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Tova Andrea Wang

Tova Andrea Wang is the vice president for research at Common Cause. Prior, she was a democracy fellow at The Century Foundation, where she led an election reform working group. Before that, Wang worked for the National Commission on Federal Election Reform and for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.

Sarah Laskow interviewed Wang on April 14, 2008.

Why don’t you start us out by telling us who you are and what your background is with the issue of voter fraud.

My name is Tova Wang. I started out doing this kind of work right after the 2000 election and the whole Florida fiasco. I started because I was asked to be the staff person to the Carter-Ford Commission that was set up after that happened, to try and explore ways in which the election system could be improved in light of everything that had gone wrong. The work of that commission ended up being sort of the template for legislation that then came out in 2002, the Help America Vote Act.

I’ve been working on the subject ever since then, written tons of reports and given a lot of speeches. I’ve done a lot of research on various issues related to how to make the election system better and ways in which some policies are being advocated that would make it worse and end up disenfranchising people and trying to work on some things to combat that as well. As of just a week ago, I took the position of vice president for research at Common Cause in which I am continuing to work on this issue as well as some others.

How in your work would you define these issues, voter fraud specifically, and can you lay out the issues as you see it?

I think that the issue of fraud is real and I think there are instances of fraud in the election system. However, the one that’s discussed most frequently, which is polling place fraud and, more specifically, impersonation at the polls, is extremely rare. There has been a campaign in this country by many to perpetuate the idea that this kind of fraud is pervasive and, as a result, enact policies that will combat what is not really a problem through measures such as requiring government-issued photo ID at the polls or requiring people to somehow prove their citizenship through birth certificates and naturalization papers and so on before they are even allowed to register to vote.

The main battle has been, unfortunately, centered on the problem in the election system that doesn’t actually particularly exist, which is in-person polling place fraud. That is not to say that there aren’t other forms of problems and irregularities that occur that we need to continue to work on.

What are the irregularities that you see as a bigger problem than polling place fraud?

I think as more and more states move forward with liberalizing their absentee ballot laws and even going toward more and more mail voting, we need to take steps certainly to strengthen the safeguards to prevent against fraud in those situations. I think absentee ballots have been demonstrated to be much more prone to fraud than anything that goes on at the polling place.

We also have what I consider as fraud of people being disenfranchised by being erroneously or at times even, possibly purposefully, left off voter registration lists through the statewide voter registration database system. I consider it a form of fraud when you have people receiving fliers and mailings telling them blatant misinformation about where and when to vote and who’s eligible to vote. So those are real problems in the system where the outcome of the election is being impacted because of the nefarious acts of people who are engaging in illegal conduct or potentially illegal conduct, as the case may be.

It sounds like you’re bringing up an issue about things that are considered criminal and things that maybe aren’t part of the legal code.

Right. I am talking about anything that distorts election outcomes in ways and is due to acts that should have been avoided or deterred.

I think in one of your reports I read about how you said one of the problems was the shift from vote-stealing to problems with registration issues. Is that right?

I am not sure what you mean by vote-stealing.

I think it might have been in one of the versions of the EAC [Election Assistance Commission] Report. It said that historically one of the problems was vote-stealing — I guess fraud by election officials. Now the issues that come up, or at least that people are worried about, tend to be problems on the registration end.

You mean voter registration fraud?

Yes.

Yes. Certainly the issue of voter registration fraud has gotten a lot of attention. I think it is somewhat of a problem. I think it is probably not a good idea when organizations pay people to conduct voter registration drives in which they are paid by each person they register to vote. That is an incentive to make up a name and give a registration form that is not accurate.

Having said that, what we have found is that it is true that you will find in some elections a small number of voter registration forms that are either completely made up or are from people who may unknowingly be ineligible to vote in an election but have filled out a registration form. Overwhelmingly, the evidence that I’ve seen is those people never end up actually voting. So when people bring up instances of where they find that Mary Poppins is registered to vote or Superman is registered to vote, we find out that Mary Poppins and Superman don’t actually go to the polls and vote. While it’s a problem because it mucks up the administration system and makes it more difficult, it’s not much of a problem of altering outcome at the election.

Let’s talk about this EAC Report that you did. There’s been some controversy about it. Can you tell us what the report was and why it became an issue?

I would rather not get into that.

Can you tell us what the work was that you did for the DOJ [Department of Justice]?

We didn’t do work for the DOJ. It was just for the EAC.

You’ve written about it in the past?

Yes. Basically, from what I understood, the report was to look at the current state of research and knowledge on the extent to which there is voter fraud, election fraud, and voter intimidation. So we consulted dozens of experts in the field. We had a bipartisan working group advising us. We did Nexis searches of articles over the last six years. We looked at all the cases from the last several years. We went through all the existing academic and advocacy literature that has been written on the subject over the last several years to come up with some very preliminary thoughts on what it is that we know now given the research that has been done to date. I submitted a rough, not initially for publication, draft. So that’s the work we did.

The final version was a little bit different.

Right.

One of the things I was curious about, and I don’t know if you want to speak to it, do you think that the changes that happened between your draft report that you suspended and the final report will affect the sorts of research that the government is able to do in the future on this issue?

