Lorraine C. Minnite - The Myth of Voter Fraud

In late 2001, David Callahan of the research and advocacy organization Demos asked me to conduct a study of voter fraud. After the 2000 election and calls for election reform, he and Miles Rapoport, Demoss president and a former Connecticut legislator and secretary of state, astutely saw the need for an empirical examination of the basis for claims about voter fraud that were shaping the policy debate. I am grateful to them and to Demos for giving me the opportunity to begin the research that led to the writing of this book.

Later, in 2006, Mike Slater at Project Vote asked me to write a report on voter fraud that drew on the research for this book. I thank him for his Midwestern optimism and get-up-and-go, and most of all for his deep commitment to an inclusive democracy.

My greatest scholarly debts are to Frances Fox Piven and Chandler Davidson. This book would not have been written without Francess intellectual influence and also her gift of friendship. Chandler patiently prodded me to better develop the empirical basis for my claims, and his mentoring has made this a better book. Any shortcomings in the area of research design, of course, are my own.

My association with election reformers and voting rights advocates has convinced me of the value and integrity of engaged scholarship. At Demos, I thank David Callahan, Steve Carb, Allegra Chapman, Stuart Comstock-Gay, Lisa Danetz, Regina Eaton, Scott Novakowski, Miles Rapoport, Tim Rusch, Tova Wang, and Brenda Wright for their expertise and friendship. At the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, Justin Levitt, Myrna Perez, Jennifer Weiser, and Wendy Weiser provoked me to extend my research by inviting me to participate in litigation. At Project Vote, I benefitted from the work and camaraderie of Doug Hess, Jody Herman, Teresa James, Nicole Kovite, Brian Mellor, Estelle Rogers, and Mike Slater. Lillie Coney, at the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Eleanor Smith, counsel to the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights shared documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act while I waited for the Justice Department to respond to my own public records request.

Many in the voting rights community know Carnegie Corporation U.S. Democracy Program Director Geri Mannion as a dedicated advocate of civic engagement and democratic reform. The financial support Carnegie provided freed me for a semester of the gratifying but demanding job of teaching Barnard undergraduates. Indeed, Barnard College provided a congenial setting to carry out this project. I am especially grateful to Provost Liz Boylan for her support through a family crisis and beyond, and to the many students who assisted with my research: Liz Aloi, Josh Bardavid, Nadia Bulkin, Cecila Culverhouse, Elizabeth Kraushar, Vanessa Perez, Julia Richardson, Christopher Ro, and Iris Rodriguez.

Scores of election administrators, public officials, lawyers, activists, scholars, and journalists set aside time to share their knowledge with me. I am enormously grateful for their willingness to take my calls, meet with me, answer my queries, provide data, comment on my work, or help in other ways. And spirited debate about voter fraud with an eclectic community of election junkies, law professors, political scientists, advocates, and reformers of every political stripe who populate Rick Hasens election law listserv has helped sharpen my arguments.

Lastly, I want to thank the editors at Cornell University Press and anonymous reviewers whose comments improved the final version of this book. I am especially grateful to Peter Wissoker for his early enthusiastic response to my book proposal. To my family and friends, especially Cyndi and Steve, Barbara, Jennifer, Adrienne, David, and Manny, I hope you know how appreciative I am of your love, support, and forbearance.

Chapter 1

The 2000 presidential election was a watershed event. The candidate with the most votes lost and the Supreme Court decided the winner. Interest in the deadening minutiae of election administration, never before a subject deserving of so much spilled ink, captured the attention of the public, the press, and academiaand remarkably continues to do so. Blue-ribbon commissions to study the challenges of election administration were convened and reports issued. Thousands of pages of congressional testimony were generated by the hearings and floor debates that led to the passage of the landmark Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) dealing with the national electoral infrastructure. Thousands more were added with hearings on a panoply of election administration topics such as what went wrong in Ohios 2004 election, election contingency plans, military and overseas voting problems, noncitizen voting, and the National Voter Registration Act. Interest in election law, a subject once about as sexy as patent law, has exploded and the field has suddenly earned some respectability, with academic centers, institutes, and journals all its own. Ideas percolate and debaters hold forth in chatrooms, Internet communities, blogs, and listservs that populate this arcane field with thousands of amateurs and experts of every stripe, computer whizzes and cyber sleuths, retired government employees and velvet glove revolutionaries. Millions of dollars in foundation money have been poured into think tanks to fund studies on things such as residual ballots and lost votes, voting technology and software code, and Internet voting and absentee ballots, but also a modular voting architecture (FROGS), vertical proximity effects in the California recall election, security vulnerabilities and problems with VVPT [Voter Verifiable Paper Trail], and rational and pluralistic models of HAVA implementation.

And there has been another curious development. With so much public, media and scholarly interest in election administration, the issue of election fraud, an obsession of reformers and muckrakers in a bygone era, returned to the fore. How could it not? On the one hand, many watching the theater of the Florida recount, with the Brooks Brothers Riot of Republican congressional staffers shutting down the count in Miami and Republican lawyers shutting down the count in the hallowed chambers of the Supreme Court, concluded that the election had been stolen. For others, there were plenty of examples of the rules not being followed or perhaps not being bent in the right direction. Concerns ranged from felons illegally voting, to Democratic ballot count observers eating chads, In the case of overseas military absentee ballots that lacked postmarks or did not comply with the rules in other ways, Bush operatives wanted the ballots counted anyway. To not do so would disfranchise patriotic soldiers and sailors.

The clamor over epidemics of voter fraud breaking out all over began to build. In 2002, the razor-thin majority control of the U.S. Senate by the Democrats was at stake. Heading into election day, at least eight Senate racesin Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and South Dakotawere considered too close to call. In a number of these states, minority voters possessed the potential to determine electoral outcomes. The perceived Democratic advantage among these voters led to a pattern of campaign practices in key races in which the Democrats attempted to turn out their vote through registration drives, bounty programs, and transportation schemes to get voters to the polls, whereas the Republicans prepared task forcesteams of lawyers and volunteer poll watchersto root out what they were convinced was fraud endemic to the Democrats efforts and the electoral process itself.