A Balancing Act in Georgia
Andy McCarthy is upset about actions taken by the Obama Administration’s Justice Department regarding voter fraud and intimidation. He is right to be. As yet, I haven’t looked into the details behind the Georgia case, but the standards they set don’t seem unreasonable on their face. I am deeply sympathetic to the impulse that no eligible voter be wrongly excluded from the ballot box, and contra Mr. McCarthy, the idea that minority voters might be disproportionately impacted by unfair standards in areas where they’ve been historically discriminated against doesn’t seem to me an anachronism.
Any system of voting that seeks to minimize disenfranchisement, however, must recognize that prohibiting an eligible voter from casting a ballot and allowing an ineligible voter to cast a ballot both have the effect of wrongly robbing a rightful voter of the influence they are due.
On the question of how best to balance these concerns, I am quite persuadable, but it seems to me that having no verification system in place is a powerful incentive to organized fraud. Isn’t there a superior compromise solution? Rather than prohibit Georgia’s verification system, for example, why doesn’t the Justice Department mandate a mechanism for reducing mistaken flags on eligible voters, and a review/appeals process that further reduces the number of people who are unfairly disenfranchised? Every system we ever adopt is going to be flawed, but the best response is surely constant intelligent tweaks that gradually diminish errors, rather than the wholesale scrapping of a system, so long as the existing system isn’t egregiously or deliberately discriminatory—and as long as it is better than nothing.
Is there a credible argument I haven’t seen that the Georgia system doesn’t meet that standard?
Superior compromise solution: allow everyone to vote, but punish fraudulent voters after the fact.
— Consumatopia · Jun 3, 06:44 PM · #
Consumatopia, I like your system, but have a couple questions.
One problem might be that if you let someone vote with a fake ID, you don’t have a good way of catching them. (Unless you detained them on their way out of the polling place, which would give rise to charges of intimidation of the other voters). A second problem is that unless your system segregates the suspect votes somehow, you can end up with fraudulent votes in the system. In the worst case, if you ended up charging 50 fraudulent voters and the election was decided by 10 votes, you would be eroding public confidence in the system.
— J Mann · Jun 3, 07:18 PM · #
The Voting Rights Act forbids election practices that have a disparate impact on minority voters. Discriminatory intent is not a factor. So the standard you suggest — “not egregiously or deliberately discriminatory” — conflicts with the law. I, for one, think the DOJ should apply the actual law and not just something you made up after thinking about this for 5 minutes.
Second, I don’t think that DOJ is empowered under the law to mandate anything, they just give a yes or no. (Note, this “preclearance” requirement only applies to states with a history of discrimination.) So, Georgia is free to go back to the drawing board and try to come up with a system that won’t disproportionately affect minorities. And if you look at the actual letter, it says that there may be acceptable alternatives and suggests that it would be useful to discuss them.
I actually do think that we should have some sort of nationwide system for voter registration and id (and for actual voting). But somehow I think that wouldn’t go over too well with the NRO crowd.
— bailey · Jun 3, 07:32 PM · #
Was there any evidence of meaningful voter fraud in Georgia—and by meaningful I mean intentional and large enough to affect an election? I doubt it.
In most cases that I know of fraud prevention schemes are designed to have a disparate impact on a certain segment of voters. I suspect that was the intent of whoever put this through in Georgia. In fact, I would bet on it even though I know nothing of this particular instance.— cw · Jun 4, 02:30 AM · #
OK. I just read Andy Macarthy’s post and all I have to say it it is heavy on ACORN and Hans von Spasky. In other words, it’s BS.
— cw · Jun 4, 02:33 AM · #
Here is a good article by Rick Hansen (someone with some actual integrity) that includes some stuff on Georgia
http://www.slate.com/id/2136776/
— cw · Jun 4, 02:39 AM · #
Thanks for that pointer, CW.
Bailey, upon reflection I think you are correct about the constraints faced by the DOJ — I object to that setup, but given the law as it stands your criticism is sound.
As it happens, I have a friend who worked pro-bono on this case, and has promised to send me additional literature on it — so I’ll revisit then.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Jun 4, 04:59 AM · #
Technically, Hasen was writing about the Georgia ID laws, which are gone, as opposed to the current issue, which is Georgia’s system to check to confirm that registered voters are actual citizens.
If you take Obama’s DOJ at its word, then DOJ believes that (1) it is possible to check for citizenship without disproportionately burdening minorities, but (2) Georgia’s system doesn’t meet the standard. I guess time will tell whether that conclusion is accurate. (Two things to watch for is whether the Obama DOJ approves any effort to check for the existence or validity of voters and/or whether they publish some “safe harbor” guidelines. It’s possible that one or both has already happened, in which case – Good for you, President Obama!)
The checks are also required by law, so I hope there is a way to do them legally, or else we are sticking the states in a Catch-22. Also, at some point, if you make clear that your state is not checking registrations for validity, I assume you will see an increase in invalid voters (underage, noncitizen, etc.) casting votes.