I think that one of the positive developments to have come out of all of that is that the EAC has become much better at being transparent about the research projects that they’re doing. That’s a tremendous step forward. I think that will solve a lot of the problems that we experienced.

One of the things that we’ve started to look into that I think you’ve written about as well is these questions about electronic voting machines. I’ve been reading from a lot of sources, but a lot of citizens are concerned with this issue. What is your perspective on that?

I have actually really stayed away from the voting machine issues, to be honest with you. I know you’re speaking to Bob Edgar here. There’s a woman here named Susannah Goodman who has really been at the forefront of the machine issue. I actually haven’t done a lot of work on it and haven’t taken much of a position on it.

What are you focusing on lately for the function cycle?

Having just started a new job, it’s a little bit on hiatus. The usual problems that we see — and especially the kind of problems that are exacerbated by the high turnout that we’re seeing — unfortunately our election system is not geared toward actually being successful in the sense of people really participating. They depend almost on the tradition of not a lot of Americans being involved. In fact, we’re seeing that turnaround this year, and the problems that arise from that and the lack of preparation.

I’m concerned about people who are registering to vote, some of them for the first time, and doing it so late and hopefully making it onto the voter registration list. We’re concerned about, again, implementation and misapplication of voter identification rules. I’m a little bit concerned that, particularly in the fall, we may see that now that students have been registering and voting in unprecedented numbers, they might become a target for some vote suppression activities. So those are some of the things I’m thinking about.

I’m interested in the students specifically. What sort of other suppression activities would they likely encounter?

What we have experienced in the past in some places is that some local officials don’t especially love the idea of students, who they perceive to be non-permanent residents of their communities, being able to vote in elections. However, the law clearly states that students are permitted to register and vote from their campus addresses. A lot of students across the country have encountered problems registering and voting. People will claim that they are not eligible to do so — they’ll try and either reject their voter registration application or challenge them at the polls. That’s inappropriate. It sends a terrible message. We hope that won’t go on this year.

Like I said earlier, one of the things our project is interested in is how money and influence impact presidential politics. Do you think that money plays into these issues at all? First of all, do you see it impacting the field?

Yes. I think campaign finance issues and election reform issues are very interrelated in the sense that they are the structural barriers in the system that we need to overcome in order to really make this a fair, equal, and high-participation democracy. I think that some of the campaign finance laws as they exist shut people out in very similar ways that structural barriers to the voting system shut people out. I see them as being very interrelated that way.

In your field, do you see money being spent to push one side of this issue, or another one view of voter fraud, or a rival one?

I don’t really know much about the spending of money. I’ve been largely a think tank person and have not really gotten involved in that level.

Your position is sort of documenting what happened in the past and deciding what sort of issues are a real problem?

I take a look at what is currently happening and what has been in the past, and try to anticipate what the problems will be going forward and alert people to them, discuss them, talk about and try to come up with some creative solutions to ensure that the maximum number of eligible registered voters are able to cast their ballots.

So what else should we talk about here? Do you think that I’m missing anything about this issue?

The voter fraud issue?

Yes or other election issues.

The only other thing is that there has been an ironic twist to this story on voter fraud that is actually a little bit troubling. I think that the people who have been pushing for voter ID have had to sort of back down a little bit on the argument that there is all this polling place fraud that needs to be addressed. Study after study has come out demonstrating that this is not the case. Now the argument on that side has become voters have the perception that voter fraud of this nature is rampant. So in order to retain public confidence in the system, we need to have voter ID.

In the first place, basing important public policy — and especially something that rises to the level of voting rights — on perceptions rather than facts is a dangerous road to go down. It’s especially rich considering that it is the same ID advocates who created this environment in which there is a public perception of voter fraud being a much bigger problem than it is. Now they’re trying to circle back and say, “That’s the problem we need to solve and therefore we need ID.”

It is my concern that that is now going to be the argument that is made. I think this is not an acceptable rationale for our enacting a policy that threatens to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands if not potentially millions of voters.

Is there any advantage to this policy?

To the voter ID policy?

Yes.

Not the kind that insists upon government-issued photo identification, which all sorts of people don’t have and are unable to get. No, not really, not at that level.

Can you explain how that contributes to disenfranchising people?

There are a number of groups. There are a number of Americans, but disproportionately, people of color, lower-income people, immigrants, elderly people, young people, those types of people will not have the type of identification that is required in the first place. That is, current driver’s licenses with their current name on them. Therefore, they will have to get some kind of state-issued or government-issued photo ID, in which case, they then need to get their birth certificate. Many people don’t have their birth certificates, so they then have to navigate the system and go out and purchase their birth certificates, which can cost a substantial amount of money. Certainly it will cost a substantial amount of time.

In order, then, to get the government-issued photo ID, even if they are distributing that ID itself for free, these underlying documents will not at all be free. In fact, they can be quite expensive. You are essentially imposing a poll tax on people who don’t have driver’s licenses. Study after study shows that possibly 10 percent of people don’t have [driver’s licenses], and much larger numbers than that in African-American and poorer communities.