Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
I'm going to cut and paste a factsheet that ACORN has put out about the allegations of voter fraud. Let me say up front that every statement made here was confirmed by my investigation of the group for the article I wrote at the Michigan Messenger, not just by ACORN but by independent and non-partisan voter rights experts.
Key Facts:1. In order to help 1.3 million people register to vote, we hired more than 13,000 registration assistance workers. As with any business or agency that operates at this scale, there are always some people who want to get paid without really doing the job, or who aim to defraud their employer. Any large department store will have some workers who shoplift.
2. Any large voter registration operation will have a small percentage of workers who turn in bogus registration forms. Their goal clearly is not to cast a fraudulent vote. It is simply to defraud their employer, ACORN, by getting a paycheck without earning it. ACORN is the victim of this fraud - not the perpetrator.
3. In nearly every case that has been reported, it was ACORN that discovered the bad forms, and called them to the attention of election authorities, putting the forms in a package that identified them in writing as suspicious, encouraging election officials to investigate, and offering to help with prosecutions. We are required by law to turn in all forms, but instead of just turning them in and figuring that it is the responsibility of the board of elections to figure out which are valid, we spend millions of dollars verifying that forms are valid, and then separate out those that are suspicious.
4. This has nothing to do with "voter fraud" - nothing at all to do with anyone trying to cast an extra vote. There has never been a single reported instance in which bogus registration forms have led to anyone voting improperly. To do that, they would have to show up at the polls, prove their identity as all first-time registrants must, and risk jail. The people who turned in these forms did so not because they wanted an extra vote, but because they didn't care enough to make sure eligible people got to vote at all.
5. When a department store calls the police to report a shoplifting employee, no one says the department store is guilty of consumer fraud. But for some reason, when ACORN turns voter registration workers over to the authorities for filling out bogus forms, it gets accused of "voter fraud." This is a classic case of blaming the victim; indeed, these charges are outrageous, libelous, and often politically motivated.
6. Similar attacks were launched against ACORN and other voter registration organizations in 2004 and 2006. The bogus charges were at the heart of the U.S. Attorney-gate scandal that led to the resignations of Karl Rove, Attorney General Ablerto Gonzales and other top Justice Department Officials. It turned out that it was the charges that were fraudulent, and that they were part of a systematic partisan agenda of voter suppression. Republican US Attorneys David Iglesias (NM), Todd Graves (MO), and John McKay (WA) all were fired primarily because they refused to prosecute similar bogus charges of "voter fraud." Another US Attorney, Bradley Schlozman, who did politicize prosecutions against former ACORN canvassers, was forced to acknowledge under cross examination by the Senate Judiciary Committee that ACORN was the victim of fraud by its employees and ACORN had caught the employees and had identified them to law enforcement.
7. The goals of the people orchestrating these attacks are to distract ACORN from helping people vote and to justify massive voter suppression. That's the real voter fraud; the noise about a small fraction of the forms ACORN has turned in is meant to get the press and public take their eyes off the real threat, while those hurling the charges are stealing people's right to vote in broad daylight. They have already tried to prevent Ohio from registering voters at its early voting sites. In Michigan, they planned to use foreclosure notices to challenge thousands of voters. And if this year is like past years, they are preparing to use this so-called voter fraud to justify massive challenges to voters in minority precincts on Election Day.
The Details:
Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.
Fact: ACORN flags in writing incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in,. Unfortunately, some of these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards. In many cases, we can actually prove that these are the same cards we called to their attention.
Fact: Our canvassers are paid by the hour, not by the card . ACORN has a zero-tolerance policy for deliberately falsifying registrations, and in the cases where our internal quality controls have identified this happening we have fired the workers involved and turned them in to election officials and law-enforcement.
Fact: No criminal charges related to voter registration have ever been brought against ACORN or partner organizations. Convictions against individual former ACORN workers have been accomplished with our full cooperation, using the evidence obtained through our quality control and verification processes -- evidence which in most cases WE called to the attention of authorities
Fact: Most election officials have recognized ACORN's good work and praised our quality control systems. Even in the cities where election officials have complained about ACORN, the applications in question represent less than 1% of the thousands and thousands of registrations ACORN has collected.
Fact: Our accusers not only fail to provide any evidence, they fail to suggest a motive: there is virtually no chance anyone would be able to vote fraudulently, so there is no reason to deliberately submit phony registrations. ACORN is committed to ensuring that the greatest possible numbers of people are registered.
There are four really important facts here. First, that in the very few instances where actual fraud takes place (as opposed to duplicate voter registration applications or applications with portions that are illegible or have mistakes in them), ACORN is the victim of that fraud, not the perpetrator.
Second, that in almost every case where canvassers have turned in fraudulent applications, they were caught because ACORN turned in both the fraudulent card and the identity of the canvasser, and they do so separate from all the applications that they have no reason to believe are bad.
Third, that none of this has anything to do with anyone actually voting twice or anyone being registered to vote that is not a legal voter. When fraud does take place, it's because a canvasser decides to take a short cut rather than do their job and register voters. ACORN fires people for that and turns them in.
