The idea of voter fraud by id has strong emotional appeal. But is not supported by evidence, research studies, or anecdotal evidence. If you weigh the pros and cons, those who will be unable or unlikely to vote far outnumber, in real terms, those likely to commit fraud by improper or fake id. Each voter is registered. Once checked off, her or she cannot vote again. This contradicts the basic claim in support of voter id.
The basic claim for fraud targets people voting more than once, using someone else’s id or address. The second claim focuses on persons who are ineligible to vote, voting in elections. Ohio had a well-publicized case in Columbus, in which 3 people were convicted of registering and voting persons illegally during the Golden Week, in which registration and voting can take place at the same time. Fears that illegal immigrants will cast ballots are also a reason supporters want to require voter ids.
The Ohio case turned on technicalities: newly registered voters in the state are to be residents for 30 days before they can vote. The confusion took place during the Golden Week, in which several voters who had recently moved to the state didn’t meet the residency test.
Yet the highest likelihood of election fraud–one that appears year after year–involves ballot security–not voter id. Year after year, voting machines fail to function and properly record votes. Ballot bags are improperly transported or stored, ballots are miscounted; voting machine software has proven ridiciously easy to reprogram or tamper with, and ballot substitution is one of the oldest but most reliable paper ballot scams (you accept a pre-marked ballot, drop it in the box and return a clean ballot to the minder who then marks it; repeat the process.) Widely spread, also, is the request for assistance scheme, in which the assisting worker then marks the ballot.
Votes are “lost” physically and electronically by schemes that are regularly updated and changed–and dificult to identity legality. Buying votes still takes place in many communities; the exchange of value taking place off site.
The Ohio bill did not step up efforts to improve ballot security, particularly important in Ohio after the Bush-Gore presidential election revealed glaring flaws in ballot security that many think amounted to fraud.
A legal filing from that election included the deposition of Michael Connell, who served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio’s vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga. In the 2000 Presidential election, Cuyahoga County reported a 3% spoilage rate for ballots, way high, and significant enough to shift votes to ensure Bush’s election. Again vote id is a front door move to close the wrong back door, which would remain wide open for hacking and manipulating ballot security, by far the largest source of complaints and evidence of manipulation.
Anti-Democratic Party Exhibit Supporting the Right of Women to Vote, Colorado, 1916. LOC.
Moreover, the current bills have a number of provisions that indicate it was intended to restrict and limit voting rights, through provisions that had nothing to do with voter id. In the most glaring example, poll workers were no longer allowed to speak to voters or answer questions. If a voter arrived at the wrong precinct, a fairly common occurence, a poll worker would not be able to inform the voter of his or her correct voting place. How does that enhance security? It simpy seems to create a barrier to voting.
Ballot security issues resulted in very large differences in voting totals in several South Carolina counties and precincts, a recent study showed. One source reported “even the state cannot ask the counties for data and get a good record of what happened last November.”
A Free Times article cited documented discreprencies in Colleton County, which reported 13,045 votes for statewide offices in the November elections, but later it turned that out only 11,656 ballots had been cast that day–somehow 1,389 extra votes had been counted. An investigation concluded that the skewed results were human error. More than 1,100 votes were udercounted in Richland County–1,000 from a single Bluff Road precinct.
South Carolina uses a statewide system of iVotronic touch screens the state purchased from an Omaha-based company called ES&S in 2004. The machines do not provide a voter-verified paper trail. The machines are about halfway through their life cycle. ID requirements do not impede the pervasive, persistent ballot security issues that shadow elections in every state.
The requirement for obtaining an id is often a conundrum. In some cases, Cleveland for example, it is difficult to get into public building to get an id without one already. Many elderly citizens do not have birth certificates and will find the document chase daunting, particularly if they were born in another state like West Virginia, Alabama, or Georgia.
Studies show that less that 0.001, or one out of a hundred thousand votes, are connected to improper id. The numbers are far greater for issues arrising from ballot security.
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