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Introduction
With the presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain expected to be very close, our nation may be on the brink of repeating the 2000 Florida election debacle—this time not in one but in several states, with allegations of vote fraud, intimidation and manipulation of voting machines added to the generalized chaos that sent the 2000 race into overtime. There is still time to reduce the chance of another electoral meltdown, both this year and in future years. But this will not happen unless we acknowledge that the United States has a haphazard, fraud-prone election system befitting a developing nation rather than the globe’s leading democracy. With its hanging chads, butterfly ballots and Supreme Court interventions at both the state and the federal level, the Florida fiasco compelled this country to confront an ugly reality: that we have been making do with what the noted political scientist Walter Dean Burnham has called “the modern world’s sloppiest election systems.”
The 2000 Florida recount was more than merely a national embarrassment; it left a lasting scar on the American electoral psyche. A 2004 Zogby poll found that 38 percent of Americans still regard the 2000 election outcome as questionable. Many Republicans believe that Democratic judges on the Florida Supreme Court tried to hand their state to Al Gore based on selective partisan recounts and the illegal votes of felons and aliens. Many Democrats feel that the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court tilted toward Bush, and they refuse to accept his victory as valid. But this issue transcends “red state” vs. “blue state” partisan grievances. Many Americans are convinced that politicians can’t be trusted to play by the rules and will either commit fraud or intimidate voters at the slightest opportunity.
A growing cynicism diminishes respect for the nation’s institutions and lowers voter participation. Only 11 percent of those eighteen to nineteen years old and eligible to vote for the first time now bother to go to the polls, although there are hopes that Barack Obama’s candidacy might change that. Overall, the United States ranks 139th out of 163 democracies in the rate of voter participation. The more that voting is left to the zealous or self-interested few, the more we see harshly personal campaigns that dispense with any positive vision of our national future. “If this escalates, we’re in horrendous shape as a country,” says Curtis Gans, who runs the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. “If election results are followed by lawsuits, appeals, fire and counterfire, many people who are already saying to hell with the process are going to exit.”
Indeed, the level of suspicion has grown so dramatically that it threatens to undermine our political system. A Rasmussen Reports survey found early in 2008 that when it comes to concern about vote fraud, 17 percent believe that large numbers of legitimate voters are prevented from voting. A slightly larger number, 23 percent, believe that large numbers of ineligible people are allowed to vote.
Those findings were confirmed in a February 2008 survey conducted for the Congressional Cooperative Election Studies group, a respected political science organization. It asked respondents how much vote fraud (defined as someone casting more than one ballot or voting if they weren’t a U.S. citizen) there was in elections, as well as how much vote theft (defined as having votes stolen or tampered with). A third question was asked about “voter impersonation,” where a person claims to be someone else when casting a vote.
Vote fraud is traditionally the type of election irregularity that Republicans focus on, while vote theft is often cited by Democrats worried about manipulation of electronic voting machines. The results were illuminating. A full 62 percent of voters thought vote fraud was very common or somewhat common, versus 28 percent who thought it occurred infrequently or almost never. As for vote theft, 60 percent of respondents thought it was a serious problem, while 29 percent thought it was occasional or rare. Voter impersonation was a much closer question, with 41 percent thinking it happened a great deal or fairly often, and 42 percent thinking it was an unusual occurrence.
Interestingly, Democrats were only slightly more likely than Republicans to state that vote theft is very common, according to an analysis of the poll by Professors Stephen Ansolabehere and Nathaniel Persily. But twice as many Republicans than Democrats thought vote fraud to be very common. As for voter impersonation, Democrats were somewhat skeptical that it was a problem, but among Republicans only 5 percent of respondents thought it was very rare. “Party remains a significant predictor of beliefs about both Fraud and Impersonation in a multivariate analysis that controls for ideology, education, age, race, income and region,” concluded the two scholars.
The 2000 election resulted in some modest reforms at the federal level, such as the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, but the implementation has been slow. Many of the nation’s voting systems will be in no better shape this November than they were in 2000, when about 2 percent of all votes for president nationwide were not counted for one reason or another, the vast majority because of voter error or outdated machines.
America’s election problems go beyond the strapped budgets of many local election offices. More insidious are flawed voter rolls, voter ignorance, lackadaisical law enforcement and a shortage of trained volunteers. All this adds up to an open invitation for errors, miscounts or fraud.
