[EL] More on the Voter Impersonation Fraud Case in Fort Worth

[Lori Minnite]

Sure.  My objection to biometric ID is based on two major claims:

1) Biometric ID is the wrong anti-dote to what's wrong with election 
administration.  When fraud is committed, it almost always is committed 
by people connected to conspiracies, people who have the most to gain in 
an electoral outcome, which means politicians, political operatives, 
campaign or election officials, party officials - and not the average 
voter.  Biometric ID is a policy directed at the average voter.  It's 
not like states have no laws or procedures in place to deter, prevent 
and detect fraud, though you might get this impression from what you 
read in the paper or online about voter ID.  Money spent on setting up 
procedures and developing and paying for the technology required to 
implement a policy of biometric ID would be much better spent addressing 
the much bigger problems we have in ensuring election integrity.

In a democracy, we can not have integrity in elections without full 
access to the ballot for all citizens, including people who are 
illiterate, people born in another country or whose first language isn't 
English, people who don't drive because they are too poor to own a car, 
or are too old, or don't need a car because they live in New York City, 
people we don't like and don't agree with, people who don't look like us 
or come from our same ethnic or racial group and so forth.  This concern 
causes me to focus on thinking about where the biggest problems are in 
"electoral mechanics," and my research tells me that there are two very 
large populations we should be concerned about: 1) eligible citizens who 
do not vote - we need to know to what extent the procedures we use to 
administer elections bear on this population, so here, we probably 
should focus most on barriers to registration; and 2) people who try to 
vote, but whose votes are not cast or counted.  We know that millions of 
eligible citizens don't vote; but we understand less about those people 
who want to vote, try to vote, and whose votes never make it into the 
official counts, either because they can't stand in line for an hour, 
don't know where their polling place or go to the wrong one, think they 
are registered when they are not, etc.  It seems to me that electoral 
procedures must be mostly to blame.  We haven't thought hard enough 
about this problem.  We have evidence that millions of eligible citizens 
could be better incorporated into the electorate, improving the 
integrity of electoral results, and that election administration and 
procedures are likely the biggest culprit in explaining why they are 
being excluded, and yet, we focus on "fraud" that is not fraud, on a 
minuscule (statistically zero) number of cases of persons willingly, 
deceitfully casting a fraudulent vote.

2) It's hard enough to figure out how to make sure all citizens have the 
ID they need to vote now.  Can you imagine what it would take to 
fingerprint the nation?  As I said to a friend of mine on this issue, in 
a country considering getting rid of the postal service because we don't 
want to pay for it, this seems like a daunting task.  And since 
biometric ID addresses the wrong problem, will not improve electoral 
integrity, and would cost a fortune to implement, I'm against it.

I could say more, but these are the two main points.

Lori Minnite

On 5/3/2012 2:20 PM, kfeng at commoncause.org wrote:
> I am interested in the reasons why a thumbprint or other biometric would be good/bad for policy reasons as an identifier or deterrent to the rare case of impersonation.  Lori?
> Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lori Minnite<lminnite at gmail.com>
> Sender: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu
> Date: Thu, 03 May 2012 10:50:34
> To: law-election at UCI.edu<law-election at uci.edu>
> Subject: [EL] More on the Voter Impersonation Fraud Case in Fort Worth
>
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