Perhaps history will record 2012 as the year of the great voter fraud flap, when state legislatures across the country chose to tackle an imaginary problem while ignoring what appears to be a real and growing threat to fair elections.
Legislators in 37 states have been swept up in the voter ID mania, most passing stricter laws requiring voters to produce ID cards before voting.
The Maine Legislature considered such a bill early this year, but no photo ID law resulted.
Republicans nationwide have been hot on the idea, strongly believing that voter fraud is a significant factor in elections and that it strongly favors Democrats.
Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai was unwise enough to honestly explain the strategy in June.
In a laundry list of accomplishments, Truzai told Republican State Committee members, “Voter ID, which is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, [is] done.”
According to videotape of Turzai’s speech, the assembled Republicans erupted in applause.
Perhaps Turzai actually believes there is enough voter ID fraud in his state to swing an election. More likely he knows that one in five people in Philadelphia, which votes reliably Democratic, lack the required ID, as do 760,000 residents statewide, mostly the poor, the elderly and minorities.
The state’s attorney general recently testified that Pennsylvania has never prosecuted a case of voter fraud and is unaware of any current reports of voter fraud.
Meanwhile, a new nationwide analysis released last week of more than 2,000 reported cases of voter fraud over the past 12 years found only 10 cases of actual fraud.
That’s because this type of fraud is risky and tough to carry out on a meaningful scale.
It requires finding a large number of people willing to engage in a conspiracy and then making sure they all remain silent afterward. As any criminal knows, the larger a conspiracy the more likely it will be detected.
Other types of fraud, like tampering with voting machines and absentee ballots, are much easier to pull off without detection.
And we have actual examples of that, and within the past two weeks.
A district attorney in Massachusetts’ Hampden County is currently investigating whether a Republican candidate for state representative organized an absentee ballot scheme involving “hundreds of voters,” Boston.com reported on Aug. 14.
Election officials became suspicious when Republican requests for absentee ballots in one suburb jumped from an expected 50 to 450. A friend of the winning candidate is suspected of changing party affiliations of hundreds of people and then voting them for the winner, John Villamaino III.
In Miami on Aug. 10, Sergio Robaina was accused with acting as a ballot broker, or “boletero,” in Spanish, who may have used 164 absentee ballots to influence two political races.
The investigation now involves a county commissioner and the uncle of Hialeah, Fla.’s former mayor.
With the popularity of absentee voting growing, this form of fraud is likely to grow, yet neither political party has lifted a finger to restrict absentee balloting or even investigate the potential for fraud.
Voters like the convenience of absentee voting, and neither party sees an advantage in tightening those laws.
And that shows this debate, like so many others, has been more about party politics than preserving fair elections.
Sun Journal, Lewiston (Aug. 19)
When voter fraud occurs, it disenfranchises every legitimate voter out there. Is it all that surprising that libs vehemently object to efforts to protect the sanctity of the ballot?
What a stupid comment. It disenfranchises every legitimate voter out there…? HUH? What are you talking about? Do you know what disenfranchise means?
Vote fraud, election fraud, tampering with a voting machine, either by manipulating how it tabulates votes, how it transmits vote counts to a central vote tabulator… THAT type of fraud has been documented and complained about by both REPUB and DEM candidates… Is THAT sacred to you…?
VOTER fraud is statistically non-existent, and when some people try to pull it off, they are more often caught than able to swing an election… What is it with you people?
What is it with YOU people? Showing an ID is so
bad and difficult? What are YOU people so afraid of?
Aren’t YOU people proud of being yourself and are
afrad to show who YOU are? Just who is being
disenfranchised? No one is being denied any right to vote.
Proving who YOU people are is such an issue? Bet YOU
people have no poblem showing an id when you go buy
booze or ciggies or cell phones or big screen tv. Bet YOU
people have no problem showing an id to cash a check or
to sign up for welfare.
AMEN!!!!
To keep black people from voting disenfranchisers, like those you associate yourself with, once instituted a “poll tax.” Poor black and white folk, though mostly black, that couldn’t come up with the nominal fee, couldn’t vote.
That Jim Crow attempt to disenfranchise poor voters and limit who voted to only the “correct” type of voter is alive and well with this BS… That you forgot, or probably never even knew this marvelous history of ours, doesn’t surprise me… Thankfully, Jim Crow laws were overturned, and the country PROGRESSED past such small mindedness…
The other insults in that comment are juvenile and ignorant, and don’t warrant any more of a reply…
Suppressing the “black vote” is not the intent, but it could be a result if not properly administered. Just as California’s motor-voter law “wasn’t about” getting illegal immigrants to vote, tho that was widely known to be the hopeful outcome. It shouldn’t be a political issue, but it is.
I believe you should have to show ID to vote. And we should get right on this important issue…right after we fix the economy, implement real tax reform, and develop a long-term national energy strategy—things that are actual problems today.
Suppressing the “poor” vote appears to be the intent, while I admit intent is very difficult to prove. The intent is to make voting more difficult by creating a hurdle that must be crossed in order to cast a vote. Claims of “protecting” the vote seem innocuous, but if voter fraud is statistically non-existent given current laws and current practices at polling stations this level of “protection” is prohibitive as there will no doubt be some that will be denied the ability to vote if they fail to provide an ID. As the vote is secure already with current law and practice, these requirements serve no real purpose. The real result, however, will be to disenfranchise voters.
