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.

A former Democratic congressman gave me this explanation of why voting irregularities more often crop up in his party’s back yard: ‘When many Republicans lose an election, they go back into what they call the private sector. When many Democrats lose an election, they lose power and money. They need to eat, and people will do an awful lot in order to eat.’

It was the day of Washington, D.C.’s presidential primary, April 3, 2012. A 22-year-old white man with a beard entered a polling place in the District, carrying a hidden camera. He walked up to the check-in desk and asked a poll workers if an Eric Holder was registered there. He gave U.S. Attorney General Holder’s address, which he had gleaned from public records. The worker began to hand him a ballot, at which point the young man said that he wanted to show his identification. ‘You don’t need it,’ the poll worker replied. ‘It’s all right. As long as you’re in here, you’re on our list, and that’s who you say you are, you’re okay.’

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.’

But few in the media or in urban government seem concerned about the designed sloppiness of our election system. Our current ‘honor’ system in voter registration and voting, and the lax enforcement of voting laws (in which prosecutors shy away from bringing election fraud cases unless the evidence is almost literally handed to them on videotape), is analogous to having counterfeit bills circulating and the Treasury Department not wanting to be bothered until the printing press is located.

In Davison County, election officials improperly counted over-votes On ballots where two Senate candidates had been marked, the election officials decided to block out the mark given to the candidate with the ‘lighter’ mark. These marks were covered with small, round, white stickers. Election officials were videotaped blocking votes from Congressman Thune. Concerns were also raised in Davison County because operatives working for Senator Tim Johnson’s office were initially granted access to the Democratic auditor’s office and its computers without allowing similar access to other parties.

State officials such as secretaries of state should be granted investigative subpoena powers to look into both vote fraud and disenfranchisement issues. Historically, election officials have relied too heavily on candidates to identify election problems. Most election boards do not have the authority to conduct vigorous investigations of fraud, and must rely on local district attorney’s offices, which usually are heavily engaged in criminal cases, and not interested in prosecuting election fraud for fear of being labeled partisan or racially motivated.

The Florida battle returned to the news as the 2004 election approached in w:Michael Moore Michael Moore’s hit film Fahrenheit 9/11, which begins with a malicious account of what happened in 2000. In essence, Moore claims that George W. Bush, aided by Florida’s Republican secretary of state w: Katherine Harris Katherine Harris and the FOX News Channel, stole the election—and that everyone knows it.

The [National Voter Registration Act of 1993] imposed an unfunded mandate on the states by requiring that anyone entering a government office to renew a driver’s license or apply for welfare or unemployment compensation would be offered the chance to register on the spot to vote. Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship. States also had to permit mail-in voter registration, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official. Finally, states were limited in pruning ‘deadwood’—people who had died, moved or been convicted of crimes—from their rolls. Now, people who didn’t vote would be kept on the registration rolls for at least eight years before anyone could remove them.

The current toxic political atmosphere, in which one side is concerned about voter fraud and the other about voter disfranchisement, is largely the product of the elephant in the parlor left over from the 2000 election. Of course, I’m talking about the Florida recount, the gold standard for botched elections, and all the bitter recriminations it launched.

Local registration and election boards should be composed of citizen appointees. All such boards should have equal representation from both major political parties and at least one independent or third-party member. We’ve seen over and over, from St. Louis to Palm Beach County, how conflicts of interest are created if election boards are run by officials who have to run for offices themselves—often as partisans. ‘I think you’ll see most of the problems in bad management of elections occur where the top position isn’t nonpartisan and where most of the oversight is by people deeply involved in the political process,’ says Mischelle Townsend, the registrar of voters in Riverside County, California.

Perhaps no piece of legislation in the last generation better captures the ‘incentivizing’ of fraud and the clash of conflicting visions about the priorities of our election system than the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, commonly known as the ‘Motor Voter Law.’

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.’

The Alabama voter fraud described by former Congressman Davis, which occurs in predominately black, poor counties, is vividly illustrated by a criminal prosecution that occurred in the 1990s in Greene County, Alabama, when local citizens, reform political candidates, federal and state prosecution, and a hometown newspaper banded together to fight absentee-ballot fraud in the county, one of the poorest in Alabama. Unfortunately, liberal groups including the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference worked equally hard to undermine the effort, as they have worked to undermine voter ID requirements and other reforms intended to ensure the integrity of elections… But in the end, justice prevailed, with the conviction of 11 conspirators who had fixed local elections for years… The Greene County case proves that absentee-ballot fraud is real, and not a cover story for an imagined voter-disenfranchisement conspiracy.

In November 2000, voters in San Francisco and in Pulaski County, Arkansas, learned firsthand about the havoc that malfunctioning machines can bring. In one San Francisco polling place, 362 people signed in to vote, and 357 paper ballots were counted manually, but ES&S machines reported that 416 people had voted there. In Arkansas, nearly thirty voters reported that the machines cast their vote for the wrong candidate—after they pushed the button for their candidate of choice, another name popped up.