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* NOVEMBER 1, 2008
Essay Will This Election Be Stolen? As both parties battle over just
how fraud could taint this election, two analysts with very different
viewpoints look at voting abuses from the beginning of the republic to
the present day. By MARK CRISPIN MILLER
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* The GOP's attack on the integrity of voters, carried out by party
leaders -- a sitting president included -- on the eve of an election, is
unprecedented.
[[Stop Voter Disenfranchisement]]
The day after John McCain charged the community-based organization Acorn
(Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) with planning
"one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country," Sarah
Palin told a boisterous crowd in Bangor, Maine: "In this election, it's
a choice between a candidate who won't disavow a group committing voter
fraud, and a leader who won't tolerate voter fraud."
Soon George Bush leaped into the furor over "voter fraud," asking the
Department of Justice to determine whether some 200,000 newly registered
Ohio voters should have their identities confirmed. (The Supreme Court
had refused that measure; and former Justice Department lawyers claim
that the probe requested by the president may violate department
policy.)
View Full Image
[In 2000, a Floridian protests presidential election irregularities in
the state.] Associated Press
In 2000, a Floridian protests presidential election irregularities in
the state.
[In 2000, a Floridian protests presidential election irregularities in
the state.] [In 2000, a Floridian protests presidential election
irregularities in the state.] Voter Fraud [[Stop Voter Fraud]]
Will ballots be canceled or diluted by fraudulent votes cast by the
dead, noncitizens, fictitious voters, or individuals voting more than
once? Read an essay by Hans A. von Spakovsky.
Meanwhile, Ohio congressman John Boehner, House minority leader, wrote
Mr. Bush a letter noting "a significant risk, if not a certainty, that
unlawful votes will be cast and counted" in his state, where there are
now several lawsuits over the apparent threat of Democratic "voter
fraud."
Election fraud in the U.S. traces back to the beginning of elections.
There's a danger now that eligible voters will be disenfranchised by the
thousands, because of efforts to prevent a few unlawful votes. Although
the GOP's barrage of charges is unique, the apprehension of "unlawful
votes" is hardly new, recalling fears as old as the republic -- or,
indeed, even older.
The worry that the undeserving may cast votes recalls the major argument
that, in the 18th century, was used to justify strict property
requirements for all voters in America. As historian Alexander Keyssar
points out in his magisterial "The Right to Vote," those without
property were deemed incapable of voting soundly, since their dependency
would cause them to defer to those above them. And yet, as Mr. Keyssar
notes, those arguing against enfranchising the poor were just as likely
to believe not that the poor have no will of their own, but that the
poor have too much will. Give such have-nots the vote, believed John
Adams, and "an immediate revolution would ensue."
In the 18th century, such qualms were largely theoretical, as voting was
restricted to white male freeholders (or, a little later, taxpayers) in
a land of villages and farms. In any case, those contradictory
misgivings soon receded, as, at first, the busy young republic was
increasingly committed to an optimistic faith in universal suffrage.
Phones Ringing Off the Hook
With voting worries at a fever pitch, a handful of national voter
hotlines have sprung up to field the thousands of questions people have
about polling locations, absentee ballots and early voting. Read
Business Technology.
In that homogeneous society, the problem of "unlawful votes" was not a
pressing concern -- as it would be by the middle of the 19th century,
when the nation's rampant industry produced a new crop of cities,
filling up with huddled masses that Americans did not want at the polls.
There were increasing hordes of Irish Catholics, Jews, Italians, Slavs,
Chinese and other foreign workers crowded into slummy neighborhoods, and
they were often muttering of explosive creeds -- variants of socialism
and anarchism -- deeply threatening to the peace and order of the U.S.
Worse, such aliens were getting organized politically, and setting up
their own political machines, like Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall, that had
large ethnic numbers on their side. And then there was the liberated
South, where millions of black freedmen suddenly enjoyed the right to
vote, and so would shortly rule the roost (or so it seemed to many
nervous whites). "We have received an almost unlimited immigration of
adult foreigners, largely illiterate, of the lowest class and of other
races," wrote an anonymous contributor to the Atlantic Monthly in 1879.
"We have added at one stroke four millions and more of ignorant negroes
to our voting population."
Thus many white Americans, native-born, were primed to buy the tales of
massive voter fraud in every ghetto -- party hoodlums stuffing ballot
boxes, people selling votes, etc. -- even though such stories were, as
Mr. Keyssar notes, "greatly exaggerated." Such anecdotes persisted
through the decades, ultimately helping to create a sort of
counter-narrative against the history of the South, where whites had
long suppressed the black vote with appalling ruthlessness.