The very real, well documented examples of VOTE or ELECTION fraud… tampering with machines, with results from machines, limiting access to voting machines, limiting ballots or equipment at certain polling places… all documented… IS a serious threat and HAS been the cause for elections being swayed against the candidate that won the election.
I agree…I eagerly await a thorough airing of the election processes in Cook County, Illinois, as a good chance to start cleaning it up.
because it is my constitutional right to vote, there are no if and or buts about it. What scares me is that Republicans love to waive the Constitution around but then do something like this. If they really love the Constitution they would be making it easier to vote not harder. But the plain fact is that this is not about protecting voting, but making it harder for certain people to vote, there are no if and or buts about that. If you believe that they really care about the protecting the elections then that is just delusional.
You go on at length about voter id but not one single comment about the documented cases of election fraud (one committed on behalf of a Republican and not id related) also discussed in the article. A person might almost think that kind of fraud is okay with you….
Why are you so willing to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of legal voters just to stop a couple votes that may or may not be legal.
In what world does it make sense to stops hundreds of thousands of legal legitimate voters from voting?
Only in a Republican mind would that make sense, mainly because they know that they can not win a major election when all legal legitimate voters vote.
I’m guessing that you feel it isn’t disenfranchisement when left wingers are blocked from voting.
Voter fraud is not as common as the GOP would like you to believe. This is an effort to shut down the poor, some elderly and disabled voters, and people of color. It is a strategy to disenfranchise people who have voted for many years. I have an ID and carry it with me at all times, so this will not prevent me from voting. But it concerns me that it will prevent others from voting.
In Pennsylvania the judge was told by the Republicans that their own investigation found no voter fraud in that state. But they are spending a lot of money to go ahead and disenfranchise nearly a million voters – largely people of color and seniors who vote Democratic historically.
But it won’t stop Obama from winning. And they won’t be able to steal it. It won’t be close enough and the polls will show that it’s not close enough to steal.
Sorry, Karl Rove, not this time. Maybe Ohio 2004 where the Republican Lt. Gov owned the Diebold machines. But not this time.
All of these state legislatures that went gaga over voter id laws is the direct result of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, inspired legislation to influence who can and cannot vote.
http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed
The League of Women’s Voters has successfully challenged several of the laws states have enacted, showing them to be in violation of the Voters Rights Act. ALEC claims bipartisanship, but only one out of 104 legislators in its leadership positions is a democrat. There exists a collusion between corporations and state legislatures through writing model legislation which is then pushed through state bodies by the predominantly republican legislators that support ALEC and its mission. The Takings Bill that failed in the Maine legislature was from ALEC.
This is yet another way for corporate interests to dominate the politics and laws of the land.
There used to be almost no prosecutions for drunken driving, too.
Here’s a question for the Democrats: are present federal requirements to show an ID when buying a gun (a federally recognized constitutional right) unconstitutional because they place an undue burden on people?
Apples and oranges… and irrelevant…
But people knew that there were drunk drivers unlike the fact that there is very little, statistically so small as to be none, voter fraud.
At this point, there’s no way to tell if there’s ‘no’ voter fraud. But the potential rewards for organized voter fraud are great and the chances for getting caught are small, so a cautious person will assume it exists.
And if it doesn’t exist, why are the Democrats so unwilling to allow a very simple counter to it? I mean, really, there are people out there who can’t get an ID? And who the Democratic party can’t help to get an ID?
The best evidence for the existence of voter fraud is the vigor with which voter ID is opposed.
Well we could make sure we only have “serious” voters by charging a fee to vote, as well, but thatis unconstitutional, as it should be.
A lot of urban voters do not need an ID for everyday living, why should they need one to exercise a Constitutional Right?
And, NO, the vigor that is being used to oppose voter ID is one of anger that a supposed American Party that believes in AMerica would disenfranchise legitimate voters to win an election.
Excellent point. Oh by the way how many people have been killed by a vote.
Quite a few: Hitler was democratically elected.
“Voter ID, which is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, [is] done.”
Kind of hard to deny it’s about politics rather than fair elections after a statement like that.
……
The only people that should be allowed to vote are those that pay income and/or property taxes, things would change for the better if we didn’t have all of these people that vote for a living helping to set policy in this country for the rest of us that work for a living.
A form of Athenian democracy… now that’s a novel idea…
Although, given that some very, very wealthy folks don’t pay a red cent in “income” tax, maybe it’s not such a strange suggestion. That would certainly get their attention…
And we could count African-Americans as 3/5 a person and not allow women to vote either.
And please define how a person “votes for a living”? Must be very lucrative, voting that is.
That would be the welfare rats that mooch off of my tax dollars and then votes for every liberal politician that promises them more and more gravy from my table.
To most of us it would not seem difficult to obtain an ID. But I read about people born in the South back when people of color were not documented through birth certificates. What is a person to do if they fall into this relatively rare but real situation? Since 9-11, every American citizen has to have a certified copy of their birth certificate in order to get a state ID or driver’s license, and that has cost fees that may be hard for some people to pay. And if someone is elderly and disabled and does not get around easily, it may seem to be too big a hassle to try to get the ID in order to be able to exercise their most basic right and responsibility as a citizen. Is this right or fair? Or is it an effort to prevent certain groups from voting?