Fourth -- and this is very important -- the law requires ACORN to turn in every single registration card that they take, even if it's fraudulent. They cannot, by law, discard ANY voter registration application, they must turn them in to election officials. And bear in mind that they have little means of knowing if someone is turning in a duplicate application because they don't have access to the state's central voter file. If someone who is already registered fills out a card, either because they figure maybe their registration has lapsed and it won't hurt to make sure they're registered or because they feel sorry for a canvasser, by law those cards must be turned in to the county election officials.
We know beyond any doubt that the GOP has an active strategy of trumping up these voter fraud charges against ACORN. How do we know that? Look at the DOJ Inspector General's report on the US Attorneys scandal, especially the section about New Mexico's David Iglesias. Republican political operatives, including Karl Rove himself, put pressure on Iglesias to bring voter fraud charges against ACORN based on a single canvasser who turned in some fraudulent applications in that state.
When he refused to do so because there was no evidence, he was put on the list of attorneys to be fired. The report contains emails and memos from Rove and from Republican activists throwing a fit over the fact that Iglesias - a man who ran for office as a Republican, so he hardly has any reason to be biased in favor of ACORN - would not do their bidding and bring a fraud case against them.
Iglesias had nothing but excellent reviews of his work by his superiors at the DOJ and the excuses that they offered for why they wanted him fired were found by the Inspector General to be dishonest justifications invented later. The evidence reveals that he was targeted because he would not bring a corruption charge against a Democratic official before the 2004 election in order to undermine the Democrats during the campaign (and by the way, charges were eventually brought and the official was acquitted).
This is politics, plain and simple. The GOP cannot come up with a single documented example of someone voting twice or voting fraudulently, but they continually raise the specter of voter fraud in order to cover up their longstanding voter suppression efforts. And those efforts, unlike the allegations of voter fraud, have been documented and proven in court many times. Multiple courts have found the RNC and various Republican state committees guilty of illegal voter suppression and issued injunctions against their voter caging programs. And that is the sole purpose of these voter fraud allegations, to distract attention away from all of that.
Politics
Comments
Here are questions I always ask people who claim to worry about fraudulent registrations and want to make it tougher for legitimately-registered people to vote. How many legitimate potential votes being denied are equally as bad as one illegitimate vote being cast? Is denying ten legal votes worth ensuring that one illegal vote is not cast? What about 100?
Posted by: Mr. Upright | October 14, 2008 9:45 AM
ACORN clearly sees some bad forms, but as you admit, they have to turn in the forms anyway. ACORN has to do this because they cannot pass judgment on the voter registration forms. They can only pass SUSPICION.
Well, guess what the GOP is doing? Based on, once again, the limitations of the law considering the Board of Elections has to pass judgment as the only authorized body to do so.
The mistake you make is the presumption that it is merely the GOP playing politics when in fact it is both ACORN and the GOP that are playing politics.
The GOP didn't submit 5,000 voter registration forms on the final day to submit them only to find that all 5,000 were fraudulent. ACORN did that in just one county in Indiana.
There is doubt to cast on the GOP, but it's not a valid reason to disregard the multiple states where we now know voter registration fraud has been committed.
Feel free to subsequently offer the "rogue employee" defense to further shield ACORN from the clear dilemma that is inevitable in paying people to register voters.
Posted by: Gabriel Sutherland | October 14, 2008 9:52 AM
Great post, thanks.
"As with any business or agency that operates at this scale, there are always some people who want to get paid without really doing the job, or who aim to defraud their employer."
This is ironic considering that many in the conservative movement may be guilty of the same thing. Rather than establishing their reputation with ideas and positive action they choose to spend much of their effort pursuing suppressing those they fear will remove them from power.
Obviously to some degree this is evident in any movement, but it seems rampant on the right.
Posted by: Monsignor Henry Clay | October 14, 2008 9:55 AM
I find it strange that so much detailed effort has been put into this post, which actually seems out of place on a science blog.
This post is categorized under "Politics". Is there a similar category for "Fashion"? It's unclear to me why such a politicized topic as ACORN is fodder for a blog dedicated to real science.
Is there a perceived need by someone to come to the defense of ACORN and its operations?
Posted by: Jack Coupal | October 14, 2008 10:04 AM
Gabriel - you argue a risk without reporting one known defect, why should anyone consider your argument? Wouldn't you have a point if ACORN registered voters were fraudulently voting? A reasonable person would argue that paying someone to register voters is a good thing if more people vote, there are no reported incidents of voter fraud, and the cost to the gov't election commissions is reasonable when reviewing suspicious registration forms.
I would argue you are falsely conflating registration with voting to make your point. I would also argue you would have a point if voter fraud was confirmed to an unacceptable degree or the cost to the state to screen ACORN registration applications was exorbitant, you do neither here.
Posted by: Michael Heath | October 14, 2008 10:05 AM
Regarding the claim: There has never been a single reported instance in which bogus registration forms have led to anyone voting improperly.
There is now.
Posted by: heddle | October 14, 2008 10:06 AM
I smell the whiff of troll. If you had ever read this blog, or indeed anything above primary school level, you would know that it is not primarily about science. Look at the title of the blog and the category in which it is listed on the Scienceblogs homepage, then re-evaluate that load of old bollocks you just wrote, and quietly piss off.
