[EL] Incidents of fraud ID is designed to stop

[Hess, Doug]

It seems to me that the focus should be on fraud that has a chance of resulting in a ballot that shouldn't be cast. (Or for policy implications, fraud that could influence an election, which needs to be weighed against barriers to prevent fraud that could influence an election). For example, we know why registration forms were mailed to non-persons (lists of some kind were purchased where people had submitted a fake, or pet's, name). These didn't, on their own, generate fraudulent registrations or votes. And if they did lead to somebody submitting fraudulent registrations, that is where the focus should lie. 

I assume many errors and "guesses" are made on tax forms each year. In fact, if you look over several years of tax forms for anybody filing an even slightly complex taxes, I would bet you could find mistakes. But is it fraud? 

What about all the signatures on candidates' petitions? The rule, generally, is that you need to collect far more signatures than you need (20% or more, some say), because of the all the mistakes made. Leaving out the real possibility of many signatures being faked by those gathering them, many of the signatures were well intentioned but broke the rules. I wouldn't say that's fraud (analogous to some of your "is it fraud..." examples). 

Doug

Douglas R. Hess
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Grinnell College
Carnegie Hall #302
1210 Park Street
Grinnell, Iowa 50112
Office: 641-269-4383
http://www.grinnell.edu/users/hessdoug 

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Message: 12
Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2014 14:24:31 -0400 (EDT)
From: BZall at aol.com
To: levittj at lls.edu, law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] Incidents of fraud ID is designed to stop
Message-ID: <52936.6a16b438.4113ccde at aol.com>
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Justin knows that I respect him as a researcher and writer, but that I  
disagree with many of his characterizations and conclusions. 
 
Here, for example, is a brief that I filed in the current Kobach v EAC  
appeal, documenting, through numerous, specific video and news reports,  
"specific and credible" voter registration fraud: 
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/documents/Kobach105.pdf.  (I have repeatedly put up my 
Crawford brief dealing with voter impersonation  fraud, and Justin has 
acknowledged the incidents I documented, so I won't do  that again.) 
 
The brief illustrates the singular difference between my analyses and  
Justin's: if there is an ambiguity, no matter how small, Justin would  "bet" 
that this is the result of error, not fraud. He may be right. But  defining 
"fraud" as only an intentional attempt to deceive the system by a  person 
participating in an effort to change the outcome of an election -- which  seems 
to be what Justin tends to do -- downplays the systemic effects of such  
things as Las Vegas unions threatening illegal immigrants with deportation  
unless they vote, and so on. Was it fraud for an organization to send  
pre-populated voter registration documents to dead dogs, as was repeatedly done?  Was 
it fraud for an alien to register to vote -- before they received  
citizenship -- even if they received it afterwards? Was it fraud for an  
organization to intentionally register aliens to vote -- the Orange County  District 
Attorney reported that 61% of their voter registrations were "illegal"  -- 
even if the number who ultimately voted was not enough to sway that  particular 
election? Was it fraud to send out millions of pre-populated voter  
registration forms, counting on over-worked election officials to weed out the  
duplicates and the false ones? "It's up to [the people who receive] them to 
obey  all ... laws," Voter Participation Center's Page Gardner told the  
Washington Post. Even assuming the purest of motives doesn't make up for the  fact 
that the actions put, in the kindest of descriptions, substantial stress on 
 a system whose components rely on affirmations and signatures (see, e.g.  
InterTribal Council, upholding the EAC's decision to force states to rely 
solely  on a signature). And to say that requiring voter ID would not weed out 
dogs and  most illegal immigrants is, to put it mildly, odd. 
 
None of these "specific and credible" incidents are in dispute,  but 
Justin's characterizations make them seem as though they are negligible in  
effect. This is defining away the problem, rather than analyzing what the  problem 
is and what the consequences are. There may have been billions of votes  
cast, and the vast, vast majority may have been legitimate, but under Purcell, 
 the Supreme Court notes that the public perception of fraud in the system 
has  adverse consequences which are probably much more significant than the 
raw  numbers of those reported frauds. 
 
Of the 1.3 million voter registration applications ACORN turned in, only  
450,000 were legitimate. Reports like that, about which there is no dispute 
over  the facts, just the motivation, fuel public distrust. So saying only 31 
reports  of voter impersonation (which may be true, as defined, or even in 
the abstract)  among billions, rings hollow. Saying voter ID will not help 
either of those  problems is another "thud." 
 
If researchers are wondering about the persistence of the American public's 
 concern about fraud, it may stem from repeated attempts to tell them: 
"Nothing  happening here. Move along", when something is clearly happening. If 
the  explanation looks like minimizing the effect on public confidence, the 
research  design is flawed. And so is the Brennan advocacy-oriented website, 
which  contains only briefs that confirm their view. 
 
Barnaby  Zall