Whose Election Fraud?

[babylonsister]

Whose Election Fraud?
Barbara Burt and Jonah Goldman
March 28, 2007
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/03/28/whose_election_fraud.php


Barbara Burt is director of election reform programs for Common Cause. Jonah Goldman is director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections with Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

The scandal involving Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, some for alleged lack of vigor in pursuing voter fraud, provides us with a peek into the machinations of politicians who attempt to manipulate the election system for their own benefit. The rapidly unfolding facts highlight how unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud are used as a proxy for political decision-making designed to disenfranchise eligible Americans. It is a shame that some in the Justice Department, an agency with a noble history of defending the rights of all Americans to cast a ballot, are focusing instead on strategies to remove politically “undesirable” voters from the process.

Unfortunately, it is not just the Department of Justice that is taking advantage of this nefarious strategy. In the past few years, legislation requiring voters to show photo identification or even proof of citizenship has appeared on the docket in two-thirds of our state legislatures. Last year, the U.S. House passed a voter ID law, the justification for which was rampant voter fraud.

The problem is that there is no evidence that voter fraud affects our election outcomes. Do a few voters perpetrate fraud? Yes. But despite its insistence that voter fraud is enough of a problem to embroil otherwise high-performing United States attorneys in a scandal that may bring down the attorney general, the Department of Justice has convicted fewer than 100 people of voter fraud out of more than 275 million votes cast during the past five years.

The number of federal prosecutions is not the only evidence undermining the voter fraud argument. The case has been further weakened by various academic studies and reports. Most recently, Barnard College professor Lorraine Minnite explored the issue in her report, “The Politics of Voter Fraud,” published by ProjectVote. Minnite found that:

Most voter fraud allegations turn out to be something other than fraud. ... Reports of voter fraud were most often limited to local races and individual acts and fell into three categories: unsubstantiated or false claims by the loser of a close race, mischief and administrative or voter error.

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[sonias]

1. So many recommends, but no comments

What's up with that? This is an excellent recap of the manufactured "voter fraud" by impersonation at the polls. We just witnessed another round of this fakery in the Texas House Election Committee today, where on a party line vote of 4-3, the republicans voted out two voter suppressing roadblock voter ID bills. What kind of evidence of this "rampant voter impersonation fraud" justifies voter suppression? None - zero, nada, zilch. As one of our great Democrats on the committee pointed out during a hearing two weeks ago, in the last 5 years that the SOS and Texas AG started to try to track this type of fraud over 20,000,000 million votes were cast in Texas elections, and not one single prosecution of voter impersonation has occurred. The only voter fraud the Texas AG has prosecuted has dealt with mail in ballots. These roadblock voter ID bills do nothing to stop mail in ballot fraud which is the only kind of organized voter fraud that seems to occur.

From the same article linked above:

Why, when too many voters must contend with electronic voting machines that routinely lose thousands of votes, forced to wait in lines that last for hours, are mistakenly purged from voter lists by the thousands, receive incorrect directions from overstressed poll workers and face a myriad of other problems, would lawmakers focus on a problem that barely exists? Could there be an ulterior motive for calling for harsh voter identification requirements?

Like the poll taxes and citizenship tests of old, ID requirements are effective at depressing voter turnout among particular groups. In 2006, research by the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice found that a quarter of all African American citizens don’t have government-issued photo identification, 18 percent of citizens 65 and older don’t have photo ID and at least 15 percent of citizens earning less than $35,000 lack photo ID.

The problem for politicians hoping to selectively depress voter turnout is this: Without voter fraud, there’s no justification for restrictive ID requirements. Thus, there’s pressure on U.S. attorneys to find and prosecute examples of voter fraud. But U.S. attorneys can’t manufacture fraud cases out of thin air. It appears that frustration with this inability to find voter fraud cases was so great that those in charge asked for a new round of U.S. attorneys, in hopes that they’d be easier to push around.

:grr:

Sonia