"Of what value to the democratic processes of society is the voice of a person who hasn't played by its rules"
11/6/00
America's Virtual Voters
The good voters of Ivory Coast rose up to throw out a former president who rigged his reelection. So did the voters of Serbia. Is America going the other way?
To start with, a personal anecdote about the small gear wheels that drive the machinery of democracy: Forty years ago, fresh out of college, I worked in a suburban Philadelphia laboratory and became friendly with an older technician--a crusty little street-wise Irishman--who also happened to be a local Democratic committeeman. We often ate lunch together, where he regaled me, college-educated naïf as I was, with tales about realpolitik at the grass-roots level.
In the blue-collar town where he lived, you had to belong to a union and register Democratic to get a job at the local steel mill. At election time, party workers would drag everyone on their list out of their row-houses, diners and bars, promising them a buck for a vote, if they voted Democratic. When the voter came out of the polling booth and wanted his money, he'd be asked to show his hands. This was to insure that the guy wasn't lying about turning the Democratic candidates' levers on the voting machine. It seems that the poll worker would smear the handles with mercurochrome whenever a party member, whose loyalty was not above question, entered the polling station.
Vote fraud is as American as apple pie. Surely by now everyone has heard the story about how the late mayor Richard Daley's Democratic machine got the Cook County (Chicago) cemeteries to vote, thereby clinching John F. Kennedy's narrow victory over Richard Nixon. As the national vote count progressed, showing an increasingly narrowing vote margin between the two contenders, the count in Chicago was mysteriously delayed. When the numbers were finally released, a record turnout of Cook County voters had voted overwhelmingly for Kennedy, in the narrowest popular vote margin of any presidential election of this century. Nixon--showing a spirit of graciousness and statesmanship that unfortunately deserted him during his later tribulations--decided not to contest the vote count for the good of the country, and conceded.
Virtual voters, absentee ballots
A record number of California voters will be voting via absentee ballot this election. Indeed, some are prognosticating that the result in some close races may not be known until days after the elections because of the time required to count and verify the large number of absentee ballots. The California Registrar of Voters has reported that 3.2 million requests for absentee ballots have been received, of a total number of 15.7 million registered voters in the state.
In these days, when it is against the law to ask voters for identification and where the Motor Voter Law has made anyone with a driver's license (authentic or counterfeit) a potential voter, absentee ballots are especially susceptible to fraud and abuse. Missing is even the minimal assurance of seeing a real live voter walk into the local polling station and signing the registry--a process wich assures at least that the voter is physically present and not in another state, or in a cemetery. All the ballot counters do is check the the signature of the absentee voter against the voter registration application.
In Los Angeles County, for example, over 600,000 absentee ballots have been sent out for the 2000 presidential election. As this comprises 15% of the total registered voters in the county, it is not difficult to see what would happen even in case of a record voter turnout: as many as a quarter or a third of the vote would be determined by absentees.
Remember, the 46th Congressional District covering the Orange County suburbs of Los Angeles is the place where, after the 1996 Congressional elections, election fraud by was charged (and later proven) in the 984 vote victory of Democratic Congressional candidate Loretta Sanchez over incumbent Republican Robert Dornan. Shortly after the election, as reported by the San Jose Mercury News (Dec. 28, 1996), nineteen non-citizens admitted to a Los Angeles newspaper that they had voted in the 1996 General Election even though their naturalization process had not been completed. A later investigation discovered that 60% of the voter registrations processed by Hermanidad Mexicanos Nacional, an L.A. area Hispanic organization, were of non-citizens who fraudulently claimed the right to vote [San Jose Mercury News (Oct. 14, 1997)]. The investigation by the California Secretary of State identified 5087 non-citizens on the election rolls of Orange County.
The 700 or so fraudulent ballots--many of them absentee ballots--were insufficient in the final analysis to overturn the election. But the issue of Sanchez's right to be seated dragged on for several years both in the House of Representatives and with the California Secretary of State's office, until the Republican House, to avoid further political damage with Hispanic voters, quashed any further investigation and denied Dornan the seat.
The above example is, of course, a case of out-and-out election fraud, not the customary misrepresentation and ethnic-group pandering that is legally permissible (although ethically questionable) under our sloppy election laws. For example, to take advantage of the changing demographics of the 46th Congressional District due to influx of Hispanic immigrants, Loretta Sanchez was legally able to revert to her Hispanic-sounding maiden name, rather than use her more Anglo-sounding married name, on the ballot.
The Motor Voter law has made fraudulent registration especially easy to commit (and hard to catch). An excerpt from the California Secretary of State's "Election Fraud Handbook" is an eye-opener for those who think that the cleanliness of our voting process is as meticulously insured as is our payment of taxes.
Question: I went to get my driver’s license and they asked me if I wanted to register to vote. You don’t have to be a citizen to get a California driver’s license. Isn’t it likely that lots of non-citizens are registering to vote at the DMV?
Answer: The National Voter Registration Act (Motor Voter) requires the Department of Motor Vehicles and certain social services agencies to offer their customers the opportunity to register to vote. The registration forms are highlighted, as are the instructions, to point out the necessity of being a U.S. citizen in order to be eligible to register. (EC § 2150) [Election Code--Ed.] If DMV has documentation from the applicant that indicates non-citizenship, employees are instructed to remind the applicant of the legal requirements and also make a notation on the card for the elections official to investigate. In addition, the Secretary of State’s Office has developed an official working relationship with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to check their files to ensure that non-citizens are not included on the voter registration files. [Our emphasis--Ed.]
The effectiveness of DMV admonitions is open to question, given that a group of DMV workers was caught recently selling driver's licenses to illegal immigrants (getting a driver's license is often the first step in establishing a false identity in the United States). As is the Secretary of State's "working relationship" with an overburdened, understaffed and badly managed INS--especially when civil rights and immigrant rights groups are poised to jump on even the slightest suggestion of "voter intimidation" or "violation of privacy." That's what happened when Bill Jones (Calif. State Secretary) sought to do a more thorough investigation of Orange County election rolls in the Sanchez-Dornan case.
There are other opportunities for abuse as well, some evidently perfectly "legal." For example, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement for Colored People) has been drumming up voters in the nation's county jails, having registered 11,000 prisoners at last count. It appears that in many states, California included, "jailbirds" are eligible to vote--by absentee ballot, of course--even though incarcerated, provided they are not serving time or on parole for a felony. It is easy to imagine what effect prison gangs and other pressures for en bloc voting would have on these prisoner-voters, and which party benefits primarily from this process.
All this raises a legitimate question: Of what value to the democratic processes of society is the voice of a person who hasn't played by its rules?
http://www.quivis.com/fraud.html
Despicable.