Posted by: Matthew | October 14, 2008 10:09 AM
From the article to which heddle linked:
OK, heddle, you win on the "there is one recorded instance claim. But look more closely. 5% are "questionable." Only 5%. And not, "invalid" or "fraudulent," just "questionable." And as a scientist, you know what 5% uncertainty means--it means you can get your data published because everyone agrees that's good enough.I would also note that even though this article comes from the right-leaning New York Post, there's no suggestion that ACORN is anything but a victim of this man's fraud.
And, finally, why don't you take your "one instance" and apply it to answering Mr. Upright's question?
You took a cheap shot, heddle. You point out one legitimate counterfactual, but without examining what it means--you simply left the implication that it undermines the whole argument. Again, you're a scientist, an academic; you know that's not a legitimate way to make an intellectual argument. And while obviously a comment on a blog need not rise to the argumentative quality of a peer-reviewed paper, it should rise above such sneering dishonesty.
Posted by: James Hanley | October 14, 2008 10:24 AM
Good grief - the last thing we need is Ed or, god help us, PZ discussing fashion....
(seriously - is this your first time reading this blog?)
Posted by: yoshi | October 14, 2008 10:29 AM
Jack Coupal, this is obviously your first visit here. You do understand the idea of a personal blog? If that escapes you, you should have at least gotten a hint of the context here based on the name of the blog- "Dispatches From The Culture Wars: Thoughts From the Interface of Science, Religion, Law and Culture". No?
Posted by: Deepsix | October 14, 2008 10:30 AM
Democratic community organizers would go through presumably sympathetic populations (college students at Pitt and Duquesne, low income areas etc.) and urge everyone to go to the polls even if they had voted absentee already (for students), if they hadn't registered or if they had already voted. Under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), polling places are supposed to maintain a supply of "provisional" ballots for people who appear to vote but aren't on the rolls. The concept is that the status of the voter would be checked later and the vote counted if the voter was inappropriately omitted form the rolls. This was put in place after the Florida fiasco.
In Allegheny County, each polling place had ten provisional ballots under the assumption that no more than ten people would show up claiming to be on the rolls but were not. But, with the organizers driving dozens if not hundreds of unregistered individuals to the same polling places, the poll workers quickly ran out of provisional ballots. This event was followed shortly by a Kerry Edwards lawyer miraculously appearing at the polling place and demanding that because there were no more provisional ballots, everyone there had to be put on a machine in order to "preserve the right to vote." Once that voter went into the booth, there was no way to check their status and their vote would count. I bumped into a college student in an elevator who told me that a Kerry worker told him that in Pittsburgh, you get to vote as many times as you want. Richard Daley would be proud.
Posted by: Dude | October 14, 2008 10:33 AM
Indeed. Ed, please rededicate yourself solely to covering scientific topics. Just because it's your blog doesn't mean you have the right to post on any old topic you happen to be interested in at the moment. And the fact that your readers love this type of topic doesn't mean that they have a right to read about it on a science blog.
I mean, what is the world coming to when everyone thinks they have the right to discuss whatever they want whenever they want wherever they want?
Posted by: James Hanley | October 14, 2008 10:39 AM
...and we all know how unimpeachable sources named 'Dude' are for data collected from some college student in an elevator...
Posted by: NJ | October 14, 2008 10:42 AM
I find it strange that someone who obviously has never read this blog before would show up to complain about the subject matter, but offer nothing to impeach it.
Posted by: Taz | October 14, 2008 11:06 AM
The GOP didn't submit 5,000 voter registration forms on the final day to submit them only to find that all 5,000 were fraudulent. ACORN did that in just one county in Indiana.
Which county?
Posted by: Neil h | October 14, 2008 11:09 AM
From the article linked by heddle:
So was it really a "bogus registration form" collected by ACORN that led to the improper voting attempt, or was it a bogus registration form filled out right there at the state election offices? How could ACORN possibly act to prevent that?
Posted by: noncarborundum | October 14, 2008 11:16 AM
Nevermind, I found it, it's Lake County. The claimed number of verified fake signatures is "2100" per CNN, and the others have not yet been looked at as yet. The claim of "all 5000 were fraudulent" cannot be proved until "all 5000" have been looked at, surely.
But if the first 2100 are all fake, doesn't it seem reasonable to believe that all the rest are probably fake too, even if we can't actually up and say "all 5000 are fake" yet? We-ell, seems like the facts are getting a bit muddled in the RNC press releases that a few MSM outlets a parroting uncontested. See, ACORN submitted 5000 signatures in three piles Why three piles? Well, as Ed already explained ACORN has to submit every registration, so they helpfully divided the registration forms into "good" ones, ones in which the forms were not completely filled out, and one containing registration forms that ACORN (not the election county officials, but ACORN)considered 'suspicious'.
Gee, if every form processed so far has turned out to be fake, I wonder which pile the Lake County officials must have gone through first?
Posted by: Neil H | October 14, 2008 11:40 AM
"The GOP didn't submit 5,000 voter registration forms on the final day to submit them only to find that all 5,000 were fraudulent. ACORN did that in just one county in Indiana."
