Broken Elections, Stolen Votes
First of a five-part series on voter fraud, voter suppression, and election stealing
BY AND Susan Q. Stranahan | June 30, 2008
Were the chaotic presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 an anomaly or a harbinger of things to come this November? Is democracy, as Karl Rove warned the Republican National Lawyers Association in 2006, under siege?
“We have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today,” the then-deputy White House chief of staff and Bush political strategist said in response to a question after his speech. “[O]ur democracy depends upon the integrity of the ballot place.” Once its integrity is jeopardized, he went on, “elections will not be about the true expression of the people in electing their government; it will be a question of who can stuff it the best and most.”
Who can stuff ballot boxes the best and most? It’s a chilling question, fueling a worry that has been rattling many Americans’ faith in the institution of free and fair elections since the 2000 presidential election was decided by a 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Since shortly after taking the White House in 2001, the Bush administration has relentlessly campaigned against voter fraud, asserting that voting by fictitious people and noncitizens is rampant. Democrats, on the defensive in a GOP administration, dismiss these claims and say the biggest threat to democracy is Republican officials who, rather than stuff ballot boxes, use their power to prevent likely Democrats from voting. Some charge that the Republicans stole the 2004 election in Ohio this way, assuring George W. Bush a second term.
Next to the campaign fundraising that’s under the constant spotlight trained on the center ring of the circus known as “buying of the president” is a side ring known as “fiddling with the election.” Sometimes the acts there steal the show, as happened in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. Following each of those elections, a barrage of news accounts has portrayed an election process open to chicanery, if not outright corruption:
As for whether the 2000 and 2004 elections were an anomaly, Andrew Gumbel, author of Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America, says they were just business as usual.
“Nothing has been more normal, over the past 200-plus years, than for one side in an American election to push, shove, and strong-arm its way across the finishing line, praising the strength and fairness of the process as it goes, while the other side stares forlornly at the inevitability of defeat and yelps in frustration about the perpetration of an outrageous theft that threatens the very fabric of the nation.”
As another fateful election approaches, a politicized debate is raging about voter fraud and voter suppression, in which neither side can agree on the nature of the problem, and every solution put forward is derided as a bid for partisan advantage. The real question remains unanswered: Are the systemic problems of the last two presidential elections likely to recur when the presumptive nominees, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, square off in November?
Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft led the fight against fraud. (Department of Justice)Not long after taking office in 2001, with Florida fresh in everyone’s minds, the Bush administration embarked on what would become a crusade within the GOP: a campaign to ferret out election fraud. The next year, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the Voting Access and Integrity Initiative and directed all of the Justice Department’s U.S. attorneys to aggressively investigate fraud and prosecute the guilty. He declared:
“America has failed too often to uphold the right of every citizen’s vote, once cast, to be counted fairly and equally. Votes have been bought, voters intimidated, and ballot boxes stuffed. The polling process has been disrupted or not completed. Voters have been duped into signing absentee ballots believing they were applications for public relief. And the residents of cemeteries have infamously shown up at the polls on Election Day.”
That same week the Republican National Committee rolled out a database of 3,273 voters who allegedly had cast more than one ballot. The committee also said it had identified over 700,000 voters registered in more than one state. Reporters, researchers, and state election officials who have examined the lists — and, apparently, the Bush Justice Department, under Ashcroft and his successors — have found little evidence of actual fraud.
The New York Times published an investigative report in April 2007 that said, “Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.”
Seven months later, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law published a 32-page report entitled “The Truth about Voter Fraud.” “[M]any of the claims of voter fraud amount to a great deal of smoke without much fire,” wrote the study’s author, Justin Levitt.
He said the problems that regularly make headlines — double-voting, voting by dead people, impersonating people at the polls, voting by dogs — tend to be little more than vivid anecdotes that are later proven false, Levitt said. Claimed double-voting, he said, is usually just a case of two people with the exact same name, sometimes with the exact same name and the exact same birthday — statistically more common than is intuitively obvious.
“By any measure,” he concluded, “voting fraud is extraordinarily rare.”
Loraine C. Minnite, an election fraud expert on the faculty of Barnard College in New York City, agrees. “The claim that voter fraud threatens the integrity of American elections is itself a fraud,” she concludes in a study for Project Vote. “No available evidence suggests that voters are intentionally corrupting the electoral process.”
Both Levitt and Minnite work for organizations devoted to protecting the franchise of the poor and other marginalized people, but even the Bush Justice Department has turned up very little.
In written testimony for a June 6 hearing conducted by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, William Welch, chief of the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, noted that in the almost six years since Ashcroft launched the voter fraud initiative, the department had convicted 111 defendants for fraud offenses out of a total 148 who were charged. Vice Chair Abigail Thernstrom complained of “a lack of really solid data on the dimensions of the voter fraud problem.” When Welch testified in person, Thernstrom, a Republican, and commissioner Todd Gaziano, a conservative independent, pressed for detail.
“I don’t think that anyone can quantify the problem through simply looking at criminal convictions and trying to equate the scope of the problem with the number of convictions,” Welch replied.
How many schemes don’t come to light?
Welch: “It is extremely difficult to quantify or give an estimate on what the scope is.”
Just how large of a problem is noncitizen voting?
Welch: “I really cannot give you an estimate of either how small or how large it is. It simply is an unquantifiable figure as far as we’re concerned.”