Hullabaloo

Monday, October 22, 2012

 
What if it's really close?

by digby

As I watch the polls get closer I have to say that I'm getting more and more worried that a narrow Obama win will be viciously contested, both legally and in the court of public opinion. All you have to do is listen to the incoherent babbling of John Fund --- who has made a second career out of perpetuating the voter fraud myth --- to see that they are working themselves into a lather.

This Chicago scandal to which Fund refers was investigated 30 years ago. Historically it's certainly true that the big city political machines manufactured votes -- but he could have just as easily have brought up Tammany Hall. The problem with Fund's thesis is that there are no more big city machines capable of delivering such results today. And in any case, Voter ID would do nothing to stop it, regardless. Today, whatever institutional support the Democrats had just for voter outreach and registration --- an entirely different thing --- it was pretty much eliminated with ACORN (thanks to the Democrats' own self-destructive impulses.) Even he can't provide much of an argument other than "we need to police this just in case."

But that's not the point of this. We know this whole psuedo-scandal is designed to suppress the Democratic vote. They've been doing this for centuries in one way or another. (A future supreme court justice was even once part of the scheme.) But as Jane Mayer points out in this article in the New Yorker, our old friend Hans Von Spakovsky has been the driving force behind the recent legislation and other political activity around the issue. She documents many of his outright lies. This is just one example:

Von Spakovsky recently sat down with me in a conference room at the Heritage Foundation, wearing rimless eyeglasses and a sports jacket with a crisp white pocket square. In our conversation, and in later phone calls and e-mails, he expressed himself with lawyerly reserve. He said of True the Vote and its affiliates, “They’re doing a great job.” Earlier this year, he noted, the Pew Center on the States found that more than 1.8 million people who had died were still registered to vote in America, and that 2.75 million people were registered to vote in multiple states. How many of these errors translate into fraudulent votes? “It is impossible to answer,” he said. “We don’t have the tools in place.” But he cited a 2000 investigation, by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, of voting records in Georgia over the previous two decades; the paper reported that it had turned up fifty-four hundred instances of dead people being recorded as having voted. “That seems pretty substantial to me,” he said.

He did not mention that the article’s findings were later revised. The Journal-Constitution ran a follow-up article after the Georgia Secretary of State’s office indicated that the vast majority of the cases appeared to reflect clerical errors. Upon closer inspection, the paper admitted, its only specific example of a deceased voter casting a ballot didn’t hold up. The ballot of a living voter had been attributed to a dead man whose name was nearly identical.

And don't forget our pals the Republican National Lawyers Association, which is mobilizing lawyers across the land to contest the vote count if the vote is close. As Von Spakovsky says ominously in the Mayer interview:

With legions of citizen watchdogs on the lookout for fraud, voters confused about the documents necessary to vote, and the country almost evenly divided politically, von Spakovsky is predicting that November 6th could be even more chaotic than the 2000 elections. He will play a direct role in Virginia, a swing state, where he is the vice-chairman of the electoral board of Fairfax County. Joining us at the conference table at the Heritage Foundation, John Fund, von Spakovsky’s co-author, told me, “If it’s close this time, I think we’re going to have three or four Floridas.” Von Spakovsky shook his head and said, “If we’re lucky only three or four.” If there are states where the number of provisional ballots cast exceeds the margin of victory, he predicts, “there will probably be horrendous fights, and litigation between the lawyers that will make the fights over hanging chads look minor by comparison.” Pursing his lips, he added, “I hope it doesn’t happen.” But, if it does, no one will be more ready for the fight.

Here's a sample post from the Republican National Lawyers Association today:

Vote Fraud Dilutes Legal Votes
Mon, Oct 22 2012 4:07 AM

“Voter fraud drives honest citizens out of the democratic process and breeds distrust of our government. Voters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised.”

Pop Quiz: Who said this?

If you think it’s a voter ID activist or conservative organization, think again. It actually was from the United States Supreme Court’s per curiam opinion evaluating the Arizona voter ID law in 2006.

This is one of the important points that John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky mention in their insightful new article published in USA Today.

Instead of stooping to the level of the left which employs incendiary rhetoric on the voter ID issue, von Spakovsky and Fund discuss the facts and intelligently respond to arguments by voter ID opponents like News21 and the Advancement Project.

What are those facts about vote fraud that they present?

They cite a nonpartisan group’s study about the poor records kept on our voter rolls:

Pew Center on the States found one in eight voter registrations were inaccurate, out-of-date or duplicates. Nearly 2.8 million people were registered in two or more states, and perhaps 1.8 million registered voters are dead.

They cite polling data:

64% of Americans think voter fraud is "very" or "somewhat" serious. Blacks (64%) and those earning under $20,000 a year (71%) agreed.

They offer recent examples of vote fraud:

Three non-citizens were arrested in Iowa last month for voting illegally in the 2010 general election and 2011 city election. A Democratic nominee for Congress resigned in Maryland last month after allegations that she had voted in two states at the same time.

So that's three illegal votes. The RNLA is collecting stories from around the country which purport to document voter fraud. (They are, in fact, just news stories about claims of voter fraud.) In fact, I'm willing to stipulate that there have been oh --- a thousand instances of voter impersonation fraud around the nation in the past two elections. Two thousand even. But the fact that this means some Republicans will feel "disenfranchised" if their candidate loses is not reason enough to keep millions of eligible citizens from voting at all. Not to mention that there's no real evidence that any illegal votes turned an election.

But note the legal argument contained within that post: the votes of legitimate voters will be "diluted" by fraudulent votes. Recall that the argument Republicans used successfully in 2000 was that legitimate voters would be "disenfranchised" by the counting of "illegal" votes. It sounds as though they are dusting it off the shelf in anticipation of a close election.


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digby 10/22/2012 01:00:00 PM