No dear, go read what happened again.
They submitted 5000 registrations and flagged those which they identified as being problematic. The officials checked the ones they flagged and all of those were fraudulent. Hence, they did good.
Posted by: Kilo | October 14, 2008 11:43 AM
Gabriel Sutherland wrote:
Even if this is true (and we have no idea whether it is at this point), where's the playing politics part? Answer this question, which no one else who is criticizing ACORN has managed to do: what possible purpose would it serve ACORN to intentionally solicit fraudulent applications? We know why some of the canvassers would just pull some names out of the phone book to fill out the cards or invent a few names; they do it to make money without actually doing their jobs. People do that every day in every type of job. But what good would it do ACORN as an organization to do so? They've registered over a million new voters in this election cycle, most of them being lower income and minority voters. They know that election procedures will catch duplicate or fraudulent applications (every single application has to be checked even against the social security number database). So what good would it do them to intentionally commit registration fraud? How would it benefit them? The obvious answer is that it wouldn't. There's simply no reason for them to do it. It would not help their cause in any way whatsoever.
Now let's look at the specific situation in Indiana. The first thing to note is that no one has any idea how many bad applications there were or how many of them were actually fraudulent rather than duplicate or incomplete (both of which are both inevitable and far more likely). The 5000 figure came from a Republican county chairman in Lake County, Indiana, not from the elections officials. The elections officials only said that they "had to reject a large portion" of the 5000 applications. Bear in mind that the normal rate of "bad" applications is about 30% and this is true of Republican groups as well (but for some reason the GOP never mentions that in their complaints about ACORN). The vast, vast majority of the invalid applications are due to being duplicates (about 25%), with a much smaller percentage (3-5%) being incomplete or illegible. The number of applications that are actually fraudulent - where names are made up or copied out of the phone book, etc - is vanishingly small. Yes, it appears that there were some actually fraudulent applications turned in to Lake County officials but the evidence simply isn't there to support a claim that all 5000 were fraudulent. I'd be willing to bet money on the outcome of this investigation that this is what will happen: less than 1% of the applications checked will be found to be fraudulent. And it will turn out that ACORN flagged them as possibly fraudulent when they sent them in, as they always do. A certain percentage will turn out to be duplicate, but of course the canvassers have no way of knowing that they are duplicates because they have no way of comparing them to the state's voter files. And it will turn out to be the work of one or two canvassers, who will be convicted based on the evidence that ACORN provided. That is the way such situations have always turned out.
How can I shield them from this accurate dilemma? Any time you pay people to solicit information from citizens - whether it's a registration drive or a petition drive, regardless of the ideology of the organization doing it - it is, as you admit, inevitable that some of those people being paid to do so will try to game the system to make money without doing the work. Welcome to reality. But you simply cannot mount any sizable project of this sort without paying people. That's why in any petition drive, for instance, the organization doing the drive - and this includes every conservative organization as well - has to turn in 1/3 more signatures than needed, because a great many of them will be duplicates or the information will be incomplete, inaccurate or ineligible on the forms. The most common forms of invalid registrations (duplicates and incomplete or illegible applications) are not influenced by whether money is paid (volunteer canvassers have the same problems inevitably), but the money does motivate the turning in of fraudulent applications. But the fact is that this argument does not condemn ACORN, it condemns every single voter registration or political petition drive that has ever been undertaken. The only reason this is being targeted specifically at ACORN is because A) the sheer size of their operation (thousands of canvassers turning in millions of signatures) and B) the political convenience of demagoguing this issue for the GOP.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | October 14, 2008 11:43 AM
heddle wrote:
Okay, we now have a single verified instance of someone being allowed to vote who shouldn't have. But the mistake was both made by elections officials and caught by elections officials, not by ACORN (which has no way of knowing whether a given application is a duplicate or not). But notice that the article also makes two key points. First, that only 5% of the cards turned in were even "questionable," which is an astonishingly low number ( as I reported previously, 30% is the norm in any large canvassing operation). And second, that the elections board is not accusing ACORN of any fraud and that ACORN was cooperating with the investigation.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | October 14, 2008 11:51 AM
Thank you, noncarborundum, for pointing out something that most newspapers know very well: many readers don't read words, but are very quick to pick up nasty implications.
As always, the NY Post does a spiffy job of implying things that aren't true in the headline (while not saying anything specifically UN-true), and managing to keep the real facts (eg. this voter's bogus ACORN registrations were uncovered long before voting--by ACORN or the BoE it doesn't say specifically--and he voted with a registration done on site) hidden among all those little bitty words in the actual article. Tricky!
Posted by: Lycida | October 14, 2008 12:00 PM
Come on, heddle, come back and fight!
(Whistle blows, ref says: "Personal foul, taunting, 15 yard penalty on the offense.)
Posted by: James Hanley | October 14, 2008 12:02 PM
But we hate ACORN. That's a fact; we've been told it is true by important people. We'll find evidence to support it later. Just hate. It's the American thing.
ice
Posted by: ice9 | October 14, 2008 12:09 PM
Calm down, folks.
