Early and often - absentee voting fraud
National Review, June 17, 1996 by Rich Lowry
E-mail Print Link Vote fraud used to be a crude tool ofmachine politicos. Now it is skillfully engineered by liberal reformers.
ON ELECTION day, five men show up at a post office carrying luggage. Their bags are stuffed with 1,100 ballots, which will constitute 20 per cent of the vote cast that day. Some of the ballots have probably been filled out by the men themselves; others have been wrung from voters under the threat that they will lose their government benefits if they don't go along. The fraudulent ballots will help maintain in power a corrupt elite that regularly manipulates elections to its advantage no matter how people vote at the polls. Is the scene Guatemala? Honduras? Almost. In destitute Greene County, Alabama, democracy is practiced strictly Third World - style by the local black Democratic machine. ''Races are being stolen here, there's no two ways about it,'' says Leewanna Parker, editor of the local Greene County Independent.
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Absentee ballots should, according to the Alabama Secretary of State, account for about 3 to 4 per cent of all votes cast (only the physically infirm and persons who will be out of town on election day are eligible to vote absentee). But in 1994 in Greene County 34 per cent of all ballots were cast absentee. Besides the post-office incident, a local watchdog group attests to absentee ballots being stolen from people's mail-boxes, voters being threatened with the loss of their public assistance, and batches of absentee ballots being sent to local Democratic officials. It all paid off. The chairman of the Greene County Commission, who otherwise would have had a tough race with an anti-machine challenger, won re-election handily, with 50 per cent of his votes cast absentee. Forget sending envoys to Haiti, local activist Pam Montgomery remembers thinking. ''They ought to send them here.''
In recent years evidence of vote fraud has cast doubt on the results of several statewide and federal races, a stunning failing of democratic practice in 1990s America. Yet fraud still gets short shrift in the national press. Except for a June 1995 Reader's Digest article and a chapter in Larry Sabato and Glenn Simpson's new book Dirty Little Secrets (an excellent, thorough account which touches on most of the cases dealt with here), vote fraud has gotten little play.
But if this political scandal has no resonance, it has lots of growth potential. The new federal Motor Voter law effectively mandates that state registration laws become more lax, and mail-in balloting -- the most frequent vehicle for abuse -- stands to get a boost nationally from Oregon's highly touted experiment with it in the special election last January to fill Sen. Bob Packwood's seat. In short, vote fraud, already a serious problem, is poised to get worse.
--In a notorious 1993 case in Philadelphia, Republican Bruce Marks ran against Democrat William Stinson in a race that would decide control of the Pennsylvania State Senate. Marks won at the polls by about 550 votes, but Stinson won overall with a 1,396 to 371 edge in absentee ballots. The Stinson campaign had gone into minority areas with absentee-ballot applications, falsely telling residents that they could vote absentee as a convenience. The campaign took the resulting 1,000 applications to the board of elections, the Democratic members of which improperly gave the applied-for ballots directly to the Stinson people. Campaign workers took the ballots back to the voters and talked them into voting for their candidate, or else simply filled out the ballot themselves. A federal judge awarded the election to Marks.
-- In California's 36th Congressional District Republican Susan Brooks lost by 812 votes to Democrat Jane Harman, with absentees providing the margin of victory. Brooks workers compiled a detailed list of more than 2,000 apparently invalid votes. As Reader's Digest put it, ''findings indicated that of 5,292 absentee ballots from 20 Venice precincts that went overwhelmingly for Harman, 1,337 (26 per cent) had been cast by voters whose addresses on the rolls turned out to be abandoned homes, empty apartments, vacant lots.'' Susan Brooks dropped her election appeal when it became clear it wouldn't have been resolved until this year (she is running against Rep. Harman again).
-- In North Carolina's 7th Congressional District in 1994, incumbent Democrat Charlie Rose beat Republican Robert C. Anderson by fewer than 4,000 votes. Anderson subsequently produced about a dozen affidavits alleging a variety of electoral misconduct, including voter intimidation and tampering with ballot boxes. The alleged fraud was concentrated in heavily Democratic Robeson County, which gave Rose his margin of victory. A House task force found ''serious problems with the electoral process in Robeson County,'' but ruled there were not enough irregularities to swing the result.
