The Adventures of Stormi Bays and Fruto Boy
David Weigel | July 30, 2007, 4:55pm
Wall Street Journal political reporter John Fund has
been on the voter fraud beat for years. Back in 2004 and 2005 he had a lot of company, as Democrats-especially the bloggy variety-traded theories that Republicans were hacking electronic voting machines, trashing mail-in ballots (
shades of George Galloway) and purging African-Americans from the rolls. In January 2005 bloggers goaded Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer into officially challenging George W. Bush's re-election, and for her services Boxer received hundreds of roses. (
Seriously.) The day of the 2006 midterms Greg Palast, a one-man Warren Commission of voter fraud theories, predicted that
Republicans would beat the Democrats thanks to 4.5 million "shoplifted" votes. I lurked around the Democrats' election night party before the final Senate results came in and talked to grumbling liberals convinced that Karl Rove would swipe Missouri, Virginia, and Montana.
And then the Democrats won and we didn't hear about voter fraud anymore. The Senate Judiciary Committee has spent weeks grilling Bush administration officials on whether they made up voter fraud scandals out of whole cloth, sending letters to homeless shelters and military bases in the hope that they'd bounce back and create suspician about the voters Democrats were bringing to the polls.
Fund doesn't want to forget about voter fraud. In his newest dispatch on the issue he focuses on Seattle, where
...on Thursday local prosecutors indicted seven workers for Acorn, a union-backed activist group that last year registered more than 540,000 low-income and minority voters nationwide and deployed more than 4,000 get-out-the-vote workers. The Acorn defendants stand accused of submitting phony forms in what Secretary of State Sam Reed says is the "worst case of voter-registration fraud in the history" of the state. The list of "voters" registered in Washington state included former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, New York Times columnists Frank Rich and Tom Friedman, actress Katie Holmes and nonexistent people with nonsensical names such as Stormi Bays and Fruto Boy. The addresses used for the fake names were local homeless shelters. Given that the state doesn't require the showing of any identification before voting, it is entirely possible people could have illegally voted using those names.
Local officials refused to accept the registrations because they had been delivered after last year's Oct. 7 registration deadline. Initially, Acorn officials demanded the registrations be accepted and threatened to sue King County (Seattle) officials if they were tossed out. But just after four Acorn registration workers were indicted in Kansas City, Mo., on similar charges of fraud, the group reversed its position and said the registrations should be rejected. But by then, local election workers had had a reason to carefully scrutinize the forms and uncovered the fraud. Of the 1,805 names submitted by Acorn, only nine have been confirmed as valid, and another 34 are still being investigated. The rest--over 97%--were fake.
But Fund isn't providing evidence of
voter fraud. Acorn's engaging in registration fraud-easy to do, easy to block, and easy to get over-excited about. As Fund points out,
nobody actually voted using the ridiculous names supplied by Acorn. The phony registrations are getting played up for many of the same reason Democrats are playing up the Bush-Cheney campaign's direct-mail anti-fraud campaigns: Party politics. Three years ago Washington's Republicans narrowly lost the closest gubernatorial campaign in history after Democratic winner Chris Gregoire paid for a recount that showed her inching ahead of
State Sen. Dino Rossi. Rossi is gunning for a rematch in 2008 and part of his campaign narrative will be, to
quote Joe Jacobs, "We wuz robbed!" That's not why the state nailed Acorn. Their lawyers determined that
Acorn's fraudsters were simply cheating to meet a quota so they wouldn't lose their jobs. But the story gets played up in blogs and by the conservative media because it makes Democrats look like criminal conspirators.
The truth undergirding all of this: America's voting systems are incredibly flawed with machinery, deadlines, and regulations that differ from county to county. And they only ever get fixed when the parties are trying to out-skullduggery each other. Since the parties, not the government, used to run these elections, it seems sort of fitting.
Chavez is a thug | July 30, 2007, 10:50pm | #
"Dave may not have been hearing much Democratic angst about voter fraud lately, but Democratic officeholders have certainly been active on the issue."
Yeah they have been extremely active, lobbying against measures on a state and federal level that would make voter fraud much more difficult, such as stricter laws on absentee and provisional ballots and their herculean efforts to defeat any bill that would require a valid photo ID to vote. Evidently it is racist to ask someone to spend around $6 for an ID, even when the state offers to pay for them when an individual can't afford one, such as the case in Georgia.
But, since joe, the expert on everything, claims that John Fund is lying to ensure electoral success in 2008 (he is a conservative at the WSJ so nothing he says can be taken at face value) it should be self-evident that Mr. Fund is merely casting about for a blameless liberal group to "smear".
