John Fund

"The voter-registration process in almost all states runs on the honor system. The Obama administration has done everything it can to keep the status quo in place. The Obama Justice Department has refused to file a single lawsuit to enforce the requirement of the National Voter Registration Act that states maintain the accuracy of their voter-registration lists. This despite a 2012 study from the Pew Center on the States estimating that one out of every eight voter registrations is inaccurate, out-of-date or duplicate. About 2.8 million people are registered in more than one state, according to the study, and 1.8 million registered voters are dead. In most places it’s easy to vote under the names of such people with little risk of detection."

"There is still time to reduce the chance of another election meltdown, both this year and in future years. But this will not happen unless we acknowledge that the United States has a haphazard, fraud-prone election system befitting an emerging Third World country rather than the world’s leading democracy."

"With its hanging chads, butterfly ballots and Supreme Court intervention, the Florida fiasco compelled this country to confront an ugly reality: that we have been making do with what noted political scientist Walter Dean Burnham has called ‘the modern world’s sloppiest electoral system.’ How sloppy? Lethally so. At least eight of the nineteen hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11."

"Many Democrats feel that the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court titled toward Bush, and they refuse to accept his victory as valid. But this issue transcends ‘red states’ vs. ‘blue states’ partisan grievances. Many Americans are convinced that politicians can’t be trusted to play by the rules and will either commit fraud or intimidate voters at the slightest opportunity."

"Reform is easy to talk about, but difficult to bring about. Many of the suggested improvements, such as requiring voters to show ID at the polls, are bitterly opposed. For instance, Maria Cardona, spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, claims that ‘ballot security and preventing voter fraud are just code words for voter intimidation and suppression.’"

"Some of the sloppiness that makes fraud and foul-ups in election counts possible seems to be built into the system by design. The National Voter Registration Act (‘Motor Voter Law’), the first law signed into law by President Clinton upon entering office, imposed fraud-friendly rules on the states by requiring driver’s license bureaus to register anyone applying for licenses, to offer mail-in registration with no identification needed, and to forbid government workers to challenge new registrants, while making it difficult to purge ‘deadwood’ voters (those who have died or moved away)."

"In 2001, the voter rolls in many American cities included more names than the U.S. Census listed as the total number of residents over age eighteen. Philadelphia’s voter rolls, for instance, have jumped 24 percent since 1995 at the same time the city’s population had declined by 13 percent."

"Ironically, Mexico and many other countries have election systems that are far more secure than ours. To obtain voter credentials, the citizen must present a photo, write a signature and give a thumbprint. The voter card includes a picture with a hologram covering it, a magnetic strip and a serial number to guard against tampering. To cast a ballot, voters must present the card and be certified by a thumbprint scanner."

"[I]n the United States, at a time of heightened security and mundane rules that require citizens to show ID to travel and even rent a video, only seventeen states require some form of documentation in order to vote. ‘Why should the important process of voting be the one exception of this rule?’ asked Karen Saranita, a former fraud investigator for a Democratic state senator in California. Americans agree. A Rasmussen Research poll finds that 82 percent of Americans, including 75 percent of Democrats, believe that ‘people should be required to show a driver’s license or some other form of photo ID before they are allowed to vote."

"Election fraud, whether it’s phony voter registration, illegal absentee ballots, shady recounts or old-fashioned ballot-box stuffing, can be found in every part of the United States, although it is probably spreading because of the ever-so-tight divisions that have polarized the country and created so many close elections lately."

"A former Democratic congressman gave me this explanation of why voting irregularities more often crop up in his party’s back yard: ‘When many Republicans lose an election, they go back into what they call the private sector. When many Democrats lose an election, they lose power and money. They need to eat, and people will do an awful lot in order to eat.’"

"Sometimes that desire to expand voting opportunities takes on unrealistic qualities. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has placed a measure on the November 2004 ballot that would allow noncitizens to vote in school board elections. ‘Candidates who run for school board ought to have to campaign in immigrant communities that are filling the public schools with kids,’ says Supervisor Matt Gonzales, the proposal’s chief sponsor. But city attorney Louise Renne, a Democrat, is adamant that state law probably bars noncitizens from voting on anything until they actually become citizens. ‘What next? Osama bin Laden voting?’ she asks."

