News21 is a project founded in 2005 by several journalism schools, to promote excellence in journalism. Read about News21 here. Recently News21 released a comprehensive study of all types of voter or elections fraud in the U.S., back to 2000. All fifty states were canvassed. The project found only ten instances at which anyone had tried to impersonate another person while trying to vote at the polls. The project found a great deal of voter fraud, but impersonation of others at the polls was miniscule compared to other types of fraud. Thanks to Rick Hasen for the link.
And this post should continue by emphasizing the obvious – that Republicans are passing voter ID laws with the un-American objective and expectation of disenfranchising more likely Democratic voters than Republican voters.
We at the USA Parliament have never found intentional voter fraud and we’ve had about 5000 to 15000 participants over the past 17 years of whom approximately 2000 have been voters who cast official USA Parliament votes.
I think a lot of peoples’ fears about voter fraud are largely unfounded.
The real fraud is the fact that very few votes count to elect people in single-winner districts, and that causes people to be dissatisfied and to lose interest in elections.
There is a bad taste in peoples’ mouths when the single-winner district power grabbers put forth super-slick camapigns, pander and forget to look out to protect the promise of democracy for all voters.
Nobody cares about making elections fair for everyone through proportaional representation. Even BAN is guilty of promoting their own friends rather than a system that treats all people fairly across the board.
The whole fight against top two is another example of wasted energy, when we could be working to find unity and fairness instead of investing in fights. The top two issue is like a wedge issue, and fighting top two is not a unity issue. Unity means working FOR something that’s good. I don’t see the top two people working FOR any good issues. It’s like they just want to pick any fight they can, and ignore the call for a unity coalition.
#2 is a cut and paste spam.
I must make a correction, we did have one intentional fraudulent duplicate vote early on in the parliament’s founding in around 1995. Without naming any names, a vote was supposedly cast by the “cat”, and was a test of our system. The parliament’s verification system worked fine and the eballot was deemed “spoiled”.
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Of course, they only found ten cases that have been CAUGHT. It would be impossible to count all the cases (if any) that haven’t been caught. If the cheater wins his or her election, it wouldn’t be that hard for him or her to bury their tracks. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number in rural Kentucky wasn’t at least 10 per election, not to mention Chicago.
If they are going to impersonate somenoe at the voting booth, they’d be stupid to impersonate someone who might show up at the polls and complain and blow the whistle. More likely, since voter registrations aren’t culled as much any more, they will impersonate a dead person, who obviously can’t show up to complain. (Let’s hope the Zombie Apocalypse doesn’t happen on election day.)
One solution, at least for rural Kentucky, would be to eliminate “General Delivery” as a valid voting address, since everyone was given an address as part of the Emergency-911 phone system. Then check the addresses, matching them against the tax rolls or some other government data that lists all the addresses, and if more than a certain number of people live at one place, or the place doesn’t exist on any records anywhere, check it out to make sure that it isn’t a cemetary or a fake. Once you find a fake voter, then watch to see if someone comes in and votes claiming to be that fake person.
Since there is a lot that can be done without resorting to requiring voter ID, I am surprised that the Democrats haven’t pushed for these alternate methods which would only cost the time of one programmer a couple of hours to develop the SQL queries necessary to run the checks.
Larry –
Since millions of people vote every year for
Larry –
Since millions of people vote every year for Republicans who do not consider as part of their constituency anyone who makes less than $300,000 per year, the Zombie Apocalypse is already underway.
But which do you think is more likely?
A) Thousands of people flock to the polls, at risk of arrest, conviction and incarceration, to cast ONE vote each?
or
B) State election officials, with very little oversight and under cover of laws like these Voter ID statutes, conspire to selectively disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters to the advantage of a single political party? Hint: Ohio, 2004.
And which do you think is the greater threat to democracy?