Time to stand and fight voter fraud
The Wall Street Journal and others are now calling for Dino Rossi to "take the high road" and stop the fight over the Washington election. This is the wrong approach. Now is the time to stand up and fight for strong protections against voter fraud.
The lesser, nitty-gritty political reason is that the high road hasn’t gotten us very far in the fight over voter fraud. Nobody but Republicans generally ever really bit into the unflattering comparison between Nixon’s response to Illinois in 1964 and Gore’s response to Florida. And it's the political equivalent of the military announcing ahead of time the date it will withdraw from a battle. Gore wasn't wrong for wanting to count every vote; he was wrong because he only wanted to count every vote in Democratic counties, not Republican ones. But when an election is marred by fraud, nobody - winner, loser, Republican, Democrat, Naderite, or Luddite - is served by sweeping the fraud under the rug and letting the results stand. When going to court is necessary to support important rights, we shouldn't consider that the low road.
The bigger reason to stand and fight now is because respect for the procedural safeguards surrounding voting has been consistently eroding over the past few years, all in the name of “count every vote”. (By the way, politically, Republicans need to find a good slogan to come back to this. Something that can be chanted at rallies. I thought of "no pulse, no vote", but I don't think it will go over that well.) Until we vigorously reinforce following procedures which minimize the opportunities for fraud, we will have nothing but growing distrust over the basic outcome of every election, an extremely unhealthy situation for our democracy.
Look at all the excuses being poured out by Washington state for serious failures of ballot security, voter identification lapses, failure to actually keep accurate track of how many people physically came in to vote at particular precincts, it goes on and on. State laws impose very specific laws on exact procedures to be followed by election workers. These procedures, like all audit control procedures, exist precisely because, if they are followed, it is very, very difficult to commit voter fraud and much easier to catch and prosecute it if it does. If we gloss over this right now in this fight, then we are saying those procedures aren’t really all that important.
When I was a prosecutor here in Louisiana (where we know a thing or two about voter fraud and, as a consequence, how to prevent it), one of the last cases I worked on was the initial election 8 years ago of Mary Landrieu to the U.S. Senate. Landrieu herself didn’t do anything wrong, and she was actually fairly disliked by the urban machine in New Orleans. (Let me be very clear; I like and respect Senator Landrieu personally and believe her to be a good and honest politician, though I often disagree with her political positions.) But there was a vote over a local casino there which was heavily promoted by the city's political machinery, so, I believe, she was an unintended beneficiary of some serious voter fraud. I say I believe because we could never actually prove anything. And the reason we couldn’t prove anything was because many of the urban poll workers utterly failed to follow the proper voting procedures.
In Louisiana, these procedures are straightforward, but strong enough, if followed, to give a high degree of confidence in an election. When a voter walks in to the polling place, he shows his ID to one of the pollworkers. This worker looks him up in the registration book and calls out his name to the other 2 workers. Each of them independently writes down the name in a notebook given to them when they show up. The voter signs the registration book, then goes and votes (we used mechanical machines for years, but have now switched to electronic ones). There is no reason for any variation between the signatures in the registration book and the names recorded in the 2 notebooks. Even minor mistakes such as a name or two recorded in switched order in the 2 notebooks is suggestive of fraud (as if the individuals were copying out the names from some other list, rather than recording them contemporaneously).
Also, the machine prints out a candidate list, vote tally (which should be 0, of course), and time stamp when it is first turned on in the morning. Each of the pollworkers must sign this and post it at the site. At the end of the day, after the last voter, another printout is made showing the final tally for each machine and a timestamp of when the machine was shut down. This also must be signed by all 3 workers. All of this paperwork is gathered and stored with the machines at the end of the day, sealed until the formal opening of the machines for the "official" count.
Taken together, these processes can either prove that no fraud occurred or help identify with specificity the pollworkers who committed it. We found a number of instances where it was obvious that the same person obviously wrote down the names in each of the 2 notebooks. Sometimes it appeared as those the first part of the notebooks were done properly, and then one person added in a lot of names in both books in the same handwriting. None of this establishes fraud for certain. Perhaps one of the poll workers came down sick and had to leave early. But the procedural lapses ensure that we have no way to guarantee the integrity of the process.
In our case, the U.S. Senate even came down and investigated. They too “took the high road” because we had no specific evidence of fraud. We didn’t prosecute anybody for the same reason. The general feeling, as with Rossi, was that without evidence of fraud by the candidate (and again I have no doubt about Senator Landrieu's integrity and honesty; I don't believe she had anything to do with any voter fraud which may have occurred), she shouldn’t have her election tarnished with these questions. Also, we hesitated to prosecute mostly African-American pollworkers simply for what would be called failures to fill out some “bureaucratic paperwork”. Plus, we were in Baton Rouge and the questionable practices took place in New Orleans, so there were jurisdictional issues, too.
While these were good reasons to not prosecute at the time, letting the failure of the poll workers to follow the procedures designed to protect the integrity of the ballot go uncorrected was fundamentally a mistake. The only way to show the importance of these rules is to prosecute their violation or, where the election is so close that the failure to heed the rules cause real doubt as to the validity of a significant number of ballots, rerunning the election.
The Washington election for governor seems like the perfect place to fight, to me, because of a strong convergence of factors. There is a strong grass-roots fight to support protecting the integrity of the process. There is some national attention on the issue. The initial evidence of dead people voting and mysterious ballots being found in unsecured locations seems quite strong. It doesn't sound like there are any major crises currently facing Washington such that a delay in finding out who the new governor would cause truly major upheaval. I think this is the perfect time and the perfect place to have this fight.