"Perhaps no piece of legislation in the last generation better captures the ‘incentivizing’ of fraud and the clash of conflicting visions about the priorities of our election system than the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, commonly known as the ‘Motor Voter Law.’"

"The [National Voter Registration Act of 1993] imposed an unfunded mandate on the states by requiring that anyone entering a government office to renew a driver’s license or apply for welfare or unemployment compensation would be offered the chance to register on the spot to vote. Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship. States also had to permit mail-in voter registration, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official. Finally, states were limited in pruning ‘deadwood’—people who had died, moved or been convicted of crimes—from their rolls. Now, people who didn’t vote would be kept on the registration rolls for at least eight years before anyone could remove them."

"Some registration scandals have been comic. In Broward County, Florida, for example, an eight-year-old girl successfully registered to vote. The error would not have been caught if the girl hadn’t been called for jury duty, whereupon her mother called the election supervisors to report the mistake. More improbably, an elephant at the San Diego zoo was successfully registered to vote."

"The current toxic political atmosphere, in which one side is concerned about voter fraud and the other about voter disfranchisement, is largely the product of the elephant in the parlor left over from the 2000 election. Of course, I’m talking about the Florida recount, the gold standard for botched elections, and all the bitter recriminations it launched."

"The Florida battle returned to the news as the 2004 election approached in w:Michael Moore Michael Moore’s hit film Fahrenheit 9/11, which begins with a malicious account of what happened in 2000. In essence, Moore claims that George W. Bush, aided by Florida’s Republican secretary of state w: Katherine Harris Katherine Harris and the FOX News Channel, stole the election—and that everyone knows it."

"Why do liberals persist in propagating the Myth of the Stolen Election? Many of them sincerely believe in it, all this evidence notwithstanding. Others see it as a rallying cry that can bring out the Democratic Party’s core voters this fall [2004] in righteous anger. The Florida controversy also offers a pretext for some to talk about other changes they want to make in election laws."

"Both the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post found that, if anything, county officials were too permissive in whom they allowed to vote, and this largely benefitted Al Gore.An analysis by the Post found that 5,600 people whose names matched the names of convicted felons who should have been disqualified were permitted to cast their ballots. ‘These illegal voters almost certainly influenced the down-to-the-wire presidential election,’ the Post reported. ‘It’s likely they benefited Democratic candidate Al Gore: Of the likely felons identified by the Post, 68 percent were registered Democrat.’"

"In Davison County, election officials improperly counted over-votes On ballots where two Senate candidates had been marked, the election officials decided to block out the mark given to the candidate with the ‘lighter’ mark. These marks were covered with small, round, white stickers. Election officials were videotaped blocking votes from Congressman Thune. Concerns were also raised in Davison County because operatives working for Senator Tim Johnson’s office were initially granted access to the Democratic auditor’s office and its computers without allowing similar access to other parties."

"Hawaii has a history of election fraud going back at least to 1982, when the political and legal community were shocked by a voter registration scandal involving University of Hawaii law school students who illegally registered voters for a Democratic candidate for the state house, Ross Segawa. They were caught when volunteers for his opponent noticed that these youthful supporters of Segawa were registered at the Arcadia Retirement Residence. An investigation by the city prosecutor’s office led to Segawa’s conviction on ten counts of election fraud, criminal solicitation and evidence tampering, for which he served sixty days in prison… In another case of election fraud, an Oahu grand jury indicted state legislator Gene Albano in 1983 for illegally registering voters in his Kalihi Kai-Iwilei House District, and a decade later he was finally convicted of voter registration fraud. Governor Cayetano pardoned both Segawa and Albano in 2000 and appointed several other students in the University of Hawaii law school voter registration scandal to high-ranking government jobs."

