Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Such registration problems don't mean people are committing voter fraud, however. Experts point out that even if someone moves and registers to vote at their new address without canceling their old registration, there's no evidence that they actually vote twice.

It's a point the Supreme Court acknowledged in April, even as it upheld Indiana's controversial voter identification requirement. "Indiana's voter registration rolls include a large number of names of persons who are either deceased or no longer live in Indiana," wrote Justice John Paul Stevens for the majority in Crawford v. Marion County.

Still, there was no evidence that someone was trying to vote on their behalf. "The record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history," Stevens wrote, noting that to do so would be a felony. In fact, to find an example of widespread voter impersonation the court had to reach back to the New York City elections of 1868, in which William (Boss) Tweed sent "repeaters" to vote in different names.

The first case brought by the new Election Fraud Task Force formed by Wisconsin's attorney general and Milwaukee district attorney, filed Tuesday, actually supports the argument that voter fraud is a red herring. The criminal complaint accuses a city worker of submitting 27 voter registration forms containing false information, including 19 addresses that do not exist. Even if the charges are substantiated, however, unless the 19 people with nonexistent addresses actually show up to vote, such fraud wouldn't have any impact on the outcome of the election.

"Voter fraud is a huge canard," said Robert Atkins, a partner at Paul Weiss Rifkind & Garrison who is working with the Brennan Center on the case against Florida. "There's a long history of systemic attempts to rip off elections. There's no evidence to support individual efforts of voter fraud. It's a sham."

In a conference call with GOP attorneys recently, I asked if they could provide a single example of any duplicate or fraudulent application resulting in someone actually voting twice or someone voting that shouldn't have been allowed to vote. They couldn't.

The second article by Eviatar notes something that I probably should have noted in my article about the subject, which is that in those few cases where canvassers actually submit fraudulent applications, ACORN is the victim of that behavior, not the perpetrator:

But in the cases cited as evidence of voter fraud by ACORN -- most notably one cited as the worst case of voter fraud in the state of Washington, where seven people were convicted last year -- the prosecutor himself noted that it was a scheme by a few individuals to make money. No one was actually trying to influence the outcome of the election.

It turned out that workers who were paid to register voters had copied names out of phone books rather than going out and doing their jobs of signing up real voters. Of course, none of those people showed up to vote.

ACORN has had thousands of canvassers working for them over the years. It is simply inevitable that a few of them are going to take shortcuts and not do their job. But bear in mind that when this does happen, it is caught because ACORN sends those cards to election officials along with the identities of the canvassers so that if there is any pattern of fraud, they can be prosecuted. And in some cases, including the infamous Missouri case, ACORN discovered the problem and turned them in to authorities themselves.

ACORN has also taken steps to correct the problem and catch any fraud themselves:

Seeking to prevent any more such scandals, ACORN officials told me the organization now has workers personally call each newly-registered voter to double-check that the registration is genuine. That's a big workload for a non-profit organization run on a shoestring, but it became a necessary effort to fend off the relentless Republican attacks.

And this is true. Mike Slater, executive director of Project Vote, which designs and administers the quality control process used by ACORN, told me that they have now added this step to the process in order to catch fraudulent applications. They also have all canvassers sign a document stating that if they are caught doing this, they will be turned over to authorities to be investigated and prosecuted.

But here's a key fact: they never discard a registration card. Even if they are sure that a given card is fraudulent, they still send it to election officials, along with the identity of the canvasser. They say, quite rightly, that they do not want to be the ones to make the final call on whether a given registration is valid, that this should be left to election officials. What they do is send all the cards in two bundles, one with all the cards that look to be legitimate and one with the cards that they suspect might be problematic, along with an explanation for why they think they might be and the identity of the canvasser that turned in each one. That allows election officials to investigate and determine whether a registration is legitimate and, if it's not, to turn in the canvasser to authorities.