Reform is easy to talk about but difficult to bring about. Many of the suggested improvements, such as requiring voters to show ID at the polls, are bitterly opposed. For instance, Maria Cardona of the Democratic National Committee claims that “ballot security and preventing vote fraud are just code words for voter intimidation and suppression.” Similarly, many Republicans express great concern for combating voter impersonation through photo ID laws but are less than eager to tackle the loopholes that make absentee ballot fraud a growth industry, because that way of voting is highly popular with middle-class people. Even improved technology is controversial. Some computer scientists are alarmed by the possibility that hackers could change the software in electronic voting machines to cast multiple votes or do other kinds of mischief. Senator Hillary Clinton (Democrat) and Congressman Steve King of Iowa (Republican) have backed separate pieces of legislation to require that voting machines issue paper receipts for voters to verify before casting their ballots.
Confusion and claims of fraud are likely in November 2008, especially if the election is as close as it was in both 2000 and 2004. Can the nation take another controversy of that scale?
Indeed, we may be on the way to turning Election Day into Election Month through a new legal quagmire: election by litigation. Every close race now carries with it the prospect of lawsuits and demands for recounts and seating challenges in Congress. “We are waiting for the day those polls can just cut out the middleman and settle all elections in court,” jokes Chuck Todd, the political director of NBC News. Such gallows humor may be entirely appropriate given our current predicament. The 2000 election may have marked a permanent change in how elections are decided, much as the battle over the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork changed, apparently forever, the politics of judicial appointments. On April 19, 2004, Senator John Kerry campaigned in Florida and announced—six months before a single ballot was cast, counted or disputed—that he was ready to take the 2004 election to court. “We are going to bring legal challenge to those districts that make it difficult for people to register. We’re going to bring challenge to those people that disembroil [sic] people,” he told a rally. “And we’re going to challenge any place in America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes of Americans. Period!”
Barack Obama has been even more forceful. Last year, he told the Chicago Defender that “Recent elections have shown unprecedented intimidation of African American, Native American, low income and elderly voters at the polls. We’ve seen political operatives purge voters from registration rolls for no legitimate reason, distribute polling equipment unevenly, and deceive voters about the time, location and rules of elections.”
Democrats plan to have over ten thousand lawyers on the ground in all states this November, ready for action if the election is close and they see a way to contest it. Republicans will have their own corps of attorneys at the ready. “If you think of election problems as akin to forest fires, the woods are not drier than they were in previous years, but many more people have matches,” says Doug Chapin of Electionline.org, an Internet clearinghouse of election news. If the trend toward litigation continues, winners in the future may have to hope not only that they win but that their margins of victory are beyond the “margin of litigation.”
“If it’s a very close election, we’re in real trouble,” said Peg Rosenfeld, who has been a prominent official of the League of Women Voters in the battleground state of Ohio for the last forty years. Daniel Okapi, a law professor at Ohio State University, says that weeks of litigation are guaranteed if the winning candidate in the next election has a lead smaller than 5,000 votes. Only a margin of 50,000 votes or more would mean the outcome will probably not be litigated. In 2004, President Bush won the state by only 119,000 votes, and many expect a closer race between Obama and McCain.
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 piece of legislation signed by President Bill Clinton upon entering office in 1993, imposed fraud-friendly rules on the states by requiring drivers’ license bureaus to register anyone who applies for a license, to offer mail-in registration with no identification needed, and to forbid government workers to challenge new registrants, while making if difficult to purge “deadwood” voters (those who have died or moved away). In 2001, the voter rolls in many American cities included more names than the U.S. Census listed at the total number of residents over age eighteen. CBS’s 60 Minutes created a stir in 1999 when it found people in California using mail-in forms to register fictitious people or actual pets and then obtaining absentee ballots in their names. By this means, for example, the illegal alien who assassinated the Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was registered to vote in San Pedro, California—twice. Luckily, some progress has been made in cleaning up those rolls, but many cities are sitting on a sea of invalid registrations that could potentially be converted into votes.
Ironically, Mexico and many other countries have election systems that are far more secure than ours. To obtain voter credentials, the citizen must present a photo, write a signature and give a thumbprint. The voter card includes a picture with a hologram covering it, a magnetic strip and a serial number to guard against tampering. To cast a ballot, voters must present the card and be certified by a thumbprint scanner. This system was instrumental in allowing the 2000 election of Vicente Fox, the first opposition party candidate to be elected president of Mexico in seventy years.