"In the crucial November 2002 race for governor, Sequoia client Bernalillo County, New Mexico, had more than 48,000 people show up at six sites with Sequoia voting machines. Somehow, only 36,000 were recorded. The company later admitted that voters in Clark County, Nevada, had had the same problem with Sequoia’s machines just weeks earlier."

"In November 2003, there was a power failure with one of the Sequoia machines in San Jose, California. It was repaired by unknown technicians in the middle of an election without any supervision from county officials. According to the San Jose Mercury News, no one on site could say what the technicians repaired or changed. Then, in March 2004, Sequoia voting machines failed to record nearly seven thousand votes in Napa County, California, because voters used the wrong ink on optical scan ballots. The glitch affected the outcome of numerous races in all levels of government as well as ballot initiative measures."

"In November 2000, voters in San Francisco and in Pulaski County, Arkansas, learned firsthand about the havoc that malfunctioning machines can bring. In one San Francisco polling place, 362 people signed in to vote, and 357 paper ballots were counted manually, but ES&S machines reported that 416 people had voted there. In Arkansas, nearly thirty voters reported that the machines cast their vote for the wrong candidate—after they pushed the button for their candidate of choice, another name popped up."

"Local registration and election boards should be composed of citizen appointees. All such boards should have equal representation from both major political parties and at least one independent or third-party member. We’ve seen over and over, from St. Louis to Palm Beach County, how conflicts of interest are created if election boards are run by officials who have to run for offices themselves—often as partisans. ‘I think you’ll see most of the problems in bad management of elections occur where the top position isn’t nonpartisan and where most of the oversight is by people deeply involved in the political process,’ says Mischelle Townsend, the registrar of voters in Riverside County, California."

"All county the municipal election authorities should be required to have independent audits conducted of their voter tabulation systems, software and security procedures on a regular basis. In business, companies undergo outside audits by independent bodies to confirm to their stockholders that the companies are truthfully reporting on their financial condition and status."

"We should consider paying the people who run our elections more, as well as giving some of them more professional training. We pay many of the election officials in some of our rural counties less than the janitor at the local school. Sue Woody, who had served as the clerk of Park County, Indiana, resigned last year because she couldn’t make it on her salary of $22,000. She was responsible for running both the court and the election systems for her county."

"With the demise of most big-city political machines and the rise of election supervision by nonpartisan civil service employees, concerns about honest and accurate election counts receded. But Dr. Larry J. Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, who cowrote a pioneering book on the subject,Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics, warned as early as the 1990s that ‘voter fraud is making a comeback… My strong suspicion—based on sores of investigated and unexplored tips from political observers and interviewees over the years—is that some degree of vote fraud can be found almost everywhere, and serious outbreaks can and do occur in every region of the country.’"

"The 2000 recount was more than merely a national embarrassment; it left a lasting scar on the American electoral psyche. A Zogby poll a few years ago found that 38 percent of Americans still regarded the 2000 election outcome as questionable."

"In recent years, the biggest battle in election reform has been over voter ID—requiring voters to present a government-issued photographic identification when they vote at their polling places on Election Day."

"There is no question that every individual who is eligible to vote should have the opportunity to do so. It is equally important, however, that the votes of eligible voters are not stolen or diluted by a fraudulent or bogus ballot cast by an ineligible or imaginary voter. The evidence from academic studies and actual turnout in elections is overwhelming that—contrary to the shrill claims of opponents—voter ID does not depress turnout, including among the ranks of minority, poor, and elderly voters, which exist; the real myth is the claim that voters are disenfranchised because of voter ID requirements."

"Jimmy Carter knows the issue of voter fraud well. His first run for office, in a Democratic primary in Quitman County, Georgia in 1962, was stolen by voter fraud that local residents said ‘had been going on on election days as long as most people could remember.’ He went to court and got the election overturned, and ended up winning in the general election. Newly minted state senator Carter helped sponsor a comprehensive reform of the state’s election code; the culprit responsible for stealing the primary election was later convicted of voter fraud in a previous congressional election. As Jimmy Carter learned, fraudulent voting does exist, and criminal penalties imposed after the fact are an insufficient deterrent."

