John Fund Quotes

There is no question that every individual who is eligible to vote should have the opportunity to do so. It is equally important, however, that the votes of eligible voters are not stolen or diluted by a fraudulent or bogus ballot cast by an ineligible or imaginary voter. The evidence from academic studies and actual turnout in elections is overwhelming that—contrary to the shrill claims of opponents—voter ID does not depress turnout, including among the ranks of minority, poor, and elderly voters, which exist; the real myth is the claim that voters are disenfranchised because of voter ID requirements.

Jimmy Carter knows the issue of voter fraud well. His first run for office, in a Democratic primary in Quitman County, Georgia in 1962, was stolen by voter fraud that local residents said ‘had been going on on election days as long as most people could remember.’ He went to court and got the election overturned, and ended up winning in the general election. Newly minted state senator Carter helped sponsor a comprehensive reform of the state’s election code; the culprit responsible for stealing the primary election was later convicted of voter fraud in a previous congressional election. As Jimmy Carter learned, fraudulent voting does exist, and criminal penalties imposed after the fact are an insufficient deterrent.

The 2000 recount was more than merely a national embarrassment; it left a lasting scar on the American electoral psyche. A Zogby poll a few years ago found that 38 percent of Americans still regarded the 2000 election outcome as questionable.

Election fraud, whether it’s phony voter registration, illegal absentee ballots, shady recounts or old-fashioned ballot-box stuffing, can be found in every part of the United States, although it is probably spreading because of the ever-so-tight divisions that have polarized the country and created so many close elections lately.

The Department of Justice prosecuted its largest voter fraud case ever in Chicago—prosecutors estimated that 100,000 fraudulent ballots were cast in the 1982 gubernatorial election. The conspirators came within five thousand votes of changing the race to the losing Democratic candidate, and a federal grand jury found that ‘similar fraudulent activities’ had occurred in prior elections. Ten of thousands of individuals had voted twice; thousands of other bogus votes had been cast in the name of individuals who were dead, in prison, or whose registered addresses were vacant lots. Absent voters were impersonated, voters’ signatures on ballot applications ‘had been forged wholesale in many precincts,’ and votes were fraudulently cast under fictitious voter registrations and in the names of transients, the incapacitated, and senior citizens.

All county the municipal election authorities should be required to have independent audits conducted of their voter tabulation systems, software and security procedures on a regular basis. In business, companies undergo outside audits by independent bodies to confirm to their stockholders that the companies are truthfully reporting on their financial condition and status.

Attorney General Holder is a staunch opponent of laws requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls to improve ballot security. He calls them ‘unnecessary,’ and has blocked their implementation in Texas and South Carolina under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, citing the fear that such requirements would discriminate against minorities.

Some of the sloppiness that makes fraud and foul-ups in election counts possible seems to be built into the system by design. The National Voter Registration Act (‘Motor Voter Law’), the first law signed into law by President Clinton upon entering office, imposed fraud-friendly rules on the states by requiring driver’s license bureaus to register anyone applying for licenses, to offer mail-in registration with no identification needed, and to forbid government workers to challenge new registrants, while making it difficult to purge ‘deadwood’ voters (those who have died or moved away).

O’Keefe’s video from the NJEA event records [Wayne] Dibofsky recounting that he was at the offices of the Jersey City Education Association (NJEA), coordinating get-out-the-vote efforts for the 1997 mayor’s race, when a man arrived and announced that he had two voting machines to deliver. Dibofsky told him the JCEA office was not a voting precinct. The unidentified man winked at him and said ‘I don’t care; I was told to deliver these machines.’ When Dibofsky asked more questions, he was told, ‘It does not matter.’ The two voting machines, Dibofsky recounted, ‘were already locked, loaded, and voted,’ which he said meant they had ‘vote tallies that were already added,’ ready to be printed out as the end of the day. ‘Nobody came through; we weren’t a voting location. They came back later on, they took the machines, I called the [city] clerk’s office,’ Dibofsky recounted. ‘They said, just leave well enough alone. And I knew that meant, Keep quiet. That was a tough district for a Democrat to win in, and they carried the district with those voting machines. And nobody came in and voted. That’s Hudson County.’

Actual election results in Georgia and Indiana confirm that suppositions about voter ID hurting minority turnout are wrong. In 2008, in the first presidential election after their voter ID laws went into effect, both states saw turnout increase more dramatically in both the presidential preference primaryandthe general election than turnout increased in some stateswithoutthe photo-ID requirement.

With its hanging chads, butterfly ballots and Supreme Court intervention, the Florida fiasco compelled this country to confront an ugly reality: that we have been making do with what noted political scientist Walter Dean Burnham has called ‘the modern world’s sloppiest electoral system.’ How sloppy? Lethally so. At least eight of the nineteen hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11.

The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) requires the Federal Voting Assistance Program (a Department of Defense program) to administer UOCAVA, and requires the Justice Department to enforce it. One of the most significant problems with UOCAVA is that it does not specify when states are required to mail absentee ballots to overseas military voters. Every federal agency and nonprofit group examining the issue, including the Election Assistance Commission, had concluded that, to provide enough time for absentee ballots to be returned from overseas, they would need to be sent out at least 45 days before a state’s deadline for receiving absentee ballots. Yet nearly one-third of states refuse to follow the 45-day standard, and at least 10 states gave military voters less than 35 days to receive, cast, and return their ballots.

The double-voting problem was illustrated, to the great embarrassment of the League of Women Voters, by an amicus brief the League filed in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Indiana voter ID case. One of the Indiana voters highlighted in the League’s brief was used as an example of someone who had difficulty voting because of the voter ID requirement. But when and Indiana newspaper interviewed the voter, it discovered that her problems stemmed from her trying to use a Florida drivers’ license to vote in Indiana. Not only did she have a Florida driver’s license, she was also registered to vote in Florida, where she owned a second home and had claimed residency by filing for a homestead exemption on her property taxes, normally only available to state residents. So the Indiana law worked as intended: It prevented someone from voting twice who might otherwise have done so illegally without detection.

Both the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post found that, if anything, county officials were too permissive in whom they allowed to vote, and this largely benefitted Al Gore.An analysis by the Post found that 5,600 people whose names matched the names of convicted felons who should have been disqualified were permitted to cast their ballots. ‘These illegal voters almost certainly influenced the down-to-the-wire presidential election,’ the Post reported. ‘It’s likely they benefited Democratic candidate Al Gore: Of the likely felons identified by the Post, 68 percent were registered Democrat.’

Should ‘anything’ goes continue to be the standard we often allow, the nation may wake to another crisis far bigger than the 2000 Florida folly. Perhaps then we will demand to know just who subverted the safeguards in our election laws. But wouldn’t it be better if—with the lessons of Florida and even more recent election snafus and scandals so obvious—we did something now?