In tacit contradiction to that story, and especially after the passage
of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the old myth of the demonic trickiness
of urban voters (i.e., Democrats) now began to serve as propaganda for a
GOP intent on courting disaffected whites, according to "the Southern
strategy" (which started under Richard Nixon). Such lore has taught us
all about dead people turning out to vote, secret wads of
"walking-around money" and other tricks allegedly played by the
Democrats alone.
That propaganda has been most effective -- and a lot of it just happens
to be true. For example, "Landslide Lyndon" Johnson stole his first
election to the Senate in 1948, gaining his minuscule victory margin, 87
votes, through ballot fraud (an act that his biographer Robert Caro
called "brazen thievery"). Chicago's infamous Mayor Richard Daley ran
the elections there with both an iron hand and no regard for civic
probity. In 1960 he helped steal Illinois for John F. Kennedy by rigging
the election in Chicago -- where the turnout was an awesome 89%.
Such offenses were, however, not exclusively a Democratic specialty.
That year in Illinois, while Daley was doing dirty work in Chicago for
John Kennedy, the GOP in neighboring DuPage County, the state's top
stronghold of Republicans, went even further in its bid to steal the
race for Richard Nixon, since that county's turnout was a staggering
93%. (This comes from county records researched for my book "Loser Take
All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008.")
The GOP was also using phantom votes and fake addresses. In 1968, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation was looking at voter fraud in Gary,
Ind., where Richard Hatcher, a black Democrat, was running for mayor.
Agent Robert Craig spent days trying to verify the information written
out on scores of voter registration cards filed by Republicans. "Names
and addresses of 'voters' turned out to be vacant lots where there had
never been a house, or the house had been torn down years before the
'person' was registered," Mr. Craig told me in a recent telephone
conversation. "The vast majority of the registrations I checked were
completely phony."
While both sides always used such tactics, in this century it is the GOP
that's done most to rig the vote (with little outcry from the
Democrats). In 2000, thousands of Floridians were purged illegally from
the voter rolls before Election Day, according to the sworn testimony of
George Bruder, a vice president of Database Technologies, before the
U.S. Civil Rights Commission. The vote count in Miami-Dade County was
shut down by a disturbance variously referred to as a "Brooks Brothers
riot" or "bourgeois riot," where several people were pushed and shoved
by staffers working for congressional Republicans.
Four years later, in Ohio, ballots were altered or destroyed on a
massive scale, making Mr. Bush's win there questionable, says researcher
Richard Hayes Phillips. (Officially, Bush won the state by some 118,000
votes.) The damage came to light through a three-year audit led by Mr.
Phillips of ballots from selected precincts in 18 Ohio counties (the
research is available in his book, "Witness to a Crime").
Recently, Acorn's alleged "unlawful votes" have caused a major stir.
Although resonantly charged with "voter fraud," the group has actually
been accused of voter-registration fraud -- i.e., the entry of false
information on voter-registration forms. In Acorn's case, the crime was
perpetrated by volunteers who, probably for mercenary reasons, filled
out the forms with bogus names like Mickey Mouse. Acorn itself
discovered the suspicious forms and turned them in to the authorities.
Meanwhile, the very party that is demonizing Acorn has now
disenfranchised countless voters nationwide, through a dizzying range of
tactics. Voters have been stricken from the rolls through purges
nationwide, carried out since 2004 at the behest of the Department of
Justice. (Courtrooms throughout New York State are crammed with people
trying to reclaim their right to vote.) Others have been dropped from
the electronic voter rolls, as USA Today began reporting months ago.
Further thousands have been sidelined through the tactic known as "voter
caging": the targeting of certain voters for disenfranchisement. This
tactic usually entails mailing forms to Democratic voters, in the
expectation that the addressees won't fill them out and send them in
(the envelopes are nondescript) -- and if they don't, their names are
stricken from the voter rolls. And then there are the e-voting machines.
Since early voting started recently, worried voters have reported seeing
their votes flipped from Barack Obama to Mr. McCain in West Virginia and
Texas.
It is not the failure or success of any candidate or party that most
matters but the exercise of voting rights, and, through them, our
self-government. If either team prevails despite the disenfranchisement
of some Americans, that victory will mean all that much less; and if
your favorite wins, and then the U.S. doesn't do anything to fix its
voting system (and otherwise restore this faltering democracy), that
victory of his won't matter much at all, since We the People will have
lost control for good.
New York University professor Mark Crispin Miller's latest book is
"Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy,
2000-2008."
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