We know election day is approaching when Republicans start screaming about voter fraud, but the McCain campaign has reached a new low and the death rattle of the Republican party has entered its last violent spasm. At this week's debate John McCain accused the Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now (Acorn) of "one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy". His running mate, Sarah Palin, warned that they were trying to "steal this election". These kinds of allegations are absurd and obviously false and the McCain campaign knows it. It is McCain himself that is damaging to our democracy because it calls into question the legitimacy of our election process in a deceitful way.
Voter fraud and voter registration fraud are two different things and they are being deliberately conflated for political purposes. Voter fraud is simply bogus. Study after study, and major nationwide enforcement efforts by the department of justice and other enforcement agencies in the states have never, ever produced any evidence of anything more than a handful of cases, and I mean two or three, of actual voter fraud. The failure of many US attorneys to actually find cases of voter fraud to prosecute was the motivation for Karl Rove to push a scheme to fire nine of them and the resulting scandal ultimately led to attorney general Alberto Gonzalez's resignation.
Voter registration fraud is real, but the kinds of allegations about Acorn are actually frauds perpetrated on Acorn and not the political process. Organisations that engage in voter registration drives are required by law to submit every registration form that they receive, no matter how obviously fraudulent the information. That law is in place as an extremely important protection for the process so that organisations are not able to go on a mass registration drive and then throw out all the Republican registrants or Democratic registrants before they submit the forms to the state government. They have a responsibility to flag those forms that they believe are fraudulent or invalid, but they cannot disqualify them on their own. For example, Acorn goes and registers 100,000 people in Ohio out of which they identify 5,000 registration forms that are clearly phony that they flag, but they have to turn them in anyway. Then Republicans go around spreading malicious stories about Acorn turning in thousands of fraudulent registrations, but they know Acorn is required by law to turn them in and they know that those registrants will never be added to the voter rolls.
Acorn is uniquely susceptible to these kinds of problems because it engages in the questionable practice of paying its organisers by the number of people they register. I can understand why they do this – to give unemployed or low-income people a paying job – but it opens them up to fraud perpetrated on them by paying for sham registrations. They believe that the multi-layered system of first flagging questionable registration forms and then having the voting agencies provide further checks is adequate protection against actual fraudulent registrants ending up on the voter rolls and the benefits of helping these people earn a living outweigh these risks.
The reason why voter registration fraud does not lead to actual voter fraud is that voter fraud is hard and voter registration fraud is usually very transparent. The charges flying around right now – people registering as Mickey Mouse, or a guy filling out 73 registration forms – are simply not credible as voter fraud. It would require us to believe that an election board would place Mickey Mouse on the rolls and poll workers would then allow someone to vote who is claiming to be Mickey Mouse, or to allow the same person to vote numerous times. That is just ridiculous and impossible to imagine occurring in the real world.
For systemic voter fraud to occur, the organisers of such an effort would need hundreds if not thousands of people to participate in a massive conspiracy to show up at the polls claiming to be someone else (a felony) who had been fraudulently registered and placed on the rolls, they will often now need to have a government issue photo ID with that other person's information (another felony), then actually vote for the chosen candidate in a secret ballot, and then keep this massive clandestine conspiracy hidden in the face of numerous investigations designed to uncover that very situation. It's even harder for systemic mail-in voting fraud because the ballots can only be mailed to each voter's registered address meaning that hundreds of households would need to be part of this conspiracy that adds mail fraud to its list of felonies. It's more likely that Mickey Mouse would be allowed to vote than systemic voter fraud to occur undetected.
Republican officials know this. They know that this election cycle has seen an unprecedented surge in new voter registrations and that those registrations have been disproportionally Democratic. They are raising the spectre of imaginary voter fraud to further their efforts to disqualify a large number of those registrations through cumbersome requirements that elections boards cannot complete by November 4 to fix a problem that does not exist. It is a deliberate effort to delegitimise both their probable defeat and, combined with despicable efforts to portray Obama as a supporter of terrorism, an Obama presidency. Should Obama win, a large percentage of the country will think that he is a terrorist supporter who conspired to steal the election, that will present a real governing problem for Obama. The reason they will believe that outrageous suggestion is that the Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates have told them it is true. This from the man who claims to put country first.
