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It is sometimes good to read books written by those whose political views differ from ours, if for no other reason than to get a better idea of what the political opposition is thinking and saying – which can help in the development of arguments to counteract them. (However, it’s often not easy to do this because so much that is written by right wingers and sold in book stores today is so much garbage that it’s difficult to read it without feeling that it’s a colossal waste of time.) The book that I will discuss here is titled “Stealing Elections – How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy”, by John Fund. The book is a combination of: 1) Outright distortions, blatant hypocrisy and lies; 2) Information that sounds reasonable on the surface, but which I am not fully competent to judge (but which, based on the distortions and lies that I know of, is probably dangerously misleading information); 3) Maybe some good ideas, I’m not sure. Probably the best reason for posting this thread is to generate discussion and information on how best to address the arguments made in this book and others like it. Many of us are involved in arguing these issues to our Congressional representatives, and our ability to argue them depends on a full grasp of the issues. Most of the arguments made in this book seem reasonable on the surface. And I assume that most of us could benefit in our election reform efforts from becoming better able to argue these issues. This guy knows what he’s doing. The Introduction is entitled “Democracy Imperiled”, and after the first page I was very excited about the book. Here is a quote from the first page: “There is still time to reduce the chance of another electoral meltdown … But this will not happen unless we acknowledge that the United States has a haphazard, fraud-prone election system befitting an emerging Third World country rather than the world’s leading democracy”. Sounds like it could have been written by one of us, right? Well, it was all down hill from there. Hypocrisy to set the tone for the whole bookOn page 6, apparently realizing that he’s stepped over the edge, the author writes, “A note about partisanship: Since Democrats figure prominently in the vast majority of examples of election fraud described in this book, some readers will jump to the conclusion that this is a one-sided attack on a single party.” He then gives the standard disclaimer that he doesn’t consider Republicans to be inherently more virtuous than Democrats, claims that he often votes Libertarian or Independent, and then goes on to a lengthy discussion of why Democrats are much more likely to be involved in election fraud than Republicans. It is certainly true that the vast majority of examples in his book involve Democrats, which are prominently noted as such at least 100 times. Republicans may also have occasionally been mentioned in his examples, but if so it’s not clear, because not a single example involving fraud actually identifies anyone as a Republican. Lies and distortions about the Florida 2000 debacleHe devotes a whole chapter to “The Myth of the Stolen Election”, in which he explains in detail how it was actually the Gore team that was involved in most of the cheating in the 2000 election in Florida. He rebukes Democrats for “playing the racism card” for complaining about the purge of felons from the Florida voter roles, but does not even mention that tens of thousands of these purged “felons” were not felons at all, but simply close computer matches to felons. He claims that under-votes are no more common in precincts characterized by large percentages of poor and minority voters than in other precincts. He claims that complaints of confusion over Palm Beach County’s “butterfly ballot” were faked with the help of a telemarketing firm, and to explain the 19,125 discarded over-votes in Palm Beach County (which in reality included over 15 thousand votes for Gore and less than 4 thousand for Bush) he comes up with this: “I was told by two former law enforcement officers and a poll worker that they believe ballot tampering affected some Bush ballots on election night … Using a nail, pencil or other sharp device, they would take a ballot and punch out Al Gore’s name for president…” There was not a word of evidence for this crap, just a statement by three unidentified persons that this is what they believed happened. There was lots more of this kind of crap in this chapter, but this should suffice.
Dismissing the “conspiracy theories” involving DREs
In a chapter titled “High-Tech Voting”, the first paragraph notes the “biggest collection of conspiracy theories about our national elections centers around DREs …” Fund notes that part of the “paranoia” over this issue has to do with the perception that Walden O’Dell, chairman and CEO of Diebold, is a Republican stooge. He says that this perception was in part created preemptively by Democratic operatives, but he fails to note O’Dell’s infamous quote about his intention to deliver the Ohio vote to Bush in 2004.
Following some more discussion of this issue, Fund then says that former DNC Chairman Joe Andrew “ripped the bark off the ‘black box’ conspiracy theorists” by stating “When it comes to electronic voting, most liberals are just plain old-fashioned nuts”. Fund then says that Andrew goes on to impugn the knowledge of computer experts who are concerned about the potential of DREs to steal elections, and says that the hysteria by the Democratic Party over this issue is politically but not factually motivated. And he quotes Andrews’ conclusion that “it is not possible to move a constant fraction of votes from one party to another in each jurisdiction without it being obvious that something is going on.” That’s it. He dismisses the DRE “conspiracy theories” through the unsubstantiated and unexplained quotes of a single person. What Fund does not note, however, is that Andrew does PR work for Diebold.
Fund also gives an example of where a paper trail could have been used to back up the results of a DRE without even mentioning the fact that most DREs are not backed up with paper trails.
To be fair to Fund I should also note that he then continues with several pages of discussion on glitches that have been reported with various types of DREs (interesting that he uses a fraud neutral term to describe these problems, however).
Then, in the conclusion of the book he does make some suggestions for DREs that sound good to me on the surface, but for which I am not competent to judge their usefulness. These include the following:
“…election authorities should be required to have independent audits conducted of their vote tabulation systems, software and security procedures on a regular basis.”
“Independent, nonpartisan groups … should be authorized to appoint poll watchers to observe the election and vote tabulation process.”
“All vendors who supply voting machines and computer software programs should be required to undergo investigation by competent bodies of the financial solvency, security and integrity of the vendor.”
“… we should phase out central counting stations where punch cards, touch-screen or optical-scan ballots are tabulated, often requiring the ballots to be moved from one location to another before being counted.”
