It looks like the NYT is going to follow this lead to the end. Yesterday they gave us a story about how Republican political operatives had manipulated the findings of a report on voter fraud to suggest that the problem was in fact real. Today they take a look at the law enforcement end of things to see how successful the Department of Justice has been in bringing in vote fraud cases. As it turns out, the initial version of the report detailed yesterday was correct. Despite Republican claims to the contrary, vote fraud does not represent a threat to our democracy.
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.
Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.
Richard L. Hasen, an expert in election law at the Loyola Law School, agreed, saying: “If they found a single case of a conspiracy to affect the outcome of a Congressional election or a statewide election, that would be significant. But what we see is isolated, small-scale activities that often have not shown any kind of criminal intent.”
86 convictions out of the hundreds of millions of votes cast in the last five years is so ludicrously small that even I'm surprised by it. But keep reading the article and you'll discover that its actually worse than that. Here are just a few of the examples of successful convictions:
Ms. Prude’s path to jail began after she attended a Democratic rally in Milwaukee featuring the Rev. Al Sharpton in late 2004. Along with hundreds of others, she marched to City Hall and registered to vote. Soon after, she sent in an absentee ballot.
Four years earlier, though, Ms. Prude had been convicted of trying to cash a counterfeit county government check worth $1,254. She was placed on six years’ probation.Ms. Prude said she believed that she was permitted to vote because she was not in jail or on parole, she testified in court. Told by her probation officer that she could not vote, she said she immediately called City Hall to rescind her vote, a step she was told was not necessary.
“I made a big mistake, like I said, and I truly apologize for it,” Ms. Prude said during her trial in 2005. That vote, though, resulted in a felony conviction and sent her to jail for violating probation.
Of the hundreds of people initially suspected of violations in Milwaukee, 14 — most black, poor, Democratic and first-time voters — ever faced federal charges. United States Attorney Steven M. Biskupic would say only that there was insufficient evidence to bring other cases.
No residents of the house where Mr. Graber made his assertion were charged. Even the 14 proved frustrating for the Justice Department. It won five cases in court.
The evidence that some felons knew they that could not vote consisted simply of a form outlining 20 or more rules that they were given when put on probation and signs at local government offices, testimony shows.
The Wisconsin prosecutors lost every case on double voting. Cynthia C. Alicea, 25, was accused of multiple voting in 2004 because officials found two registration cards in her name. She and others were acquitted after explaining that they had filed a second card and voted just once after a clerk said they had filled out the first card incorrectly.
But actually, that isn't even the most amazing part of the story. What really floored me is that after presenting the facts, the NYT actually put the entire thing into the proper political perspective:
The push to prosecute voter fraud figured in the removals last year of at least two United States attorneys whom Republican politicians or party officials had criticized for failing to pursue cases.
The campaign has roiled the Justice Department in other ways, as career lawyers clashed with a political appointee over protecting voters’ rights, and several specialists in election law were installed as top prosecutors.The Justice Department stand is backed by Republican Party and White House officials, including Karl Rove, the president’s chief political adviser. The White House has acknowledged that he relayed Republican complaints to President Bush and the Justice Department that some prosecutors were not attacking voter fraud vigorously. In speeches, Mr. Rove often mentions fraud accusations and warns of tainted elections.
Voter fraud is a highly polarized issue, with Republicans asserting frequent abuses and Democrats contending that the problem has been greatly exaggerated to promote voter identification laws that could inhibit the turnout by poor voters.
The fraud rallying cry became a clamor in the Florida recount after the 2000 presidential election. Conservative watchdog groups, already concerned that the so-called Motor Voter Law in 1993 had so eased voter registration that it threatened the integrity of the election system, said thousands of fraudulent votes had been cast.
Similar accusations of compromised elections were voiced by Republican lawmakers elsewhere.
The call to arms reverberated in the Justice Department, where John Ashcroft, a former Missouri senator, was just starting as attorney general.
Combating voter fraud, Mr. Ashcroft announced, would be high on his agenda...
At the same time, the department encouraged United States attorneys to bring charges in voter fraud cases, not a priority in prior administrations. The prosecutors attended training seminars, were required to meet regularly with state or local officials to identify possible cases and were expected to follow up accusations aggressively.
The Republican National Committee and its state organizations supported the push, repeatedly calling for a crackdown. In what would become a pattern, Republican officials and lawmakers in a number of states, including Florida, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington, made accusations of widespread abuse, often involving thousands of votes.
In swing states, including Ohio and Wisconsin, party leaders conducted inquiries to find people who may have voted improperly and prodded officials to act on their findings.
But the party officials and lawmakers were often disappointed. The accusations led to relatively few cases, and a significant number resulted in acquittals.
As I mentioned yesterday, it really shouldn't surprise anyone that these investigations turned up relatively few instances of fraud, and no instances of conspiracies. If you really wanted to steal an election, this isn't how you would do it.
However, if you wanted to intimidate people and keep turnout down, prosecuting these cases, or more importantly, threatening to prosecute these cases, is precisely what you'd want to do. If your goal is to keep people on the margins of society from voting, this strategy is perfect.
In yesterday's post, I linked to an excellent piece by Hilzoy that covered the topic in considerable detail. Today, Publius has followed her post with an even longer look at how this particular issues fits into a series of much broader problems we have with our bizarre system of vote casting and counting.
I've said this before, and no doubt I will say it again: nothing matters more than the integrity of the vote. It is the bedrock on which the rest of our democratic system of government is built. There are huge problems with our system, some of which have been deliberately created by partisan political operatives in the hope of tilting the playing field in their direction, but they can be fixed. If you are at all interested in this subject - and if you're reading this blog, I honestly don't see how you could not be - you need to take a few minutes and get acquainted with the issues involved.
And kudos to the NYT for following this issue in such detail.
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