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“Broken Elections, Stolen Votes” — Podcast |
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It’s been almost eight years since President George W. Bush took home an election that some Americans still think of as “stolen.” In the fourth part of our Buying of the President series, the Center for Public Integrity investigates how campaigns can manipulate electoral results. I’m Bill Buzenberg, the Center’s executive director.
In close elections, campaigns have ways of getting around the “one person, one vote” principle. For most of American history, the strategy was to add to a candidate’s ballot count by any means necessary.
Susan Q. Stranahan: Historically, the activities have ranged from voters voting multiple times in different locations to give their candidate a boost, to phonying up ballot counts, to voting dead people, to falsifying absentee ballots.
Journalist Susan Stranahan covered election fraud for the Center for Public Integrity’s Buying of the President 2008 project. She says that modern elections are stolen by preventing voters from casting ballots.
Stranahan: More recently, there have been allegations that elections have been quote-unquote stolen by preventing voters from casting their ballots, to not counting votes cast, or even intimidating voters from choosing the candidates of their choice.
In 2000, these allegations centered on vote counting and faulty ballot design in florida. In 2004, accusations of voter suppression grew from reports of long lines at minority precincts. This year, laws meant to root out voter fraud are attracting the most attention.
Stranahan: Indiana enacted what is regarded as the most restrictive voter identification law in the country, which requires photo identification. Earlier this year the Supreme Court upheld that law, saying the requirement was not burdensome. But the court was deeply divided on the issue, in terms of its logic. Despite dire warnings, however, the 2008 primary in Indiana did not produce large numbers of disenfranchised voters.
Justin Levitt, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice, has studied voter fraud. While Indiana’s law might not have caused problems yet, he says that restrictive voter ID laws address a problem that doesn’t actually exist.
Justin Levitt: The incidence of impersonation at the polls, the only problem that requiring a photo ID could possibly solve is actually far less than the incidence of Americans being struck and killed by lightning.
Levitt says that voter fraud is extraordinarily rare. He found administrative errors were the source of almost all incidents of supposed “voter fraud.”
Levitt: The sorts of things that we’re talking about, double voting, voting by dead people, they make for great stories. They’re alleged to happen far more often than they actually occur. That drives policy that actually keeps real, registered, eligible citizens from being able to vote.
Almost no one who studies election fraud can say just how big a problem it is. In Washington, the Office of Civil Rights recently held a hearing about voter fraud. One commissioner asked for hard numbers about voter fraud from William Welch, a Justice Department official. He didn’t have any. When asked about extent of election fraud schemes that don’t come to light, Welch replied:
William Welch: It is extremely difficult to quantify or give an estimate on what the scope is…
And non-citizen voting?
Welch: “I really cannot give you an estimate of how small or how large it is.”
What about prosecutions of voter fraud? Don’t they indicate the dimension of this problem?
Welch: I don’t think anyone can quantify the problem through simply looking at criminal convictions and trying to equate the scope of the problem with the number of convictions.
This information vacuum is one reason why arguments about election fraud quickly become polarized, partisan arguments. Justin Levitt, the Brennan Center lawyer, likes to tell a story that demonstrates how politicians exploit the issue for political gain. The story is set in Texas, during a high-pitched battle over a restrictive voter ID provision.
Levitt: There was a quote in the Houston Chronicle by a gentleman named Royal Massett, former political director of the Republican Party of Texas. He said, “We take it on faith, as an article of faith, that voter fraud is costing us elections.” I don’t believe that, but I do know that restrictive photo ID requirements could cost legitimate Democratic voters about three percent at the polls.
These ID laws are, of course, legal. But plenty of election practices that were once legal are now scorned. Jim Crow laws, for instance, or laws restricting the franchise to white property owners. Some of our most respected statesmen engaged in vote buying. Again, reporter Susan Stranahan.
Stranahan: Election tampering has a rich history in the United States, and so does vote buying. George Washington spent almost 40 pounds to supply rum and beer to his supporters when he ran for the Virginia House of Burgesses back in 1758. Even then, he worried that he’d spent with too sparing a hand, but he won. Then in 1777, his fellow Virginia James Madison balked at “swilling the planters with bumbo unquote,” and he lost.
Nowadays, Stranahan says, there are other ways that money can influence election outcomes.
Stranahan: Money can pay for lawyers, it can pay for demonstrators, it can pay for media advisors, it can pay for campaign appearances. Money buys time, it buys airtime, it buys media time, and it buys time to challenge election results, to put poll watchers in place, to do all sorts of things that would alter or at least affect the way votes are cast in this country.
In 2000, these sorts of strategies fed the post-election mayhem in Florida. One incident, known as the Brooks Brothers riot, had a direct effect on the recount. A group of well-dressed protestors gathered at the Miami-Dade recount office and agitated until the election officials stopped counting the votes.
Stranahan: It looked, initially just like a citizen protest, but not long thereafter it became known that the protestors outside the election office had been in essence congressional staffers that had been flown in by the Republicans. The aides had been flown down and basically positioned themselves outside of the election office to mount quote-unquote a protest. It wasn’t a local, it wasn’t spontaneous, it was pretty well manufactured to affect the decision to proceed with the count.
One of the difficulties of preventing election fraud is that no one can predict when or where it might happen. There’s a special premium on having this election go smoothly. Historically, election manipulation has had racial overtones, and with Barack Obama as the first African-American presidential candidate, any allegations of fraud would cut especially deep.
One Democratic commissioner at the Office of Civil Rights hearing, Michael Yaki, spoke to this sentiment:
Michael Yaki: If there is any doubt, if there is any issue of barriers to voting by African-Americans in this country in this election, this nation will have extreme difficulties dealing with that in its aftermath. . . . “We’ve gotta get it right. Democratic, Republican, liberal, conservative, left, right, independent, whatever – we’ve got to get it right this time.
For the Center for Public Integrity, I’m Bill Buzenberg.
For more on this story, and to read the rest of our series, visit our website at publicintegrity.org. Sarah Laskow is the producer for this podcast series.
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