November 3, 1998
Eroding Elections
While everyone wrings their hands a lot these days about voter
turnout, there is a real and present danger that voter fraud is slowly
undermining the legitimacy of more and more elections. "Voter fraud is much
more common than people believe, because they think it no longer exists,"
says the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato. "The fraud perpetrators
depend on people remaining unaware."
As CBS's "60 Minutes" pointed out on Sunday, security procedures have not
kept pace with efforts to make voting easier. Since almost all states operate
on the honor system and don't require photo ID, it's fairly easy to vote in the
name of dead people, vote if you're an illegal alien, falsify an absentee ballot
or vote more than once.
Two years ago, groups using federal funds registered hundreds of
non-citizens in Orange County, Calif. The House Oversight Committee found
that at least 747 votes were cast illegally in the photo-finish election of
Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez, who won by only 984 votes. But little has
changed. House Oversight came up with the names of 1,499 voters who
should be removed from the rolls, but election officials claim it's too late to
purge them for today's election. This month, the Los Angeles County registrar
identified 16,000 phony registrations submitted by two groups aligned with the
Democratic Party.
Some Hispanic groups say efforts to tighten voter registration are
discriminatory, but Texas Secretary of State Al Gonzales disagrees. His
office has taken steps to rid the state's rolls of 74,000 duplicate voters and
43,000 others who may have died. He plans to ask the legislature next year
for authority to curb mail-in ballot abuses.
Mr. Gonzales has seen how easy it is for politics to get in the way of attempts
to curb voter fraud. Last year, the Immigration and Naturalization Service's
Dallas office ran a random computer check of voter registration records with
citizenship records. Of 400 registered voters, 10 weren't citizens, or 2.5%. At
that point, the INS's district director stopped the probe and the Associated
Press reported that internal memos "suggested the inquiry was stifled because
of superiors' concerns about 'political ramifications.' " No wonder. INS
officials presided over shocking lapses in "Citizenship U.S.A.," a crash
program to clear immigration bottlenecks that resulted in 180,000 people
becoming citizens without proper background checks before the 1996
election. It was later found that at least 5,000 of these new citizens had been
arrested for felonies.
Given this record, you'd think the Clinton Justice Department would be eager
to help states police voter fraud. Instead, it is actively thwarting them through
a recent ruling that bars states from verifying voters' citizenship. "I don't
know how the Justice Department can say that non-citizens shouldn't vote
and then block them from checking on what the status of a voter is," says
Abigail Thernstrom, an expert on the Voting Rights Act.
Justice has also been of little help to Florida officials. Democratic Governor
Lawton Chiles signed into law restrictions on absentee ballots after 15 people
were arrested in connection with the 1997 Miami mayor's race and the
fraudulently elected incumbent was ousted from office. But the Justice
Department's civil rights division ruled that minorities are more likely to use
absentee ballots and that key elements of the new law were discriminatory
and "legally unenforceable."
Voter fraud also turns up in places without a lot of new citizens. Sean
Cavanagh, a Democratic supervisor in Fayette County, Pa., claims that
nursing home administrators frequently forge registrations and ballots under
residents' names. He is on the advisory board of the Voting Integrity Project,
a national group that this month sought to prevent Maryland from making bulk
mailings of absentee ballots to nursing homes. A federal judge acknowledged
the potential for abuse, but ruled there would be greater harm if voters didn't
receive ballots on time.
No doubt further evidence of voter fraud will emerge after today's election.
Congress may hold hearings, but it's hard to force the Justice Department to
focus on the issue so long as President Clinton wields his veto pen. Last
month, GOP Rep. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent Attorney General
Reno a letter noting his state was awash in gambling money. He asked that
election monitors be sent to prevent the kind of gambling-financed "vote
hauling" scandal that delayed resolution of Louisiana's 1996 U.S. Senate race
for a year. State Democratic Party chairman Dick Harpootlian joined him "in
asking Janet Reno to send someone down to watch what they do." As of
yesterday, Justice hadn't responded.
Justice seems to have an incomplete--and political--understanding of its role in
policing elections. The department's primary job is to preserve the integrity of
the election system, not let it slowly degrade.
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