Eric Rauchway: The Great Voter-Fraud Myth
[Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author, most recently, of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America and Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America. ]
When we think of voter fraud, we generally think of the grift depicted in Preston Sturges's 1940 film The Great McGinty: The drifter McGinty accepts a party operative's offer of two bucks for a fraudulent vote and, enterprisingly, zips through 37 precincts, casting 37 votes (and billing 74 bucks). McGinty gets away with it because the poll guardians can only ask him to sign his name. We use the same system in my precinct in California and in many other states where there's a premium on getting people to vote: Once you've registered, all you have to do is show up, say who you are, and fill out a ballot.
Self-styled vote reformers say such simple safeguards don't suffice, that we need stronger forms of identification and registration to vote, because McGintyesque scenes occur routinely at our polls. Apparently, that's why Bush administration officials wanted to fire certain U.S. attorneys who didn't believe many McGintys existed offscreen. And with good reason: They don't. Histrionics about voter fraud, now as in the past, don't draw attention to a priority problem. Instead, they serve to draw attention away from the real scandals of our electoral system.
ote reformers argue that Americans need more and better documentation if we want to exercise our right to vote. They play on fears that, as Federal Election Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky put it, "the Democratic Party and its alter ego organizations" like the NAACP and the League of Women Voters, working particularly in states with large immigrant populations, are drawing on their "long and studied history" of voter fraud to steal elections from good, solid, Republican candidates.
But this is bunk, through and through. Suppose there were widespread fraud under our current system. What would you see? You'd expect, for one thing, a much higher turnout in states not requiring ID to vote, as McGintys flooded the polls. But in 2004, according to ElectionLine.org, two states which require ID, Alaska and South Dakota, ranked among the top ten states for voter turnout, while six of the states with the lowest turnouts do not require identification. There is no obvious correlation....
Read entire article at New Republic
When we think of voter fraud, we generally think of the grift depicted in Preston Sturges's 1940 film The Great McGinty: The drifter McGinty accepts a party operative's offer of two bucks for a fraudulent vote and, enterprisingly, zips through 37 precincts, casting 37 votes (and billing 74 bucks). McGinty gets away with it because the poll guardians can only ask him to sign his name. We use the same system in my precinct in California and in many other states where there's a premium on getting people to vote: Once you've registered, all you have to do is show up, say who you are, and fill out a ballot.
Self-styled vote reformers say such simple safeguards don't suffice, that we need stronger forms of identification and registration to vote, because McGintyesque scenes occur routinely at our polls. Apparently, that's why Bush administration officials wanted to fire certain U.S. attorneys who didn't believe many McGintys existed offscreen. And with good reason: They don't. Histrionics about voter fraud, now as in the past, don't draw attention to a priority problem. Instead, they serve to draw attention away from the real scandals of our electoral system.
ote reformers argue that Americans need more and better documentation if we want to exercise our right to vote. They play on fears that, as Federal Election Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky put it, "the Democratic Party and its alter ego organizations" like the NAACP and the League of Women Voters, working particularly in states with large immigrant populations, are drawing on their "long and studied history" of voter fraud to steal elections from good, solid, Republican candidates.
But this is bunk, through and through. Suppose there were widespread fraud under our current system. What would you see? You'd expect, for one thing, a much higher turnout in states not requiring ID to vote, as McGintys flooded the polls. But in 2004, according to ElectionLine.org, two states which require ID, Alaska and South Dakota, ranked among the top ten states for voter turnout, while six of the states with the lowest turnouts do not require identification. There is no obvious correlation....