Walter In Denver

Voting Accuracy?

Much blogging in the last week on John Fund's new book on voter fraud, and rightly so. NRO has the intro online, including:

Some of the sloppiness that makes fraud and foul-ups in election counts possible seems to be built into the system by design. The "Motor Voter Law," the first piece of legislation 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 that the city's population has declined by 13 percent. CBS's 60 Minutes created a stir in 1999 when it found people in California using mail-in forms to register fictitious people, or pets, and then obtaining absentee ballots in their names. By this means, for example, the illegal alien who assassinated the Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was registered to vote in San Pedro, California — twice.

This is a subject that concerns me greatly. I think voter electon fraud is so easy that it's almost inevitable that someone will attempt it.

In 2000 I ran for the State House seat in my Northeast Denver neighborhood. Running as a Libertarian I know I had little chance of being competitive, but I gave it some effort anyway. One of the things I did was campaign door to door, using the voter registration lists so I could cover the neighborhood more efficiently. What an eye opener that was.

The voter lists were wildly inaccurate. It seemed that about a third of the names were incorrectly listed. I found multiple people with different last names registered to single small apartments. There were people registered to vacant houses and empty lots. Some had moved out years ago.

None of this proves that there was any fraud, but it wouldn't have been terribly difficult for someone to vote multiple times using the names on the voter list. The district is heavily Democratic, many precincts voting 90% that way. If someone did manage to vote a few hundred extra times no one would notice on account of a lopsided vote, since that's so normal.

Colorado now requires identification for voters at the polls, but that still leaves the problem of absentee ballots.

Posted by Walter at September 22, 2004 03:26 PM