Category Archives: fraudulent fraud squad

Some of those in the fraudulent fraud squad like to call those, like me, who (correctly) argue that impersonation voter fraud is virtually nonexistent “vote fraud deniers.” Here’s an example of the language in a new John Fund column.

As I make clear in The Voting Wars, election crimes (including voter fraud) happen.  It is a relatively small problem relative to the number of votes cast.  When it happens, it tends to involve absentee ballot fraud, and sometimes other things like election officials cooking the books and, as John Fund’s column notes, double voting in two states.  (This is one of the reasons I favor federal voter administration with a national id card and unique voter i.d. number to prevent double voting between states.)

The primary kind of fraud which a state voter id law would prevent is voter impersonation fraud, and that, as I’ve explained ad nauseam, is really a non-problem.  Making this claim doesn’t make me a “vote fraud denier.”  It makes me a denier of the possibility of significant in person voter fraud.

How rare is it?  We’ve been down this road before, but here’s a nice graphic from News21, which did a comprehensive survey of district attorneys across the country over the last 10 years, finding 491 cases of absentee ballot prosecutions and 10 cases of impersonation fraud, none connected to the other.  Check out this graphic from News 21 (look at the way down to find impersonation fraud):

Here.

Rob Richie traces the ever-evolving TTV report. It begins:

Yesterday I helped my colleague Andrea Levien expose on the FairVote blog that True the Vote — an organization that purports to be dedicated to reducing voter fraud and has been the subject of much controversy for its methods — had cooked numbers on voter turnout in a February 27th report that featured its findings on the effect on voter turnout of voter ID laws and other election changes allegedly meant to reduce voter fraud.

True the Vote in its original report concluded that these new laws not have an adverse impact on turnout and may have led to increased turnout. They began the report with highlighted statistics, including two relating to turnout:

• 6.2 percent: The average increase of voter turnout in states with “strict” voter ID laws.
• 72 percent: The rate of voter turnout in Georgia, home of the strictest voter ID law — up from 62 percent in 2008

But these statistics were absolutely wrong. If you go to the report now as of noon on Friday, March 1st (important to clarify, as the report has been edited twice today and may be again), you won’t find any reference to turnout. You also won’t see any apology or explanation for the deletions, despite those findings being trumpeted on such websites such as Breitbart’s Big Government, which on February 27 published an article reporting that:

“True the Vote’s report demonstrated that in almost every state with some form of photo ID requirement, voter turnout improved from 2008.”Georgia is known to have the ‘strictest’ photo requirement in the nation,” Engelbrecht continued. “In two consecutive general election cycles the state has seen increases in voter turnout. This is more evidence that voter confidence and turnout rise together, thanks to photo voter ID.”

In fact, the report’s authors made a huge methodological mistake. They compared turnout of eligible voters in 2008 to turnout of registered voters in 2012. Because many people are not registered to vote, turnout of registered voters is almost always higher than turnout of eligible voters. (The only exception would be if a state has more registered voters than eligible voters, as in fact can happen in some states like Alaska due to our antiquated approach to voter registration.)

Correcting this error in fact reverses True the Vote’s findings. All but one of the states with new voter ID laws experienced a decline in voter turnout, and most experienced a decline greater than the national turnout decline from 2008 to 2012.

NPR: “To those who closely follow the voter ID wars, Hans von Spakovsky is a household name, one of the nation’s leading crusaders against voter fraud, and also one of its more controversial. Days before the 2012 election, The New Yorker profiled him as ‘the man who has stoked fear about imposters at the poll.’ So it was news that von Spakovsky, a Republican lawyer and scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation, failed to get a second term on the electoral board of Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest county, despite being the top choice of the county’s Republican Party.”

See here.

So reports Not Larry Sabato (via Maddow). Apparently an unprecedented judicial rejection of a party’s choice for the board.

Maybe the judges read Jane Mayer?

UPDATE: The judges were directed by Democrats to the Jane Mayer article and more about him.

Read this:

A Hamilton County Board of Elections hearing on Friday into possible vote fraud last November produced no Perry Mason moments but plenty of evidence of voter confusion – not over for whom to vote, but how to vote…

The case of Veronica Stearns, a 51-year-old Springfield Township voter, was typical of those heard Friday. Stearns acknowledged having cast an absentee ballot and then also voting a second time at her polling place on Election Day.

Stearns said she became concerned when a postal worker told her mother that absentee ballot envelopes without two stamps – hers had only one – would not be delivered. (In fact, the post office’s policy is to deliver such ballot envelopes, with boards of elections picking up the additional postage cost, said board member Caleb Faux.)

“The post office told my mom my vote wouldn’t be counted,” she said.

When she went to her polling place on Election Day, Stearns said, workers who she told that she already had voted absentee allowed her to cast a provisional ballot – the proper procedure.

Provisional ballots are cast when there is a question over a voter’s eligibility, often after a move, a name change or in cases when it is unclear whether a requested absentee ballot has actually been cast. After officials sort out the matter, they decide which, if any, of a voter’s ballots to count.