"The Department of Justice prosecuted its largest voter fraud case ever in Chicago—prosecutors estimated that 100,000 fraudulent ballots were cast in the 1982 gubernatorial election. The conspirators came within five thousand votes of changing the race to the losing Democratic candidate, and a federal grand jury found that ‘similar fraudulent activities’ had occurred in prior elections. Ten of thousands of individuals had voted twice; thousands of other bogus votes had been cast in the name of individuals who were dead, in prison, or whose registered addresses were vacant lots. Absent voters were impersonated, voters’ signatures on ballot applications ‘had been forged wholesale in many precincts,’ and votes were fraudulently cast under fictitious voter registrations and in the names of transients, the incapacitated, and senior citizens."

"In addition to voting in the names of fictitious people, the crews used several other methods of casting fraudulent votes involving voting under the names of legitimate voters. By reviewing voter registration records at the Board of Elections prior to Election Day, conspirators were able to identify newly registered voters. Crews would go to the appropriate polling places as soon as polls opened in the morning to vote under those names: The reasoning behind this method, according to the experience of one witness, was that newly registered voters often do not vote. By arriving at the polling sites early, the bogus voter would not need to worry about the possibility that the real voter had actually voted."

"One of the witnesses before the New York grand jury described how he led a crew of eight individuals from polling place to polling pace to vote. Each member of his crew voted in excess of 20 times, and there were approximately 20 other such crews operating during that election. This extensive fraud could have been stopped if New York required voters to authenticate their identify at the polls, and there had been poll watchers making sure that election officials were verifying voters’ IDs. The grand jury explained that ‘the ease and boldness with which these fraudulent schemes were carried out shows the vulnerability of our entire electoral process to unscrupulous and fraudulent manipulations.’ As a recent, thousands of fraudulent votes were cast in New York legislative and congressional elections."

"Voter ID might also help prevent double-voting by someone who is registered in two states. In 2004, a comparison of the voter registration rolls in North and South Carolina by the Charlotte Observerfound more than 60,000 people who were registered in two states, at least 180 of whom were listed ‘as having voted in both states in either the 2000 or 2002 general election.’"

"A similar investigation by the New York Daily News of voting rolls in New York City and Florida found 46,000 individuals registered in both states, 68 percent of whom were Democrats; 12 percent were Republicans, and 16 percent didn’t claim a party. Between 400 and 1,000 individuals voted in both states in at least one election—this in Florida, where the presidential election was decided in 2000 by 537 votes—and some of the registered voters double-voted in multiple elections."

"The double-voting problem was illustrated, to the great embarrassment of the League of Women Voters, by an amicus brief the League filed in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Indiana voter ID case. One of the Indiana voters highlighted in the League’s brief was used as an example of someone who had difficulty voting because of the voter ID requirement. But when and Indiana newspaper interviewed the voter, it discovered that her problems stemmed from her trying to use a Florida drivers’ license to vote in Indiana. Not only did she have a Florida driver’s license, she was also registered to vote in Florida, where she owned a second home and had claimed residency by filing for a homestead exemption on her property taxes, normally only available to state residents. So the Indiana law worked as intended: It prevented someone from voting twice who might otherwise have done so illegally without detection."

"Actual election results in Georgia and Indiana confirm that suppositions about voter ID hurting minority turnout are wrong. In 2008, in the first presidential election after their voter ID laws went into effect, both states saw turnout increase more dramatically in both the presidential preference primaryandthe general election than turnout increased in some stateswithoutthe photo-ID requirement."

"The California secretary of state reported in 1998 that two to three thousand of the individuals summoned for jury duty in Orange County each month claimed an exemption from jury service because they were not U.S. citizens, and 85 to 90 percent of these individuals were summoned from the voter registration list, rather than DMV records. While some of those individuals may have simply committed perjury to avoid jury service, this represents a significant number of potentially illegal voters: 24,000 to 36,000 noncitizens summoned from the voter registration list over a one-year period."