But in the United States, at a time of heightened security and mundane rules that require citizens to show ID to travel and even rent a video, only about half the states require some from of documentation in order to vote. “Why should the important process of voting be the one exception to this rule?” asks Karen Saranita, a former fraud investigator for a Democratic state senator in California. Americans agree. A Rasmussen Reports poll finds that 80 percent of Americans, including three fourths of Democrats, believe that “people should be required to show a photo identification such as a driver’s license before being allowed to vote.”
The reason for such support is that citizens instinctively realize that some people will be tempted to cut corners in the cutthroat world of politics. “Some of the world’s most clever people are attracted to politics, because that’s where the power is,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. “So they’re always going to be one step ahead of the law.”
Election fraud, whether it’s phony voter registrations, 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. Although most fraud is found in urban areas, there are current scandals in rural Texas and Minnesota. In recent years, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Seattle and Milwaukee have all had election-related scandals. Wisconsin officials convicted a New York heiress who was working for Al Gore by giving homeless people cigarettes if they rode in a van to the polls and voted.
Then there is the Ford family of Tennessee, which has dominated Memphis politics for a couple of generations and almost elected Harold Ford Jr., the son of a former congressman, to the U.S. Senate in 2006. One burden Ford had in the race was the unsavory record of his family in Memphis elections. Earlier in 2006, the Tennessee State Senate voted to void the election of his aunt Ophelia Ford after it was learned that three poll workers had faked votes in her behalf, including at least two votes cast in the names of dead people.
A few months earlier, Harold Ford Sr., the former congressman and father of the Senate candidate, landed in trouble when it was revealed that he had voted in a Memphis election even though he had taken advantage of a homestead tax break for Florida residents by telling officials there that his $2.5 million home on Miami Beach’s Fisher Island was his primary and permanent residence. Casting a ballot in Tennessee while knowing that one is ineligible to vote is a felony. Reached by reporters, Ford was in no mood to talk about the matter. “I’m in a lunch meeting,” he said, “and I don’t have time.” He did not respond to subsequent calls, and the matter faded from public view. But such incidents probably contributed to his son’s narrow defeat in the Senate race.
The Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering how “vote brokers” employed by the candidate Xavier Suarez stole a Miami mayoral election in 1997 by tampering with 4,740 absentee ballots. Many were cast by homeless people who didn’t live in the city and were paid $10 apiece and shuttled to the election office in vans. All the absentee ballots were thrown out by a court four months later and Mr. Suarez’s opponent Joe Carollo was installed as mayor.
But such interventions are rare, even when fraud is proven. In 1997, the House of Representatives voted along partisan lines to demand that the Justice Department prosecute Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a group that investigators for the House Administration Committee say registered hundreds of illegal voters in a razor-thin congressional race in Orange County, California. But federal immigration officials refused to cooperate with the probe, citing “privacy” concerns, and nothing was done beyond yanking a federal contract that paid Hermandad to conduct citizenship classes. The same year, a U.S. Senate probe into fraud in a Senate election in Louisiana found more than 1,400 cases in which two voters used the same Social Security number. But further investigations collapsed after Democratic senators walked off the probe, calling it unfair, and then Attorney General Janet Reno removed FBI agents from the case because the probe wasn’t “bipartisan.”
A note about partisanship: Since Democrats figure prominently in the vast majority of examples of election fraud described in this book, some readers will jump to the conclusion that this is a one-sided attack on a single party. I do not believe Republicans are inherently more virtuous or honest than anyone else in politics—far from it. I myself often vote a third-party or independent ticket and have voted for some Democrats.
Vote fraud occurs both in Republican strongholds such as Kentucky hollows and in Democratic bastions such as New Orleans. When Republicans operated political machines such as Philadelphia’s Meehan dynasty up until 1951 or the patronage mill of Nassau County, New York, until the 1990s, they were fully capable of bending—and breaking—the rules. The late Earl Mazo, the journalist who exhaustively documented the electoral fraud in Richard J. Daley’s Chicago that may have handed Illinois to John F. Kennedy in the photo-finish 1960 election, said there was also “definitely fraud” in downstate Illinois counties controlled by Republicans “but they didn’t have the votes to counterbalance Chicago.”
