Fraud? You Damn Betcha!
Urban legends of the dead voting are targeted not so much at the general public, but at the same conservatives who lapped up Bush administration lies about Iraqi WMDs like milk from a saucer. The GOP knows its base well. Tell supporters credulous enough to fall for the WMD lie that the dead are voting en masse, and the marks will fall for that, too. Wrap it in a flag and they’ll believe anything.
A pattern of fraud? You damn betcha!
Courtesy of the Brennan Center (2007):
Exaggerated or unfounded allegations of fraud by dead voters include the following:
• In Georgia in 2000, 5,412 votes were alleged to have been cast by deceased voters over the past 20 years. The allegations were premised on a flawed match of voter rolls to death lists. A follow-up report clarified that only one instance had been substantiated, and this single instance was later found to have been an error: the example above, in which Alan J. Mandel was confused with Alan J. Mandell. No other evidence of fraudulent votes was reported.
• In Michigan in 2005, 132 votes were alleged to have been cast by deceased voters. The allegations were premised on a flawed match of voter rolls to death lists. A follow-up investigation by the Secretary of State revealed that these alleged dead voters were actually absentee ballots mailed to voters who died before Election Day; 97 of these ballots were never voted, and 2715 were voted before the voter passed away. Even if the remaining eight cases all revealed substantiated fraud, that would amount to a rate of at most 0.0027%.
• In New Jersey in 2004, 4,755 deceased voters were alleged to have cast a ballot. The allegations were premised on a flawed match of voter rolls to death lists. No follow-up investigation publicly documented any substantiated cases of fraud of which we are aware, and there were no reports that any of these allegedly deceased voters voted in 2005.
• In New York in 2002 and 2004, 2,600 deceased voters were alleged to have cast a ballot, again based on a match of voter rolls to death lists. Journalists following up on seven cases found clerical errors and mistakes but no fraud, and no other evidence of fraud was reported.
Michigan’s Secretary of State and South Carolina’s Attorney General were undoubtedly unaware of these facts, or or else didn’t think they mattered. Republicans have been crying voter fraud since the 1980s, at least. What is different now is they have more channels for promoting the lie.
Examining the effects of recently passed Voter ID bills, the Washington Post reports that the “numbers suggest that the legitimate votes rejected by the laws are far more numerous than are the cases of fraud that advocates of the rules say they are trying to prevent.”
In trying to promote Voter ID passage, the Republican National Lawyers Association published a report last year citing some “400 election fraud prosecutions” in the entire country in the last decade. The Post observes, “That’s not even one per state per year.” Among the dead links the association provides to substantiate its claims, only six cases are listed as voter impersonation fraud — the kind Voter ID laws are supposedly designed to stop — and none of those indicate votes actually being cast by anyone passing themselves off as someone else, dead or alive. Most involve vote buying or falsified registrations.
Meantime, the Christian Science Monitor reports that Georgia rejected 873 provisional ballots in 2008 due to ID requirements, and 64 more in this year’s presidential primary. Indiana tossed hundreds of provisional ballots in 2008, plus a hundred more in this year’s primary. In its 2012 primary, Tennessee blocked 154. That’s 1200 votes rejected in Georgia and Indiana alone according to an Associated Press investigation.
The party that believes government doesn’t work has found a concrete way to prove it. Too cowardly to face the voters in a fair election? It’s nothing a dose of vote suppression Viagra won’t help. And Voter ID is only one of the tools in play. Common Cause just released an updated summary of additional Deceptive Election Practices and Voter Intimidation to watch out for this fall.
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