— J Mann · Jun 4, 02:42 PM · #
“As it happens, I have a friend who worked pro-bono on this case, and has promised to send me additional literature on it — so I’ll revisit then.”
If you are going to write about this further you have to remember that pushing fears about, and “soulutions” to, voter fraud is a tactical program of the GOP designed to win elections by supressing democratic votes. Step A is to spread disinformation about the dangers of voter fraud (step B is to pass laws that will hopefully suppress democratic votes). So I suggest you really look at a lot of different sources. It is particualry useful when looking at allegations to note if any actual arrests were made and then look at the outcomes of those arrests. I am confident you will find that almost all, if not all, allegations are made by republicans and that the vast majority are all smoke and no fire. When people are actually charged or election record discrepencies discovered, 99.9% of the time the “fraud” turns out to be error: a felon votes becasue they didn’t know they were not allowed to, or election officials make amatureish mistakes. And inevitably in these instances, the numbers of votes involved are way too small to make any difference. I think in the Milwaukee “fraud” case they charge something like 19 people. All except one was some kind of innocent error.
— cw · Jun 4, 02:47 PM · #
CW, duly noted, and if you have any particular sources to recommend, please send them along so I can be sure to consider them.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Jun 4, 03:39 PM · #
There is so much out there it’s pretty overwhelming. It is illustrative to read both sides to get a picture of what is going on—the incessant disinformation campaign and the rebuttals. Milwaukee 2004 is a good place to start becasue it seem pretty representative of all sides of the issue. Just google “Milwaukee voter fraud” and start reading. Here is the best sourced report I have found about the actual results of the various investigations. You might want to start here.
http://www.truthaboutfraud.org/pdf/TruthAboutVoterFraud.pdf
On the surface this sounds like an advocacy group pamphlet but all their claims are documented via the public record.
— cw · Jun 4, 06:08 PM · #
To a large degree CW is right the Politics of Validating Voters.
There are two undeniable facts: Democrats are well positioned to reap the benefits of a looser system, Republicans are positioned to reap the benefits of a tighter system.
Democrats cover their naked opportunism with the fig leaves of disparate impact and the right to vote. Republicans hide behind ‘voter fraud’ and the need for transparency. These are real concerns, and they are pretexts. The result is a deep mistrust, by both sides, to the arguments of the other.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable per se to suggest that voters have an affirmative duty to verify that they do, in fact, hold the right to vote — yet, that’s the position Democrats are forced to defend if we take the ‘disparate impact’ argument to its logical conclusion.
Demanding strict compliance with any universal validating procedure will have a disparate impact on the lower classes (and therefore minorities). Distributive asymmetries make fee arrangements unworkable. Informational and cultural asymmetries make other arrangements unworkable. And yet, our elections need transparency to retain legitimacy.
Finally, discriminating valid from invalid votes is an IT problem. Thinking about it as an “IT problem” is the appropriate mindspace for this discussion.
— Sargent · Jun 4, 11:20 PM · #
I agree at trustworthy election system is a very good thing. But there is no reason to believe that there are organized efforts to perpetrate voter fraud at the ballot box. there is absoloutly no evidence.
And in fact this kind thing of would be very hard if not impossible to pull off on a scale large enough to affect an election. Large numbers of people would need to be involved. How many fraudulent votes would you need to guarentee an election? 2000? 5000? 10,000? Say it’s 2000. How many people would you need to fake register and then multiple vote? 50 fake voters registering and voting 40 times each? 100 registering and voting twenty times each. The organizational problems are massive and there are a huge number of ways to get caught.
Which may be why there is no evidence of organized voter fraud taking place. So there is no reason for the kinds of voter ID laws that republicans are pushing for all over the place, especially at the cost of potentially suppressing votes.
That said, I agee that some kind of ID system would be good for appearence sake and I think looking at it as a IT problem is wise. Someone needs to think up something that’s not going to suppress votes and doesn’t cost too much, since it is just cosmetic, at least at this point in time.
Speaking of IT problems, it seems to me the real sweet spot for stealing elections is in the counting.
— cw · Jun 5, 02:18 AM · #
The absence of successfully prosecuted voter fraud cases is not verification that voter fraud is a non-issue. There are a number of reasons why fraud cases are inherently difficult to prosecute. The secret ballet, an essential part of our electoral process, makes it difficult to tie a particular vote to a particular individual who professed to be that voter. The onus is on the challenger to prove that fraud has occurred. The whole business of challenging elections tends to undermine voter confidence in the system, and is considered an unacceptable cost to the country (see Nixon’s concession to Kennedy in 1960). But perhaps the greatest reason so few voter fraud cases are advanced is that the election has concluded and the parties involved or their intended beneficiaries are now in office and wielding power.
As Conor pointed out, the counting of illegitimate ballots is just as threatening to governance by the people, for the people as not counting the votes of the citizenry, or not allowing the votes of the citizenry to be caste. It is essential that our election system accomplish its goal of representing the will of the people, and must not be allowed to be subverted by special interests, or seized upon by the powerful.
— nicholas · Jun 6, 06:15 PM · #