While they have not often had the complete control of local and administrative offices that makes it easiest to tilt the rules improperly in their favor, Republicans have at times been guilty of intimidation tactics designed to discourage voting. In the 1980s, the Republican National Committee hired off-duty policemen to monitor polling places in minority areas of New Jersey and Louisiana, until the public outcry forced them to sign a consent decree forswearing all such “ballot security” programs in the future.
In their book Dirty Little Secrets, Larry Sabato and Glenn Simpson noted another reason why Republican election fraud is less common: Republican base voters are middle-class and not easily induced to commit fraud, while “the pools of people who appear to be available and more vulnerable to an invitation to participate in vote fraud tend to lean Democratic.” Sabato remarks that election fraud tends to be “class-based” because “a poor person has more incentive to sell his vote than an upper class suburbanite.”
Those few Democrats who engage in outright dishonesty find it easiest to encourage poor people—who need money—to participate in shady vote-buying schemes. “I had no choice. I was hungry that day,” Thomas Felder told the Miami Herald in explaining why he illegally voted in the Suarez-Carollo mayoral election. “You wanted the money; you were told who to vote for.” Those who buy the votes often have their own kind of hunger. A former Democratic congressman gave me this explanation of why voting irregularities crop up more often in his party’s back yard: “When many Republicans lose an election, they go back into what they call the private sector even if it’s subsidized at public expense. 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.”
Investigation of vote fraud is inherently political, and because it often involves race, it is often not zealously pursued or prosecuted. Attorney General John Ashcroft did launch a Voting Integrity Initiative in 2002, which dramatically reduced both Republican allegations of fraud and Democratic complaints of minority voter suppression. But the problem became highly controversial after the 2006 elections when evidence surfaced that the White House had leaned on the Justice Department to replace several U.S. attorneys who had dragged their feet on cases of vote fraud, including David Iglesias in New Mexico and John McKay in Washington State. Even though the firings were perfectly legal, Justice Department lawyers have since then largely retreated from any major role in pursuing cases of vote fraud or voter intimidation.
My research found that the number of people who have actually spent time in jail as a result of a conviction for vote fraud is shockingly low. Most of those who are found guilty get a fine or community service. A vote fraudster in Detroit joked to me that the penalty is often viewed as the cost of doing business. The U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Louisiana, Donald Washington, told a reporter in 2004 that “most of the time, we can’t do much of anything [about ballot box improprieties] until the election is over. And the closer we get to the election, the less willing we are to get involved because of just the appearance of impropriety, just the appearance of the federal government somehow signaling how this election ought to occur.” Several prosecutors told me they fear charges of racism or of a return to Jim Crow voter-suppression tactics if they pursue fraud cases. Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights dismisses efforts to fight election fraud as “a solution in search of a problem” and “a warmed-over plan for voter intimidation.”
But when voters are disenfranchised by the counting of improperly cast ballots or outright fraud, their civil rights are violated just as surely as if they were prevented from voting. The integrity of the ballot box is just as important to the credibility of elections as access to it. Voting irregularities have a long pedigree in America stretching back to the founding of the nation—although most people think the “bad old days” ended circa 1948 after pistol-packing Texas sheriffs helped stuff Ballot Box 13, stealing a U.S. Senate seat for Lyndon Johnson. Then came the 2004 Democratic primary election in the same part of Texas, when Representative Cero Rodriguez, a Democrat, charged that during a recount, a missing ballot box reappeared with enough votes to make his opponent the Democratic candidate by 58 votes. Political bosses such as Richard J. Daley or George Wallace may have died, but they have successors. A one-party machine in Hawaii intimidates critics and journalists who question its vote harvesting among noncitizens. In Alaska, native tribes are often preyed upon by both parties and offered inducements to vote for one candidate or another.
Even after Florida 2000, the media tend to downplay or ignore stories of election incompetence, manipulation or theft. Allowing such abuses to vanish into an informational black hole in effect legitimates them. The refusal to insist on simple procedural changes such as purging voter rolls or requiring a photo ID at the polls, combined with secure technology and more vigorous prosecution of fraud, accelerates our drift toward Banana Republic elections.
In 2002, Miami election officials hired the Center for Democracy, which normally observes voting in places like Guatemala or Albania, to send twenty election monitors to south Florida. Scrutinizing our own elections the way we have traditionally watched over voting in developing countries is, unfortunately, a step in the right direction. But before we can get the clearer laws and better protections we need to deal with fraud and voter mishaps, we have to get a sense of the magnitude of the problem we face.