-- In July 1991, in the run-up to school-board elections in Fresno, Calif., the local chapter of the Black American Political Association of California launched its Voter Education Project. BAPAC's president described it as ''a highly selective process of both voter registration and absentee-ballot applications. With some $10,000 in cash, equipment, and materials, we are projecting a landslide in seven of the elections and comfortable wins in the others.'' BAPAC workers went door to door registering voters and getting them to fill out applications for absentee ballots, which the workers illegally had sent directly to BAPAC offices. The ballots -- roughly a thousand -- were then taken to the voters, who would be pressured or duped into voting the right way. The California Supreme Court finally overturned these elections in 1993.
-- In 1994 in Laredo, Texas, Cynthia Zunigapuig, running for a Webb County judgeship, noticed during a recount that many of the mail-in ballots had votes for her erased. Texas has loose mail-in voting rules, permitting anyone age 65 or older to mail in his ballot without witnesses or a notary signature. In Laredo, it turned out, campaign workers had been visiting elderly people to get them to fill out an absentee application, then returning when the ballots arrived in the mail to ''help'' them fill them out. A judge granted Mrs. Zunigapuig a new election. ''We have had a recurrence of voter fraud in Texas over the last seven or eight years,'' says Austin attorney Buck Wood, who tried the Laredo case and attributes the rise to mail-in balloting.
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County reports 73 cases of vote fraud
FALSE registrations -- of the dead, of voters who have moved away, of non-citizens, even of illegal aliens -- is one major strand of voter fraud. This is especially virulent in California, which is the nation's model for electoral laxity. It has an absurdly loose registration system. No ID or proof of citizenship is required to register, and registration is permitted by mail. That, combined with the fact that the rolls are seldom ''purged,'' accounts for the fact that as much as a quarter of the California rolls is ''deadwood'' -- duplicate, dead, illegal, or non-existent registrants. Karen Saranita's under-funded but dogged Fair Elections Group, based in Torrance, Calif., has documented some of the absurdities: the Mexican who assassinated presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in 1994 registered twice in San Pedro, Calif.; ''God'' registered (as a Republican) in Hollywood; many children and pets are registered.
Many of the fraudulent registrations are the work of ''bounty hunters,'' campaign workers paid per registration. In 1992 a group paying $5 per registration in Hawthorne produced 4,000 fraudulent registrations, according to the Fair Elections Group. Karen Saranita says the case caught her eye when she noticed on the rolls the name of someone whose funeral she had attended a year earlier. When the Fair Elections Group checked a burst of about 3,000 new registrations in the 39th Assembly District this year it found that, of its sample of roughly 250 new registrants, more than 200 were invalid (including 159 non-citizens). Indeed, bounty hunters routinely tell non-citizens that the laws have changed to permit them to register and vote. ''They sent me the [sample] ballots and things,'' one non-citizen who has been voting since the 1980s explained to Channel 9 reporter Bill Gephardt. ''I figured my name is on there, I guess I'm allowed to vote.''
Any time there are people on the rolls who won't vote themselves (because they have moved out of the district or are dead or just never vote) it creates the possibility of fraud; other people can vote for them, especially in California, one of five states that require no ID to enter the voting booth. But as the examples above indicate, absentee voting poses a bigger risk, by taking the ballots out from under the eyes of poll watchers and making it possible for campaigns to get their hands on them. Hence the premium some campaigns put on getting voters to request absentee ballots (in California, campaigns are permitted to solicit applications directly). Until the late 1970s, California limited absentee voting (as most states still do) to cases of physical infirmity or absence from one's own district. In those days, according to Karen Saranita, about 4 per cent of Californians voted absentee. Now, when anyone can vote absentee for convenience' sake, the figure is 20 per cent.
The combination of invalid registrations and extensive absentee voting can make for mischief. Take the 1994 race for California's 16th State Senate District in the Central Valley, which Republican Phil Wyman narrowly lost to Democrat Jim Costa. According to a report by Doug Swardstrom -- at the time a Republican consultant --during the year and a half prior to the 1994 election Democratic registrations had declined in the Central Valley. But in the month prior to the election there was a spike of more than 9,000 new Democratic registrations. Fully one-third of the new registrants applied for absentee ballots. (In some areas, the trend was even more pronounced. In Tulare County, according to Mr. Swardstrom, of the 1,600 newly registered voters, 1,300 applied for absentees.)