This was my first visit to this blog. I came via a link and saw only scienceblogs.com, so I thought it was about...science. Didn't read the blog name. Sorry
My bad
Posted by: Jack Coupal | October 14, 2008 12:18 PM
Well played Jack. A gracious apology.
Posted by: Matthew | October 14, 2008 12:27 PM
I guess this fraud fiasco explains the massive Democratic voter turn out.
Posted by: MZ | October 14, 2008 12:54 PM
I meant the massive Democratic voter *registration* this year.
Posted by: MZ | October 14, 2008 12:58 PM
You are not the first person to mention this James. And sadly, you won't be the last.
Posted by: charles johnson | October 14, 2008 1:39 PM
James Hanley,
There is nothing to fight about. I pointed out that there is, now, one reported incident of actual voting resulting from an ACORN faulty registration. End of my comment. I made no implication whatsoever that it undermines the whole argument. Please look up the difference between imply and infer. The claim of "no incidents" was but one part of one of seven enumerated points; of course it doesn't undermine the whole argument--it doesn't even weaken it--it is simply a correction. Your response was to whine that it came from a "right leaning source." Ed took a different approach, an honest approach, and accepted the incident without a hair-trigger, oh-so-easy impugning of the source, and then, reasonably, made the case that it actually makes ACORN look good, not bad. I don't actually agree--but I don't have an interest in arguing the point.
Posted by: heddle | October 14, 2008 1:52 PM
Now in an actual example of registration fraud, last presidential election an RNC-paid group deliberately discarded registration forms signed by Democrats in both Nevada and Oregon.
Posted by: QrazyQat | October 14, 2008 2:08 PM
I have to agree with Heddle here. I've said repeatedly that there hasn't been a single documented case of someone voting twice and he pointed me to one such case. It doesn't undermine my argument much, but he didn't claim it does. It's certainly reasonable, though, to point me to the article.
But to correct him on one thing, I didn't say this makes ACORN look good. It clearly doesn't. But it's an example of how the system, both ACORN's internal controls and the safeguards built into HAVA, prevents voter registration fraud from resulting in actual voting fraud. It is telling that this single example seems to be from a single person intent on finding a way to game the system and that he was caught before his vote was ever actually counted.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | October 14, 2008 2:20 PM
Heddle,
I commented on it being from a right-leaning source because the article took pains to note that ACORN was a left-leaning organization. Bad attempt to be humorous--bad because unless someone both read the article and noticed what I noticed was in on the joke. But of course no one's ever complimented me on my jokes.
I stand by everything else I say, inference vs. implication not to the contrary.
Posted by: James Hanley | October 14, 2008 2:38 PM
heddle wrote:
Except that there isn't. The guy in the article might have filed invalid registrations through ACORN before, but the vote in question was based on a registration form he filled out right there at the state election office.
Quoting this again, in case you missed it:
How is this ACORN's fault? Unless perhaps someone from ACORN was holding a gun to his head?
Posted by: noncarborundum | October 14, 2008 2:55 PM
They keep reporting on our local NPR station here in central-Indiana on the "ACORN story", and the way they do it feeds to the fire that ACORN is the cause for the voter fraud.
Posted by: MarkusR | October 14, 2008 4:18 PM
This is politics, plain and simple. The GOP cannot come up with a single documented example of someone voting twice or voting fraudulently, but they continually raise the specter of voter fraud in order to cover up their longstanding voter suppression efforts
***********************************************************
Can't believe you would be foolish enough to post such a silly statement
===========================================================
According to The Denver Post, prosecutors in at least 47 Colorado counties investigated
cases "involving accusations of forged signatures, felons voting or people who attempted to vote
twice."144 The paper reported the following numbers on vote fraud and irregularities during the
November 2004 election:
122 people voted twice statewide, casting absentee ballots through the mail, then showing
up in person to vote on Election Day;
**
144 Vote Fraud Probed In State, Susan Greene and Karen E. Crummy, THE DENVER POST, March 24, 2005
===========================================================
Nearly 100 voters in at least five Florida counties voted more than once in the 2004
election. It was reported in January that the FBI and U.S. Attorney's office were investigating
59 cases of double voting in Duval County. According to the Florida Times-Union, at least 41
of these double votes counted while another 18 involving provisional ballots were not part of the
final tally.191 Broward County officials referred to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement
(FDLE) at least 30 cases of people voting at early-voting locations and also voting at the polls on
Election Day.192 In Palm Beach County, three voters reportedly voted twice by casting absentee
ballots and also showing up at the polls.193 There were also reports of double voting in Volusia
and Sumter counties.194
**
191 Double Voting Being Investigated, David DeCamp, FLORIDA TIMES-UNION, January 25, 2005
192 Double-Voters' Names Going To Prosecutors, Amy Sherman, THE MIAMI HERALD, November 14, 2004;
Absentee-Ballot Glitches Prompt Request For Inquiry, Erika Bolstad, THE MIAMI HERALD, November 17, 2004
193 Possible Attempts To Double Vote Eyed, George Bennett, THE PALM BEACH POST, November 5, 2004
194 Volusia Canvassers Examine 3 In Vote Fraud, Ludmilla Lelis and Jeff Libby, ORLANDO SENTINEL,
November 4, 2004; Area Voters Encounter Few Snags, Lindsay Jones and John Pacenti, THE PALM BEACH
POST, November 3, 2004
===========================================================
In September 2004, the Kansas City Star reported that more than 300 people may have
voted twice in the same election in Missouri in 2000 and 2002, though the number "could be
even higher." The Star found about 150 potential double-voters in St. Louis or St. Louis County,
60 in the Kansas City area and the rest spread around the state.226
**
226 One Person, One Vote? Not Always, Greg Reeves, THE KANSAS CITY STAR, September 5, 2004
Posted by: Campesino | October 14, 2008 4:23 PM
And more:
===========================================================
On May 10, the joint task force on election fraud led by U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic, a
Republican appointee, and Milwaukee County D.A. Michael McCann, a Democrat, reportedfinding "clear evidence of fraud in the Nov. 2 election in Milwaukee."321 The task force's
preliminary findings mirrored many of the Journal Sentinel's revelations, including double voting,
felon voting and large gaps between the number of ballots cast and people identified as
voting.
