obvious problems of counting non-citizens, many of them illegal, the true figure may be anywhere from 5 percent to 8 or 9 percent, or even higher.)
- 7:27 AM, 31 October 2004
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