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Swardstrom enlisted canvassers to check new registrants in low-income neighborhoods in Fresno, where the Democrats' efforts were concentrated. A little more than 500 voter interviews were conducted, with almost 140 uncovering some sort of irregularity. More than 50 of the voters' descriptions of how campaign workers ''helped'' them with their absentee ballots included illegalities (punching holes in the ballot, telling them how to vote, etc.). Twenty other voters said they had refused such help. Even though 1994 was an off-year election, turnout was way up -- as much as 264 per cent in one instance -- in six cities in Fresno County where there are migrant labor camps. Mr. Swardstrom's canvassers were told by one woman that one of the camps featured a special drop box for absentee ballots.
But mail-in balloting isn't necessary for vote fraud, which in one-party areas can still occur by more old-fashioned ballot-box stuffing. Ellen Sauerbrey lost her Maryland gubernatorial race to Democrat Parris Glendening in 1994 by about 6,000 votes after late returns from Baltimore City wiped out her lead. Doubts about the election centered around the city's election board. ''Local election boards,'' the Baltimore Sun editorialized later, ''are among the last relics of a blatant cronyism system that was the hallmark of machine-era politics.'' In Maryland, the rolls are supposed to be purged annually, removing the names of those who haven't voted in the last five elections or have failed to respond to mailings. In 1994, Baltimore elections administrator Barbara Jackson failed to complete the purge, leaving at least 30,000 ineligible voters on the Baltimore rolls. Why does it matter? ''If a registration list contains the names of persons who themselves will not appear at a polling place . . . the risk of fraud increases,'' Barbara Jackson herself had written several years earlier.
Failing to complete the purge contributed to a number of other voting irregularities. There were votes cast from abandoned buildings. Ellen Sauerbrey unearthed a number of apparent double voters. And there was a strange mismatch -- numbering in the thousands -- between votes recorded in Baltimore and the number of people checked off as present at the polls. Meanwhile, in a violation of accepted practice, security keys were left in some Baltimore voting machines all day. Two moving men were ready to testify that on election night they saw a chaotic scene at the Baltimore election warehouse: machines left open, machines with security keys still in them, one machine with a note attached reading, ''Voting machine has been miscounted.'' When election workers heard that Sauerbrey workers were headed to the warehouse, according to the movers, they ''were panicking.'' But Judge Raymond Thieme, who heard Mrs. Sauerbrey's election-contest suit, refused to allow the movers to testify
Which is just one example of the hurdles Ellen Sauerbrey faced in getting access to evidence and getting it into court. Judge Thieme, a Democratic appointee, repeatedly excluded evidence on the grounds that it wasn't based on original records, or that it wasn't presented in time to meet his fast-track timetable for discovery --when it was the non-cooperation or footdragging of Maryland officials that made it impossible for Mrs. Sauerbrey to comply. A nice Catch-22. The Attorney General's office, meanwhile, represented both the city board and the state elections board in the case, even though their interests were often opposed (the state board was in some instances sharply critical of the city board). According to Daniel Earnshaw, an outspoken former member of the state board, ''the Attorney General's office did everything within its power to conceal evidence [and] to defend the criminal actions of elections officials from the Baltimore City board.''
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State Board to Probe Voting Problems in Twiggs, Telfair Counties, Ga.(Knight...
County reports 73 cases of vote fraud
Ellen Sauerbrey's difficulties in her unsuccessful challenge are typical in one-party areas. When Republican Perry Hooper Sr. emerged as the winner of a tight 1994 election for Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice over incumbent Democrat Sonny Hornsby, ]Democrats turned to the courts. They sought to count 1,700 absentee ballots from Democratic areas even though the ballots had not been notarized or witnessed as required by law. The issue eventually reached the state Supreme Court. Three justices had contributed to their colleague Hornsby's campaign. Another had received $10,000 in contributions from the law firm of Hornsby's son, while Hornsby's lawyers had plied the court with generous contributions. The justices ruled -- surprise -- Hornsby's way. A federal court eventually threw out the invalid absentees and declared Perry Hooper the winner, equating the attempt to change absentee rules mid-course to ''ballot-box stuffing.''
Republican Bruce Marks had a similarly arduous road in his 1993 Philadelphia case. In Pennsylvania judges are elected and, in Philadelphia, all owe their jobs to the Democratic machine. When Marks tried to get the suspiciously high number of absentee ballots impounded the day before the election, Judge Gregory Smith, the son-in-law of a Democratic state senator, refused him a hearing. The next day the election judge, Eugene Maier, a former Democratic city commissioner, also refused. Judge Maier retained jurisdiction after the election and brushed aside all of Marks's challenges to absentee ballots. In a last-ditch effort, 50 voters filed to contest the election. The judge? Mark Bernstein, a former Democratic ward leader. He ruled the voters would have to put up a $50,000 cash bond to get a hearing. To get relief, Marks finally had to turn to the federal courts.