Key findings of the election fraud task force included:
More than 100 instances of double-voting, including people voting twice, voting under
fictitious names and addresses and voting in names of dead people.
More than 200 felons casting illegal ballots.
Approximately 65 fake names registered to vote by paid voter registration workers.
The number of votes cast in Milwaukee "far exceeds the total number of recorded
voters." At least 4,609 more votes were cast than people identified as voting and
"multiple wards had discrepancies in excess of 100 votes," a phenomenon the task force
continues to investigate.322
**
321 Inquiry Finds Evidence Of Fraud In Election, Greg J. Borowski, MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL, May
11, 2005
322 Preliminary Findings Of Joint Task Force Investigating Possible Election Fraud, May 10, 2005 (Exhibit U).
Posted by: Campesino | October 14, 2008 4:35 PM
This is politics, plain and simple. The GOP cannot come up with a single documented example of someone voting twice or voting fraudulently, but they continually raise the specter of voter fraud in order to cover up their longstanding voter suppression efforts
====================================================
OOPS!
====================================================
Man convicted of double voting
'I forgot' doesn't get Tosa resident off hook
Sure, Michael Zore told police, he'd voted twice in last November's election, using the city hall polling stations of two different Milwaukee County suburbs in the space of six hours.
The evidence against him included him signing up to vote using a false address in West Allis, after he'd already voted in Wauwatosa.
But Zore, 44, told a jury Wednesday there was a good reason he shouldn't be convicted of felony counts of double voting and giving a poll worker false information:
He forgot.
"It is hard to believe, I don't discount that at all," Zore's lawyer, Raymond M. Clark, told the jury. "But it did happen."
Clark's "stress defense" claimed Zore was so tense - from his sister's death a week before, from the garnishment of his wages to pay back taxes, from his divorce a year before, and from the cancellation of a master's degree class on election day - that when he found himself, after an errand, in West Allis across the street from City Hall, he forgot he'd already voted.
Jurors needed just an hour of deliberation, and a lunch break, to reject this claim and find Zore guilty Wednesday.
He now could face a prison sentence of up to seven years and a fine of $20,000 when Milwaukee County Circuit Judge William W. Brash III sentences him Sept. 27
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=651215
Posted by: Campesino | October 14, 2008 4:48 PM
Honestly, there's this great thing on the Internets called Google. You should try using it sometime.
And please don't try to tell me that The Huffington Post is some group of rightwing nutjobs
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Double Voting In TX Primary Still Unresolved
HOUSTON-- The saying "vote early and often in the Texas primary" was taken literally last month when 1,148 Harris County residents voted twice and, so far, got away with it.
According to reports, some voters cast ballots by mail during the Early Voting Period and then showed up the day of the primary and were allowed to vote again. Others voted in both the Republican and Democratic primaries. It's still unclear why there were no records of original votes and whether voting authorities plan to act to address the problem.
Many voters have pleaded innocent due to the confusing way Texas handles its primary. It is the only state in the nation to hold both a primary and a caucus on the same day, where you can "vote" twice -- the first being a ballot cast in a voting booth, the second, held after the polls close, is a caucus vote, where citizens verbally "vote" for their candidate.
Some Texans told me, however, that they heard about something called the "Texas Two-Step" -- and thought it meant you could vote twice at the polls. Some even said they voted once for Sen. Obama and once for Sen. Clinton.
Also confusing, they said, were several political websites-- such as this one belonging to "VirginiaDem.org". It was published the week before the Texas primary. The headline reads: "Texans -- Vote Early, Vote Twice, Vote Obama."
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given his performance on the campaign trail this year, former president Bill Clinton, they say, also helped muddled the process with off the cuff remarks. On a campaign stop in the state in the days leading up the vote, he told a crowd, "Think of it as the only time in your life that you'll get to vote twice without going to jail." He was being facetious -- but apparently some voters took him at his word.
Voting twice isn't a joke. Doing so knowingly can lead to a minimum sentence of two years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. Voting fraud of this kind is considered a third-degree felony.
