[EL] in-person voter fraud Washington 2004 follow up

[Scarberry, Mark]

This may illustrate my point about general confidence in elections not being easily correlated with fears of particular kinds of dishonesty.

If you don’t do the easy and obvious thing that most people in the public think is a no-brainer (checking id at the polls), then what else aren’t you doing to maintain election integrity?

Are you really checking to see that the absentee ballots are legitimate? That may be harder to do than checking id at the polls, but if you don’t do it you could create a massive problem.

I don’t think most recent-vintage cars are likely to need oil added between oil changes. So, if you know your friend hasn’t checked the oil in a while, you might not worry too much about the engine seizing up due to lack of oil; but you might worry about other things. The friend has failed to do the easy, obvious, normal thing that is done to maintain a car. That might make you might wonder whether the friend gets the brakes checked regularly, or regularly checks the tire pressure, or makes sure the tires have enough tread left on them to be safe. You might then wonder whether you think it’s safe when the friend says, “What an open road. Let’s see if we can get this car up to 100 miles an hour!” Maybe close elections stress the election system like going 100mph stresses a car.

Mark

P.S. When I refer to checking id at the polls, I’m not being Freudian.

Mark S. Scarberry
Professor of Law
Pepperdine Univ. School of Law
Malibu, CA 90263
(310) 506-4667

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Thad Hall
Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2011 5:25 PM
To: Vince Leibowitz
Cc: law-election at UCI.EDU
Subject: Re: [EL] in-person voter fraud Washington 2004 follow up

If I can offer two comments that might be helpful here.  First, if you look at polling data, most people do not worry about in person voter fraud.  Instead, they are more worried about absentee voting fraud.  (There will be a VTP working paper on this in the next couple of months).  Second, in the aftermath of Washington 2004, the state changed the training requirements for examining absentee ballot signatures.  In talking with several clerks in the state, it is quite clear that most people do not know how to conduct signature comparisons, which the Washington State Police have noted in training sessions is an art, and not an easy art to learn or implement (especially by temp workers comparing several hundred signatures a day.

This part of the authentication process seems to be left out of voter ID discussions.


Thad Hall
Associate Professor, University of Utah
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