What is preventing U.S. from making sensible election reforms?

St. Paul Pioneer Press ^ | 10/27/04 | MARK YOST

[rhema]

If anyone's expecting to go to bed early on Nov. 2, they should read "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy," by John Fund. The intrepid Wall Street Journal columnist has done his homework in detailing how partisan politics is undermining our elections.

One problem is that we make voting too easy. Indeed, Mexico has a more secure voter-registration system than we do. Voters there must show a photo ID and be verified with an electronic thumbprint before they can vote.

How well does the Mexican system work? It resulted in the 2000 election of Vicente Fox, "the first opposition party candidate to be elected president in seventy years," Fund notes.

How does the U.S. system compare? Horribly.

The biggest obstacle to any sensible reform is the fundamentally different way in which Democrats and Republicans look at elections.

"Democrats gravitate to the view that the most important value is empowering people to exercise their democratic rights," Fund writes. "Republicans tend to pay more attention to the rule of law and the standards and procedures that govern elections."

While both goals are laudable, Democrats do significant damage by favoring turnout over legitimacy. For instance, a proposal in California argued that illegal aliens should be allowed to vote in school board elections because their children attend public schools. In the 2002 South Dakota Senate race, Democratic Party employee Maka Duta forged signatures on registration forms and absentee ballots.

"If I erred … I erred on the side of angels," she said.

"In other words, doing the devil's work of forging voter signatures is somehow understandable given her angelic goal of increasing voter turnout," Fund rightly notes.

Democrats have also done significant damage by continuing to perpetuate the twin myths that millions of blacks were disenfranchised in the 2000 election and that the election was illegally given to George Bush by the Supreme Court.

Charges of black disenfranchisement in Florida in 2000 "have proved baseless," Fund writes, and Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno agrees with him. But that hasn't stopped even John Kerry from demagoguing on the issue.

As for the Supreme Court "giving" the election to Bush, "Such assertions are simply not supported by the facts," Fund writes. Indeed, an examination of the Florida recount by USA Today, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and the New York Times — even using counts most favorable to Gore — all found that George Bush won Florida.

But what's most disturbing is that the Motor Voter Law, which has been widely hailed a success, is widely used to commit voter fraud. Under the law, states must register anyone applying for a driver's license or welfare benefits, offer mail-in registration (with no ID requirement), and it forbids government workers from challenging new registrants.

Registration has soared under Motor Voter, but Fund thinks maybe a little too much. Rolls in many cities now exceed the Census population of those 18 and older. In Philadelphia, the population declined by 13 percent but voter rolls rose by 24 percent. In California, mail-in forms were used to register fictitious people — or pets! — who then voted by absentee ballot.

It's too bad the prospects for voting reform are so dim, because it wouldn't be that hard to do. Simply requiring that voters show ID would go a long way toward stemming voter fraud. Democrats argue that it would intimidate non-English speakers and effectively disenfranchise people — particularly minorities. But as Fund correctly notes, in 1997 the FDA mandated that retailers demand ID for cigarettes, but the same year the Justice Department said Louisiana couldn't ask the same from voters.

Fund isn't in favor of provisional balloting, which is this year's hot topic and basically allows anyone to walk up to the polls and vote, but holds those votes until they can be validated. What would work better is a central registration office in each state. That way, someone from St. Paul walking into a polling place in Bemidji could be quickly verified.

While these are sensible proposals, Fund believes it'll take a debacle bigger than Florida 2000 to push any meaningful reform.

"Should 'anything goes' continue to be ballot bywords, the nation may wake to another crisis even bigger than the 2000 Florida folly," Fund writes. "Perhaps then it will demand to know who subverted the safeguards in its election laws."

In other words, put on an extra pot of coffee next Tuesday. It could be a long night.

[inquest]

No, all we need to do is go back to doing things the right way. I've had it with government passing some harebrained law that creates a new problem, and then comes up with a "solution" which (surprise, surprise) gives more power to the government. Just go back to the way it was. Why is that too elusive of a concept?