The Real Voter Fraud
It has become a rallying cry for some to claim that we need to do more to prevent “voter fraud”. According to those chanting this disturbing chorus, elections are being influenced and sometimes determined, by people who are ineligible to cast a ballot impersonating eligible voters.
To be sure, the NAACP sees disenfranchising, disturbing instances of “voter fraud” every election cycle. However, the fraud that we witness is different. Every day, we hear of deceptive practices, misinformation and lies that are used to keep registered, legitimate voters away from the polls or to support candidates whom they might not otherwise vote for. Sadly, we also still find ourselves fighting attempts by election officials to disenfranchise the people in communities we represent.
It is our experience that voter impersonation, which has resulted in passing numerous laws, proposed laws, and court cases, is actually quite rare. Nationwide, between 2002 and 2006, when a crackdown on voter fraud was one of the U.S. Department of Justice’s top priorities and when more than 400 million votes were cast, an average of only 30 federal cases per year were prosecuted.
Regardless of the questionable prevalence of this type of voter fraud, several states have passed troubling photo identification requirements. Sadly, rather than addressing voter fraud, however, the true effect of these laws is to disenfranchise the estimated 20 million Americans who have not purchased government-issued photo IDs. And it should come as no surprise that a disproportionate number of these people are racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly and low-income Americans.
Yet examples of genuine, malicious voter fraud continue to plague us. In Virginia, registered voters received recorded calls stating that they could vote by telephone, by pressing a number for the candidate of their choice. The call ended by fraudulently stating that they had now voted, and did not need to go to the polls.
In 2006 in Orange County, California,14,000 Latino voters got letters in Spanish saying it was a crime for immigrants to vote in a federal election. It didn’t say that immigrants who are citizens have the right to vote.
In addition to these unscrupulous tactics, the NAACP has seen a dramatic increase in which people have registered to vote, believing or having been told that they have done everything correctly, only to be turned away from the voting booth on Election Day because they have been erroneously purged from the voting rolls, or mistakenly not added.
We know from Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 that over-zealous, erroneous purging of the rolls, underestimating the number of necessary voting machines, ballots and poll workers, the under-training of poll workers, intimidation of voters and the misuse of photo ID requirements, especially in neighborhoods with heavy concentrations of racial and ethnic minorities, can be a standard trick by unscrupulous election officials trying to suppress a segment of the voting public.
Voter fraud, inadequately trained election workers, lack of working voting machines and lack of ballots, blocked access to polling sights and intentional deception and voter intimidation lead to disenfranchisement of eligible voters. These are the real problems that should be seriously addressed if we are to realize the promise of our democracy. These problems are more than just “voter fraud”: These problems are a national travesty.
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The only trouble thing is that there are placed that DON'T required identification! If it's not necessary to provide identification, there could be massive voter fraud and it would be virtually undetectable. Might indeed be the case.
I maintain that voter fraud stole the last election and I predict that we will not have free elections in the future. When our own governemnt fuels a group such as ACORN and allows the registeration of people who are not eligible to vote and registers one person 20 times, what is going to stop this ineligible person from voting more than once? I am very much in favor of IDs for everyone.
I agree that voter fraud is a much less serious problem than is often claimed. In particular, voter registration fraud is completely blown out of proportion. However, most of the actual examples of voter fraud could indeed be limited or prevented by requiring a government-issued picture ID to vote. Many states offer a free state ID for those people who cannot or choose not to get a driver's license or other form of ID. For those states that do so, is there any real burden on the voting public, even the poor, to get such an ID before voting?
How exactly does this "estimated 20 million" people conduct business in their daily lives without ID? You can't open a bank account or cash a check without one. Is the author suggesting that someone who can figure out how to register to vote can't figure out how to get a photo ID? That strikes me as fantastically unlikely in a society where ID is required for everything we do.
In fact, as a rule of thumb, the only people who ever balk at showing IDs are criminals. It isn't something honest people typically have a problem with.
So, why does the NAACP have a problem with it? They certainly seem to have a handle on the mechanics of vote fraud, which wouldn't be a red flag until they get to the part of refusing to show ID. I'm sure check forgers felt the same way when banks started insisting customers identify themselves to prove who they are.
In 2000 is when the non-precedent setting (sure!) US Supreme Court committed the most outrageous voter fraud in the history of our democracy. By stretching the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution to include voting recount standard in 67 counties while the clock expired under their own mandated stay, the Supreme Court became a political activist vote fraud, disenfranchinsing an entire state. See the re-enactment in "Recount" - the movie that accurately portrays the end of real democracy.