In instances in which both an absentee and Election Day ballot have been cast, the vote counted usually is the first one cast – the absentee….

Of course, some real voter fraud does occur including in Hamilton County. But don’t turn a very small problem into an epidemic of fraud.

Rush Limbaugh weighs in on Shelby County and voter registration modernization.

New York Times, Clout Diminished, Tea Party Turns to Narrower Issues:

Grass-roots leaders said this month that after losing any chance of repealing the national health care law, they would press states to “nullify” or ignore it. They also plan to focus on a two-decade-old United Nations resolution that they call a plot against property rights, and on “fraud” by local election boards that, some believe, let the Democrats steal the November vote.

But unlike the broader, galvanizing issues of health care and the size of the federal government that ignited the Tea Party, the new topics seem likely to bolster critics who portray the movement as a distraction to the Republican Party….

Billie Tucker, an activist with the First Coast Tea Party in Florida, said she and others suspected that corruption on local election boards had led to Mr. Obama’s victory in the state. Activists want to investigate.

“Some people say it’s just a conspiracy theory, but there’s rumbling all around,” she said. “There’s all kinds of data, and no one’s talking about it, including, hello, the mainstream media.”

More on Election Trutherism.

TPM reports.

WaPo reports.

Yes this is the county where von Spakovksy is on the elections board.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports.

WaPo‘s Robert McCartney: “A political and legal tussle is gaining force in Northern Virginia over guaranteeing a fair vote on Election Day. Fairfax County Democrats are complaining that Republican-appointed county elections officials are breaking or twisting some rules to help the GOP in the biggest jurisdiction in a key swing state….Democrats also worry that the process could be tainted because some top officials in the Republican-controlled county election apparatus have records as aggressive GOP partisans. In particular, Hans von Spakovsky, who is vice chairman of the Fairfax Electoral Board, is one of the nation’s most prominent advocates of voter identification laws strongly opposed by Democrats.”

Front-page, must-read extensive NYT article on “True the Vote.”  It begins:

It might as well be Harry Potter’s invisible Knight Bus, because no one can prove it exists.

The bus has been repeatedly cited by True the Vote, a national group focused on voter fraud. Catherine Engelbrecht, the group’s leader, told a gathering in July about buses carrying dozens of voters showing up at polling places during the recent Wisconsin recall election.

“Magically, all of them needed to register and vote at the same time,” Ms. Engelbrecht said. “Do you think maybe they registered falsely under false pretenses? Probably so.”

Weeks later, another True the Vote representative told a meeting of conservative women about a bus seen at a San Diego polling place in 2010 offloading people “who did not appear to be from this country.”

Officials in both San Diego and Wisconsin said they had no evidence that the buses were real. “It’s so stealthy that no one is ever able to get a picture and no one is able to get a license plate,” said Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin agency that oversees elections. In some versions the bus is from an Indian reservation; in others it is full of voters from Chicago or Detroit. “Pick your minority group,” he said.

The buses are part of the election fraud gospel according to True the Vote, which is mobilizing a small army of volunteers to combat what it sees as a force out to subvert elections. Ms. Engelbrecht’s July speech in Montana was titled “Voter Fraud: The Plot to Undermine American Democracy.”

Doug Chapin:

Judging only by actions, it would appear that these officials consider voter fraud to be a serious threat along the lines of smallpox – a highly contagious, lethal disease – and thus are willing to tolerate a high number of false positives in order to isolate and “cure” the true positives and protect the rest of the population from an epidemic. Opponents of these efforts can (and already have) suggested that such fears are overblown; in essence, that voter fraud is an isolated disease with a low degree of contagion.

Rush Limbaugh transcript.

WSJ’s “The Numbers Guy” tackles the extent of voter impersonation fraud.  The piece ends: “One rare point of agreement among most experts: Absentee-ballot fraud is a far bigger problem than voter-impersonation fraud—about 50 times more common, says News21—and voter-ID laws won’t stop it.”

Elections in the Hands of the Partisan and Incompetent.

Yesterday: The Fake Voter Fraud Epidemic and the 2012 Election.

This item appears at The Plum Line (WaPo).

Byron York column for Washington Examiner.  I don’t have time for a full response now, but you need to view everything von Spakovsky and Fund skeptically. On the allegations of Minnesota Majority in Coleman-Franken (discussed in detail in The Voting Wars), see these posts, especially this one, a guest post from Michael McDonald.

Update: On von Spakovsky’s veracity problems, see von Spakovsky stonewalling me on the 1984 grand jury report which supposedly proves voter fraud:

http://electionlawblog.org/?p=19560

And here are more reasons to think he’s not credible:

See here, here, here and here.

More about him in the “Fraudulent Fraud Squad” chapter of my new book, The Voting Wars.

http://www.amazon.com/Voting-Wars-Florida-Election-Meltdown/dp/0300182031/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1329286945&sr=1-2-catcorr