The lesser, nitty-gritty political reason is that the high road hasn’t gotten us very far in the fight over voter fraud. Nobody but Republicans generally ever really bit into the unflattering comparison between Nixon’s response to Illinois in 1964 and Gore’s response to Florida. And it's the political equivalent of the military announcing ahead of time the date it will withdraw from a battle. Gore wasn't wrong for wanting to count every vote; he was wrong because he only wanted to count every vote in Democratic counties, not Republican ones. But when an election is marred by fraud, nobody - winner, loser, Republican, Democrat, Naderite, or Luddite - is served by sweeping the fraud under the rug and letting the results stand. When going to court is necessary to support important rights, we shouldn't consider that the low road.
The bigger reason to stand and fight now is because respect for the procedural safeguards surrounding voting has been consistently eroding over the past few years, all in the name of “count every vote”. (By the way, politically, Republicans need to find a good slogan to come back to this. Something that can be chanted at rallies. I thought of "no pulse, no vote", but I don't think it will go over that well.) Until we vigorously reinforce following procedures which minimize the opportunities for fraud, we will have nothing but growing distrust over the basic outcome of every election, an extremely unhealthy situation for our democracy.
Look at all the excuses being poured out by Washington state for serious failures of ballot security, voter identification lapses, failure to actually keep accurate track of how many people physically came in to vote at particular precincts, it goes on and on. State laws impose very specific laws on exact procedures to be followed by election workers. These procedures, like all audit control procedures, exist precisely because, if they are followed, it is very, very difficult to commit voter fraud and much easier to catch and prosecute it if it does. If we gloss over this right now in this fight, then we are saying those procedures aren’t really all that important.
When I was a prosecutor here in Louisiana (where we know a thing or two about voter fraud and, as a consequence, how to prevent it), one of the last cases I worked on was the initial election 8 years ago of Mary Landrieu to the U.S. Senate. Landrieu herself didn’t do anything wrong, and she was actually fairly disliked by the urban machine in New Orleans. (Let me be very clear; I like and respect Senator Landrieu personally and believe her to be a good and honest politician, though I often disagree with her political positions.) But there was a vote over a local casino there which was heavily promoted by the city's political machinery, so, I believe, she was an unintended beneficiary of some serious voter fraud. I say I believe because we could never actually prove anything. And the reason we couldn’t prove anything was because many of the urban poll workers utterly failed to follow the proper voting procedures.
In Louisiana, these procedures are straightforward, but strong enough, if followed, to give a high degree of confidence in an election. When a voter walks in to the polling place, he shows his ID to one of the pollworkers. This worker looks him up in the registration book and calls out his name to the other 2 workers. Each of them independently writes down the name in a notebook given to them when they show up. The voter signs the registration book, then goes and votes (we used mechanical machines for years, but have now switched to electronic ones). There is no reason for any variation between the signatures in the registration book and the names recorded in the 2 notebooks. Even minor mistakes such as a name or two recorded in switched order in the 2 notebooks is suggestive of fraud (as if the individuals were copying out the names from some other list, rather than recording them contemporaneously).
Also, the machine prints out a candidate list, vote tally (which should be 0, of course), and time stamp when it is first turned on in the morning. Each of the pollworkers must sign this and post it at the site. At the end of the day, after the last voter, another printout is made showing the final tally for each machine and a timestamp of when the machine was shut down. This also must be signed by all 3 workers. All of this paperwork is gathered and stored with the machines at the end of the day, sealed until the formal opening of the machines for the "official" count.
Taken together, these processes can either prove that no fraud occurred or help identify with specificity the pollworkers who committed it. We found a number of instances where it was obvious that the same person obviously wrote down the names in each of the 2 notebooks. Sometimes it appeared as those the first part of the notebooks were done properly, and then one person added in a lot of names in both books in the same handwriting. None of this establishes fraud for certain. Perhaps one of the poll workers came down sick and had to leave early. But the procedural lapses ensure that we have no way to guarantee the integrity of the process.
In our case, the U.S. Senate even came down and investigated. They too “took the high road” because we had no specific evidence of fraud. We didn’t prosecute anybody for the same reason. The general feeling, as with Rossi, was that without evidence of fraud by the candidate (and again I have no doubt about Senator Landrieu's integrity and honesty; I don't believe she had anything to do with any voter fraud which may have occurred), she shouldn’t have her election tarnished with these questions. Also, we hesitated to prosecute mostly African-American pollworkers simply for what would be called failures to fill out some “bureaucratic paperwork”. Plus, we were in Baton Rouge and the questionable practices took place in New Orleans, so there were jurisdictional issues, too.
While these were good reasons to not prosecute at the time, letting the failure of the poll workers to follow the procedures designed to protect the integrity of the ballot go uncorrected was fundamentally a mistake. The only way to show the importance of these rules is to prosecute their violation or, where the election is so close that the failure to heed the rules cause real doubt as to the validity of a significant number of ballots, rerunning the election.
The Washington election for governor seems like the perfect place to fight, to me, because of a strong convergence of factors. There is a strong grass-roots fight to support protecting the integrity of the process. There is some national attention on the issue. The initial evidence of dead people voting and mysterious ballots being found in unsecured locations seems quite strong. It doesn't sound like there are any major crises currently facing Washington such that a delay in finding out who the new governor would cause truly major upheaval. I think this is the perfect time and the perfect place to have this fight.
3 Comments:
I agree that the integrity of poll workers is crucial to smooth elections. But as far as I know, it is difficult to find people to volunteer for this work. If they were subject to prosecution, or if there was wide news of prosecution, it might discourage anyone from doing it. Herein lies the problem: How can we make poll workers more responsible, yet not loose the volunteers?
By the way, politically, Republicans need to find a good slogan to come back to this.How about "Count every HONEST vote"?
Good points -- I agree. Voter fraud has to be stopped somewhere, and the WA election seems a great place to start.
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