I don’t know how to evaluate the above proposals, especially given that there is no proposal for a paper trail. Perhaps Fund felt that after his brilliant debunking of the DRE “conspiracy theories” nobody would be very interested in the above recommendations anyhow.
Balancing the risk of “voter fraud” against the risk of voter disenfranchisement
From beginning to end, the book is filled with examples voters (all Democrats) casting votes that they should not have been allowed to cast, which Fund obviously considers to be by far the biggest threat to our election systems. In the eight chapters of the book prior to the Conclusion chapter he doesn’t even mention the possibility that over-vigorous efforts to prevent “voter fraud” can lead to voter disenfranchisement. In fact, he never mentions the possibility of voter disenfranchisement period, until in the Conclusion chapter of the book he makes some token remarks to the effect that we must make sure not to take away the right to vote from those who legitimately have that right.
I believe that it is worth while to go into this issue in some detail because voter disenfranchisement is one of the main Republican tricks (as demonstrated in Ohio, 2004), and this is generally accomplished under the guise of aggressive efforts to prevent “voter fraud”.
General issues regarding “voter fraud”
Categories of illegal voters that are repeatedly cited throughout the book include dead people, pets, people who vote more than once in the same election, felons, non-citizens, and people without addresses (several examples are given of this last category, but it is never clear whether these are simply homeless people whom Fund doesn’t think should have the right to vote, or whether there is some more substantive reason why he thinks they shouldn’t be allowed to vote).
Obviously, most of would agree that it is inappropriate for most of the categories listed above to have the right to vote. But a central question should be, “How often does ‘voter fraud’ occur, and how likely are efforts to prevent it from occurring going to cause legal voters to be effectively disenfranchised by putting overly strict conditions on their right to vote?”
I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I think that we should be conversant with this issue when arguing about it, especially to legislators. Despite Fund’s numerous examples of “voter fraud” one doesn’t get a good sense of its prevalence from reading his book, except perhaps by his inability to come up with impressive numbers (though his numbers obviously seem quite impressive to him). For example, he has a whole chapter on voter fraud in St. Louis during the 2000 election. After all the hullabaloo about this terrible disaster he tells us that an investigation of this matter revealed that 68 people had voted twice, and 14 dead people, 114 felons, 79 people without addresses (homeless?), and a pet had voted in this election. And, after a whole chapter dedicated to Democratic machine corruption in Hawaii, the major finding of the election investigation that he describes was of “543 registered voters who may have been improperly or illegally registered”! And he also dedicates a whole chapter to Democratic malfeasance in improperly chasing after the Native American vote on South Dakotan Indian Reservations, including Democratic officials paying them to vote (I have no idea how much validity there is to the claims made in that chapter, but the numbers involved were not much different than in the above noted examples.)
Absentee ballots
Fund devotes a whole chapter to the evils of absentee ballots, concluding that they should only be used when absolutely necessary, and not simply for “convenience”. He gives several trivial (IMO) reasons for not allowing absentee ballots for reasons of “convenience”, including: Voters would have to pay for postage; the ballots are paper and therefore difficult to count; people may change their mind between the time they cast their ballot and election day; and, it negates the communal feeling that people get from voting together.
However, Fund also describes a more substantive problem with absentee ballots, claiming that they are susceptible to fraud. In particular, the process bypasses normal safeguards against ineligible voters getting to vote, and it is possible that some people (especially from old age homes, etc.) may be coerced into voting. I don’t have enough knowledge of this process to effectively combat those arguments.
What to do about long lines on election day
Fund does note long voting lines in a few parts of his book, but only to complain about election officials extending voting hours, so as to enable more people to vote. Never once in all this discussion does he note the possibility that the long lines may be due to insufficient allocation of voting machines, which as we all know is an especially common occurrence in poor and minority precincts, and can result in the loss of tens of thousands of votes. And his main reason for opposing the extending of voting hours is that it represents a rule change, and it facilitates fraud (though how this facilitates fraud was quite unclear to me.)
Other things that facilitate “voter fraud” according to Fund
He is especially hostile to Clinton’s “Motor Voter Law”. He claims that it encourages “voter fraud” by requiring driver’s license bureaus to register anyone (without adequate identification), offers mail-in registration without adequate identification, forbids government workers to challenge new registrants, and makes it difficult to purge “deadwood” voters. I do not know how to evaluate these claims, so it is difficult for me to argue them.
He is adamantly opposed to same day registration, claiming that it encourages “voter fraud” and allows people to get around registration deadlines.
And he makes several complaints about election boards that maintain “inactive voters” on their lists. An inactive voter is simply a registered voter who has not voted in a while. To Fund, purging these voters helps to eliminate voter fraud, but he seems totally unconcerned about the possibility that this practice will cause these so-called “inactive voters” to be disenfranchised should they decide to vote in an especially important election but did not register on time because they were unaware that they had been purged from the voter list.
Conclusion
The types of arguments presented in this book are and will continue to be used by Republicans to attempt to enact election laws that are so aggressively aimed towards preventing voter fraud that I fear they will effectively prevent millions of voters from voting.
Many of these arguments are blatantly false and easily counteracted. But some of them I would be unable to argue effectively against because I don’t fully understand the applicable issues and historical experience. I assume that the same would apply to many of us who would read this book or others like it. In order to most effectively advocate for an election system that will provide the safeguards we need to prevent the disenfranchisement of millions of voters, we need to thoroughly understand the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments that are presented by our political opponents.
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