And as is your M.O joe, you totally ignore evidence that is contrary to your point of view. ACORN has been convicted in Washington and Colorado and has either been reprimanded, investigated or indicted in Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Ohio, New Mexico, North Carolina, Missouri, Michigan, Florida, and Arkansas. Those damn quotas, they will get you every time, right joe? But, hey, they did nothing wrong; it is merely the conservative media trying to ruin their good name. Evidently a group needs to be investigated or indicted by 33% of the states in the Union rather than a mere 25% before we stop attacking the messenger reporting on a given groups electoral fraud.
Joe you are so predictably idiotic, it has become a nuisance arguing with you. You always claim that your take on an event is the right one and anyone who disagrees with you is not speaking the truth, they are merely obfuscating to hide a more sinister motive, which of all the people on this message board, you are uniquely equipped to divine. It seems your master's degree has made you more qualified than John Fund, a man who makes a living reporting on these things, when it comes to the field of elections and the law. It now seems I must add elections to your growing list of fields of expertise. Let's see that now makes you an expert in: Venezualan media and election issues, Cuba and its healthcare system, the United States' healthcare system, American Indian history, Bariatric medicine, McCarthyism, First amendment issues, University Tenure issues, Gun control law, etc. Oh, I musn't forget your greatest expertise, regurgitating left-wing talking points and putting them forth as your own original thought. I wouldn't want to short-change your immense genius. After all, you do have a master's degree.
de stijl | July 31, 2007, 1:53pm | #
joe/de stijl - Since "your team" insists that it is wrong to expect anyone to show ID to prove that they are who they say they are, what's to STOP "Mickey Mouse" or "Fruto Boy" from voting?
BTW, I have no team.
County registrars generally verify addresses and the rolls are examined and purged depending upon the location and the rules in place. Dead people, non-existent addresses, trapping (mail registered mail to see if it's accepted), felons, re-enfranchised felons, etc. Laws and practices vary by location.
Can people fraudulently register and vote? Certainly.
Does it happen often?
I haven't seen any evidence that it does. Can you offer an instances of widespread voter fraud (not registration fraud)?
Should ID be required to vote?
Dunno. I see valid points on both sides of the issue. In GA, for example, when the bill passed that required ID it would cost $20 to get a state issued ID, you had to get it at the DMV which had no offices in Atlanta proper, and you had to use certain types of identification to verify identity and your addess. This strikes me as an effort to disenfranchise some voters. Being that GA is covered by the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Dept. had to approve the changes which they declined to do.
However, had the law been allowed to stand we would see less "positive" voter fraud (ie, false registration and voting. This is a good thing in that it discourages the bad actors.
But we would also see people turned away from the polls who are eligible to vote but who cannot provide the proper ID. This is a bad thing in that in prevents citizens from exercising their right to vote.
All in all, I prefer that everyone who is eligible to vote should be allowed to vote. Have them cast a provisional ballot if there is a registration question or if the party spotters challenge the voter and then examine their bona fides after the fact if need be.
State sanctioned disenfranchisement strikes me as a little too close to Poll Tax territory to make me confident in the legislators' intent.
BTW, if you think ACORN is the only organization who does this kind of monkey business you are woefully undereducated. This is a "both teams" issue.
joe | July 31, 2007, 3:38pm | #
CB, what de stijl said.
This is one of those situations where the solution to one problem raises the specter of the other, and vice versa. If we subject would-be voters to stringent ID requirements, we're going to prevent some segment of them from voting, potentially flipping an election. If we don't do enough to secure the vote, we're going to allow some number of cheaters to cast extra votes, potentially flipping an election.
I've never heard of an election that was swayed by actual voting fraud in my lifetime b. 1973), but I can think of a number of close elections - such as Florida 2000 - where the final margin of victory was proven to be far smaller than the number of people who were improperly prevented from voting.
I'd say that there are two important rights related to voting - the right of the individual to cast a vote and have it counted, and the right of everyone to have the winner of an election be the person who actually won. If an actual person is being denied the opportunity to vote, that's a serious rights violation for that person. If the wrong candidate wins an election because lots of people have been improperly forbidden to vote, that's a serious rights violation. And we know, for certain, that these rights violations have occured. On the other hand, the flip side rights violation - the wrong candidate being declared the winner because of fraudulent votes being counted - hasn't been a problem in this country for decades.
If there was no cost at all to making double secret super duper sure that absolutely no improper votes were cast, I'd be all for it. That's one reason why I'm so wary about electronic voting machines. But there is a cost, in terms of the actual rights violations it would cause, in terms of voter suppression denying citizens their right to cast a vote, and even in tipping elections towards the wrong candidate.
BTW, where are all of the conservatives who are so incredibly worried about voter fraud when that issue comes up? Oh, right, calling people tinfoil-heads.
Maybe we ought to just bring back the finger-dye to keep people from casting bogus votes. Unlike voter ID laws, that has the virtue of not denying basic civil rights to anyone.