"Absentee-ballot fraud in particular is difficult to control. It is ‘the tool of choice’ for those who are engaging in election fraud,’ as the Florida Department of Law Enforcement concluded in its investigation of the 1997 Miami mayoral election. The results of that election were thrown out because of massive fraud involving more than five thousand absentee ballots, andThe Miami Heraldwon a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for its innovative investigation into the voter fraud. With the increasing use of no-fault absentee voting and all-mail elections, there is the real risk that fraud will affect more election results and potentially wipe out voting rights hard won by the civil rights movement."

"The Alabama voter fraud described by former Congressman Davis, which occurs in predominately black, poor counties, is vividly illustrated by a criminal prosecution that occurred in the 1990s in Greene County, Alabama, when local citizens, reform political candidates, federal and state prosecution, and a hometown newspaper banded together to fight absentee-ballot fraud in the county, one of the poorest in Alabama. Unfortunately, liberal groups including the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference worked equally hard to undermine the effort, as they have worked to undermine voter ID requirements and other reforms intended to ensure the integrity of elections… But in the end, justice prevailed, with the conviction of 11 conspirators who had fixed local elections for years… The Greene County case proves that absentee-ballot fraud is real, and not a cover story for an imagined voter-disenfranchisement conspiracy."

"Two of the biggest barriers to the prosecution of voter fraud are the misapplication of resources within the Justice Department and the political and ideological bias of too many of its lawyers."

"The 93 offices of the U.S. Attorneys located throughout the country share responsibility for prosecutions with the Election Crimes Unit. But given their many other responsibilities, vote fraud is not high on their priorities, particularly because they are well aware of the enormous criticism prosecutors receive from the civil rights community when they pursue election cases, as happened during the Bush administration. There is a Designated Election Officer in each office, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, who is supposed to deal with election crimes. But the vast majority have never investigated or prosecuted a voter-fraud case, and have no experience or interest in doing so."

"A veteran Justice Department prosecutor told one of the authors that while there was never an official memorandum delineating the Clinton administration’s policy on [voter fraud], the unofficial word had come down from the Clinton political leadership to the career prosecutors that there was ‘no interest’ in pursuing voter fraud cases."

"The NPV plan strikes at the Founders’ view of federalism and a representative republic—one where popular sovereignty is balanced by structural protection for state governments and minority interests. It like would violate the Constitution’s Compact Clause. In an age of perceived political dysfunction, effective policies that already are in place—especially successful policies established by this nation’s Founders, like the Electoral College—should be preserved."

"It was the day of Washington, D.C.’s presidential primary, April 3, 2012. A 22-year-old white man with a beard entered a polling place in the District, carrying a hidden camera. He walked up to the check-in desk and asked a poll workers if an Eric Holder was registered there. He gave U.S. Attorney General Holder’s address, which he had gleaned from public records. The worker began to hand him a ballot, at which point the young man said that he wanted to show his identification. ‘You don’t need it,’ the poll worker replied. ‘It’s all right. As long as you’re in here, you’re on our list, and that’s who you say you are, you’re okay.’"

"Attorney General Holder is a staunch opponent of laws requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls to improve ballot security. He calls them ‘unnecessary,’ and has blocked their implementation in Texas and South Carolina under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, citing the fear that such requirements would discriminate against minorities."

"In New Hampshire, three of [ James O’Keefe’s ] assistants visited precincts during the state’s January 2012 presidential primary. They asked poll workers whether their books bore the names of several voters, all deceased individuals still listed on voter registration rolls. Poll workers handed out 10 ballots, never once asking for a photo ID. The ballots were immediately given back, unmarked, to precinct workers. New Hampshire Governor John Lynch James , who had vetoed a state photo ID bill, sputtered when asked about O’Keefe’s videos, focusing on the messenger, rather than his message—that polls are dangerously vulnerable to fraud. ‘They should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, if in fact they’re found guilty of some criminal act,’ he roared."

"In neighboring Vermont, O’Keefe struck again in March, during the state’s presidential primary. His assistants were freely offered ballots at several locations without being asked to produce identification. In his videos, O’Keefe then documented the same people ordering drinks in bars or trying to rent a hotel room. In each case, they were asked for an ID."