According to Beverly Kaufman, Harris County Clerk, who is chief election official and has served in the Clerk's office for 14 years, a list of "questionable" voting cases from the elections workers has been given to the District Attorney's office for further investigation.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/erin-medlicott/double-voting-in-tx-prima_b_96451.html
Posted by: Campesino | October 14, 2008 4:55 PM
Campesino-
Perhaps I should have been more clear that I was referring specifically to any such instances tied to voter registration drives. Election law experts agree that by far the most common form of voter fraud is done through absentee ballots - someone sends in an absentee ballot and then goes to vote, or orders an absentee ballot in another person's name and sends it in. But this has nothing to do with voter registration drives or ACORN; the fault with that lies with election officials not doing their job.
The same is true of felons voting. Every state has different laws on this. In some states, felons can vote. In other states, they can't. In still other states, they can vote only once they're off probation or parole. Those who are registering people to vote have no way of knowing who is and is not eligible to vote. By law, they must turn in every application they take. It is up to election officials and clerks to make sure that those who are ineligible do not get to register or vote. This has nothing to do with registration drives.
The Milwaukee situation is a perfect example of how such claims of massive voter fraud, when actually examined, turn out to be vastly overblown and nearly always the result of incompetence by election officials rather than any organized effort to commit fraud. Lorraine Minnite, a voting rights expert at Columbia University, did a study of all the allegations of voter fraud, including this one. Here's what she concludes:
Milwaukee is also a perfect example of how the GOP uses voter caging lists to pump up these false and exaggerated claims of fraud. 4 days before the election, the Wisconsin GOP produced a list of more than 37,000 voter registrations that had "questionable addresses" and demanded that all of them be challenged. The vast majority of those "questionable addresses" turned out to be things like addresses with the wrong apartment number or without an apartment number, things like that. Reviews of the list by Milwaukee city attorneys and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found only 68 that were actually questionable. The rest were simply the result of clerical errors between the registration list and the post office's list of known addresses.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | October 14, 2008 5:11 PM
I contend that system still worked in the case of the Ohio man who was found to have cast an illegal ballot. He could register and cast his ballot the same day. But the vote won't count until election day...giving the state time to verify these same-day registration/castings. AND....they found him ineligible, before the election and his vote won't count. So, still no ineligible votes COUNTED.
Posted by: Cindy | October 14, 2008 6:22 PM
A person named kevin posted this, obviously meant for this thread, in the "teaching our children to be gay" thread by mistake:
Posted by: noncarborundum | October 14, 2008 10:10 PM
By the way...why are folks convinced that if it is intentional fraud, that it's coming from the left wing? For all we know, there could have been a dirty tricks squad that had far right roots that infiltrated ACORN to gum up the works.
(I'm not seriously proposing this, but a) that would not be unprecedented for right wing elements, and, far more importantly, b) we don't know enough about what's going on to make judgements...
Posted by: gwangung | October 14, 2008 10:34 PM
Perhaps I should have been more clear that I was referring specifically to any such instances tied to voter registration drives. Election law experts agree that by far the most common form of voter fraud is done through absentee ballots - someone sends in an absentee ballot and then goes to vote, or orders an absentee ballot in another person's name and sends it in. But this has nothing to do with voter registration drives or ACORN; the fault with that lies with election officials not doing their job.
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You certainly should have been clearer - but Republicans certainly complain about absentee fraud as well as everything else. They also can make a decent case that registration irregularities can make that easier.
Also I would agree that many problems "lie with election officials not doing their job." My favorite example of this is the oft-cited long voting lines in Ohio. If you look into that in any depth you'll see that they were in predominantly Democratic counties where Democrats were in charge of allocating the numbers of machines in polling places. Most all of these weren't Republican tricks but self-inflicted wounds
Posted by: Campesino | October 14, 2008 10:59 PM
Campesino:
Citations for that last comment, please.
Posted by: democommie | October 15, 2008 12:37 AM
"Democratic community organizers would go through presumably sympathetic populations (college students at Pitt and Duquesne, low income areas etc.) and urge everyone to go to the polls even if they had voted absentee already (for students), if they hadn't registered or if they had already voted. Under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), polling places are supposed to maintain a supply of "provisional" ballots for people who appear to vote but aren't on the rolls. The concept is that the status of the voter would be checked later and the vote counted if the voter was inappropriately omitted form the rolls. This was put in place after the Florida fiasco.
In Allegheny County, each polling place had ten provisional ballots under the assumption that no more than ten people would show up claiming to be on the rolls but were not. But, with the organizers driving dozens if not hundreds of unregistered individuals to the same polling places, the poll workers quickly ran out of provisional ballots. This event was followed shortly by a Kerry Edwards lawyer miraculously appearing at the polling place and demanding that because there were no more provisional ballots, everyone there had to be put on a machine in order to "preserve the right to vote." Once that voter went into the booth, there was no way to check their status and their vote would count. I bumped into a college student in an elevator who told me that a Kerry worker told him that in Pittsburgh, you get to vote as many times as you want. Richard Daley would be proud."
What a crock. Let's see the links that prove this.