Nationwide, thanks to 1993's Motor Voter bill, vote fraud stands to continue to thrive. Motor Voter imposes the fraud-friendly rules pioneered in California on the rest of the country. In addition to making it possible to register when getting a driver's license, the law forces states to permit mail-in registration, a big contributor to fraud in California. It actually forbids workers at government offices to challenge new registrants. The law also forbids states to conduct vigorous purges of deadwood. Under Motor Voter, a state cannot purge a voter who has moved without sending him a notice attempting to confirm his new address. If the voter responds in writing he can be struck from the rolls in his old area; otherwise, he can be struck only after failing to vote in two federal general elections. Under Motor Voter, that Mexican assassin who registered in 1990 and re-registered in 1993 could not have been purged until November 9, 1996 (provided he didn't vote).
It is partly an accident of circumstance that vote fraud primarily benefits Democrats; they dominate traditional one-party areas in the rural South and the cities. But legislation like Motor Voter, which passed with nearly unanimous Democratic support, is no accident. As Rep. Bob Livingston (R., La.), a lonely voice against Motor Voter in 1993, pointed out at the time, any ineligible voters swept up by the new rules will surely vote Democratic. In the tension between ballot access and security, the Democrats are natural allies of access. Motor Voter declares that ''discriminatory and unfair registration laws and procedures can . . . disproportionately harm voter participation by various groups, including racial minorities.'' As defined by Democratic-oriented interest groups, any electoral safeguard qualifies as unfair; the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) defines requiring an ID to register and to vote, banning bounty hunting, ending mail-in registration, and purging voter rolls all as discrimination ''against voters who appear 'foreign looking.'''
Related Results
The dangers of absentee voting
Absentee and Early Voting
Don't cast that ballot -- until Election Day, that is
State Board to Probe Voting Problems in Twiggs, Telfair Counties, Ga.(Knight...
County reports 73 cases of vote fraud
To its credit, California is moving to a statewide voter file and adding a space on voter-registration forms for driver's-license numbers, two innovations that will cut down on deadwood. But more serious reforms like requiring an ID to vote get eaten up by the Democrats and MALDEF. Elsewhere, Democrats assiduously protect the status quo. In Alabama, Democratic members of the State Senate's election committee stopped showing up at meetings in April so they wouldn't have to consider reform legislation. The committee eventually defeated an absentee-ballot reform bill. Two other bills -- one to reinstate the requirement that an absentee ballot be witnessed, the other to require an ID to vote -- died in May thanks to the exertions of Democratic Lt. Gov. Don Siegelman. (Siegelman maintains he is worried that the bills would discriminate against the poor and minorities).
The other implicit accomplice to fraud is often the press, which reserves its outrage for scandals like Newt Gingrich's college course. There are exceptions. The liberal Philadelphia Inquirer launched a wide-ranging investigation of the Marks case. Marks recalls that when an Inquirer reporter first called him about his allegations it was with a put-upon air. Soon enough, the paper was running devastating stories. But that is not the usual tendency. ''The difference in my case was the lack of a crusading, investigatory press,'' says Ellen Sauerbrey. Indeed, the coverage of the Sauerbrey challenge was unenthusiastic at best; the discrepancy between the number of votes recorded in Baltimore City and the number of voters checked in at the polls, for instance, got buried. What didn't was the sense of satisfaction of some in the press, especially Baltimore Sun writers, when her case got quashed in court.
Vote fraud would be easy to discourage if those in control of state legislatures could be shamed into doing so (and were released from the strictures of Motor Voter). Three easy measures outlined by Sabato and Simpson are: scaling back and tightly regulating mail-in voting rather than following Oregon's lead; requiring voters to show ID when voting; requiring a so-called unique identifying number to register. But the most serious blow against fraud would be if the political culture began to treat it more seriously, the surest sign of which would be more prosecutions for violating electoral laws. There are occasional prosecutions today, but even they aren't always comforting. In Baltimore this spring five people were fined for false voting in 1994. All five were employees of the Baltimore election board.
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