Broken Elections, Stolen Votes – Part Five
What impedes election reform efforts
BY Susan Q. Stranahan | July 07, 2008
With another Election Day bearing down on an electorate whose trust has been shaken by the spectacular disarray of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, what is being done to fix what’s broken, and what’s impeding reform efforts?
First, what needs fixing has long been in dispute. Democrats have traditionally supported efforts to simplify voting and registration; Republicans have warned that loosening the rules will encourage fraud.
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter called on Congress to reform the national electoral system, saying that “millions of Americans are prevented or discouraged from voting in every election by antiquated and overly restrictive voter registration laws.” Carter proposed a method of universal voter registration, in which citizens could register to vote in a federal election on Election Day; as a safeguard against fraud, Carter said, new voters should be required to show identification. The proposal won little support, and in 2005, as co-chair of a presidential commission to investigate the integrity of the nation’s voting procedures in the aftermath of the 2004 election, he tried again. He and his co-chair, Republican former Secretary of State James Baker III, issued a similar call for voter IDs and streamlined election rules, but they had just as little backing.
With the 2008 election less than six months off and the general election campaign gathering steam, political passions are running extraordinarily high and millions of new voters have been registered. What they experience at the polls has yet to be seen. The every-four-year fundraising process, “the buying of the president,” presses on, with the parties knowing that they may have to plan to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees in Election Day-related challenges.
Voter registration lists are messy. They’re not coordinated between states; they often list the names of the departed long after those voters have been buried; they’re subject to misspellings and other administrative slips. And they’re subject to mischief.
Says journalist Andrew Gumbel: “The [election] system functions not on the principle of the common good, but on how much its participants think they can get away with. There is nothing virginally pure about American democracy, and there never has been.”
Several reasons make voting reforms like those Carter proposed difficult to achieve, according to the political scientist Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College. “Chief among them,” she writes, are “the benefits the status quo bestows on politicians in charge of making the rules.”
Former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, joined with former Secretary of State James Baker III, a Republican, to propose a series of steps toward election reform. (Jimmy Carter Library)Another roadblock to reform is the dearth of agreed-upon facts and quality data about problems during elections. Biographies of Boss Tweed’s fabled Tammany Hall machine in New York City and treatises asserting how the last election was stolen may be readily available, but nonpartisan research into the administration of elections and their vulnerabilities is thin. At the launch in May of the Brookings Institution’s new book on election fraud, one of the editors, Thad Hall, held up a copy of a worn, brown book, a copy of Joseph P. Harris’s Election Administration in the United States, published in 1934. This volume, according to Hall, was the only book written on the subject for decades.
It’s not clear how often voter fraud or voter suppression actually takes place, either. Advocates on the liberal side often point to the dearth of election fraud prosecutions as a sign that conservatives are wringing their hands over nonexistent problems. But the low numbers of prosecutions may have more to do with the difficulty of tracking down the tricksters responsible. Similarly, Craig Donsanto, a career lawyer at the Department of Justice, who wrote the manual on prosecuting election fraud, has talked about his department’s fruitless search for the distributors of misleading flyers, for instance, which might give incorrect information about polling locations or times, or claim that drivers with outstanding parking tickets are liable to be arrested when they show up to vote.
“We have investigated every one of those that came to our attention last election cycle,” he wrote in a 2006 e-mail providing comment to the federal Election Assistance Commission on the commission’s study on voter fraud and voter intimidation. “We were not able to identify the persons responsible for printing the misleading flyers in any of these. But we sure as heck tried.”
“Those are the kinds of things that [are] very hard to tie down,” agrees Vincent Fry, a former head of the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute. “There is not really a smoking gun.”
Election manipulation can grow spontaneously from that last, desperate moment at the end of a close race, when the outcome is unclear. If the campaign’s coffers hold $10,000 or so to spare, Fry explained to the Center: “They think — where can I spend this $10,000 in a way that will show that I have used the money? . . . You can buy some radio or some autocalls, that kind of thing.”
Fry speculated that, with off-the-books funds, “the same situation could happen with the flyers. Someone has got $10,000 cash and they want to use it to be helpful. . . . Nobody can really trace that, and so I think [voter intimidation and suppression] thrive in a low-dollar environment, because fewer people are paying attention.”
A record 126 million Americans voted in the 2004 election, a jump of 15 million over 2000, made possible in part by a net increase of 12.5 million in the number registered. According to one estimate, nonprofit and civic organizations filed nearly 50 million new-voter registrations in advance of the election, with millions of people signed up as part of local registration and get-out-the-vote drives. Many of those drives targeted minorities and low-income neighborhoods that traditionally vote Democratic.
Offsetting this surge in new voters have been restrictive regulations enacted by state legislatures that have shut down or severely curtailed registration activities. Requirements in different states include registration of each individual who will collect registrations and deadlines as short as 48 hours for turning in completed forms. Violations carry hefty fines and criminal penalties. Rules Florida enacted before the 2006 election, for example, were so onerous that the League of Women Voters abandoned its registration efforts; the rules did not affect political parties in the state.
The League has been fighting the law ever since. In 2006, it joined with a consortium of voting rights groups to obtain a temporary injunction against the law, and in 2007, Florida’s legislature amended the law to reduce the fines for violations. In April, after Secretary of State Kurt Browning unveiled the rules he would use to implement the revised legislation, the League of Women Voters again put a moratorium on its voter registration activities and filed a new suit against the secretary of state.
The law could mean fines as low as $1,000 for the League, or as high as $28,500, the group says. “Its ambiguity puts us in a place where we can’t determine what risk we’re at,” said Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, a former president of the League’s Florida chapter. On June 18, Giliotti took the stand for an hour and a half, as a key witness for the plaintiffs. The League anticipates in the coming weeks the court’s ruling on whether the state can enforce the new law while the court case proceeds.
Another Florida law barred any Florida citizen from registering to vote if the state cannot match or validate the driver’s license or Social Security number on a registration form, a requirement that critics argue could disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters solely because of typographical errors or other minor discrepancies. This provision is also now under challenge in a lawsuit brought by the Florida branch of the NAACP and other groups.