Posted by: Mary | October 15, 2008 1:00 AM
Good grief - the last thing we need is Ed or, god help us, PZ discussing fashion....
Too late, PZ is already modelling his line of squid hats.
I never understood felon disenfranchisemnet. I mean, are criminals *that* large a special interests voting block that politicians would promise to go easy on crime?
Posted by: Graculus | October 15, 2008 1:06 AM
Campesino stated:
Ditto democommie's request. It is my understanding that Ohio's Secretary of the State has the responsibility to allocate voting machines. In 2004 this was Ken Blackwell, an extremely partisan Republican. Not only did Democratic-heavy precincts not receive a fair distribution of machines relative to Republican-heavy precincts, but many other shenanigans occurred, more than enough to insure an Ohio victory for Bush, here is my citation, which includes links to its citations: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/10586714/was_the_2004_election_stolen/print .
This is a long article so I recommend you do a search-find and search for Long Lines to find the relevant portion of the article, the rest of the article describes the other shenanigans that assured a Bush victory in spite of the fact that more voters wanted Kerry in Ohio.
Posted by: Michael Heath | October 15, 2008 7:49 AM
...b) we don't know enough about what's going on to make judgements...
Are you fucking kidding me?
Since when does a lack of data prevent people from forming judgements about a subject? If people had to back up their opinions with facts, then I suspect that the blogosphere would be a much quieter place.
Posted by: Josh | October 15, 2008 8:15 AM
Ditto democommie's request. It is my understanding that Ohio's Secretary of the State has the responsibility to allocate voting machines.
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You couldn't be more wrong. Virtually everywhere in the country allocations of voting machines to the polling place level are made by county election commissions or boards which are bi-partisan. During the 2004 election in Franklin County (Columbus area) Ohio the chairman of the election board was also chairman of the county Democratic Party
Look here:
http://vote.franklincountyohio.gov/assets/pdf/administratio-board-minutes/BoardMinutes2008-8-14-630pm.pdf
CHAIRMAN PREISSE: We are in session,
and thank you all for coming. Thank you for
attending Franklin County Board of Elections'
public hearing regarding the preliminary voting
machine allocation report issued by Sagata
Limited.
The Board is taking under
consideration both the report and the comments
received for our final determination of
allocation of voting machines throughout Franklin
County on election day.
Pursuant to Revised Code 3501:11(i),
this Board will vote in public session on the
final voting machine allocation for the November
4th general election, 2008.
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This is the same procedure used in 2004 where the BOE allocated the number of machines per polling spot
For another perspective look here:
http://copperas.com/machinery/
This is a very rigourous analysis of how unfair the 2004 allocation of voting machines was in Franklin County and completely (and accurately) blames the BOE for its screw-up
A board chaired by a Democrat misallocated the machines - as I said, a self-inflicted wound
Can't blame Ken Blackwell for that one
Posted by: Campesino | October 15, 2008 12:09 PM
Campesino - we seem to be talking past one another. Are you claiming that Blackwell allocated the proper amount of voting machines to the counties and they screwed it up? I have heard no one make that claim.
I may have been mistaken in my use of the term, "precinct" rather than county, but it is my understanding that Democratic voting districts did not have enough machines given allocation at the state level and that Republican voting districts had such an abundance of machines, especially in rural counties, there was zero wait time. If Blackwell misallocated by county, that would still be the causal factor that created waiting lines up to 11 hours and thousands turned away.
If Democratic-powered county level adminstrator(s) misalloccated machines but there wasn't enough machines to begin with or provided no margin of error, that appears to be a far less grievious issue than what Blackwell did at the state level.
Posted by: Michael Heath | October 15, 2008 12:20 PM
Campesino - we seem to be talking past one another. Are you claiming that Blackwell allocated the proper amount of voting machines to the counties and they screwed it up? I have heard no one make that claim.
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Go back and look at the second link I provided. The analysis there says that *within* Franklin County, majority Republican precincts go proportinately more machines than majority Democrat precincts. I've seen this argument cited many other places.
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http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/990
Cliff Arnebeck, a Common Cause attorney, introduced into the record the Franklin County Board of Elections spreadsheet detailing the allocation of e-voting computer machines for the 2004 election. The Board of Elections' own document records that, while voters waited in lines ranging from 2-7 hours at polling places, 68 electronic voting machines remained in storage and were never used on Election Day.
snip
An analysis of the Franklin County Board of Elections' allocation of machines reveals a consistent pattern of providing fewer machines to the Democratic city of Columbus, with its Democratic mayor and uniformly Democratic city council, despite increased voter registration in the city. The result was an obvious disparity in machine allocations compared to the primarily Republican white affluent suburbs.
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Apparently the Sec of State under Ohio law sets the standards for MINIMUM number of machines required based on number of registered voters. Also, if you look deeper you'll see counties are responsible for buying their own machines, though they can get more funds under HAVA
Posted by: Campesino | October 15, 2008 12:53 PM
Hey there's some lucid arguments and ideas going on here. It has given me side to the story that is completely lacking in any other coverage that I have see. Thanks.
Posted by: Another Kiwi | October 17, 2008 4:42 AM