The right wing media and blogosphere are furiously promoting a new “study” on voter fraud by Horace Cooper, a black conservative who claims that photo ID laws and other Republican initiatives to combat virtually non-existent voter fraud help protect poor and minority voters.
Though outlets like Fox News are calling it a “study,” it’s nothing of the sort. It’s little more than an op-ed piece that lists allegations of voter fraud, most of which turn out to be pure air when they’re examined. Here’s a great example:
Then there is New Mexico, where the secretary of state recently identified over 64,000 instances – or nearly 10% of those who voted – of voter irregularities sent to the state police for investigation.
This claim demonstrates two things: Cooper’s utter lack of honesty and how the right uses these huge numbers of potential illegal votes as evidence of actual illegal votes. We’ve seen these claims all over the country. When they say “voter irregularities” what they mean is any discrepancy between the state’s Qualified Voter File and any other state database. So they find 64,000 “discrepancies” between those databases and then leap to the conclusion that there may have been 64,000 people voting illegally. OMG! That’s terrible! Yeah, it would be. But it simply isn’t true.
In fact, that same secretary of state that found those “discrepancies” released a report after examining all of them and guess what was found? More than 99.9% of them were simply clerical errors — a missing middle initial in one database compared to another, or a missing apartment number, or a new address that was updated in one database but not the other, and so forth. The end result? A grand total of 19 potential illegal votes — even those have not yet been substantiated. And none of them involved impersonating a voter at the polls, which is the only thing that photo ID laws could possibly prevent (they were all cases of someone illegally registered to vote, so they were on the voter rolls and if they showed their ID, they’d be allowed to vote even under the Republican restrictions).
And this is important: That report came out in November, 2011. Cooper’s report is dated August, 2012. So he’s still claiming 64,000 potential cases of voter fraud in New Mexico 10 months after the same person who made the initial claim of that number found that there were only 19 possible cases of actual voter fraud out of that 64,000. That tells you pretty much all you need to know about Cooper’s rigorous analysis.
Here’s another great example of the dishonesty of this “study”:
Lest we think that this sort of thing only happens on the east coast, we should remember the illegal ballots cast by an estimated 5,000 non-citizens in Colorado’s elections in 2010. Colorado’s Secretary of State reported that a state study found nearly 12,000 people registered to vote in Colorado who were not citizens and were therefore not legally eligible to vote. Of those, the state believes that perhaps as many as 5,000 voted in the 2010 general election.
Almost all of this is false. As Justin Levett points out, what the Colorado study actually showed was that 11,805 people were registered to vote who had not been eligible to vote at the time they got their driver’s license. But all but 11,699 of those people had registered to vote long after they got their driver’s license, often many years later. You don’t have to be a citizen to get a driver’s license, of course, so it’s not evidence of anything that someone who was not a citizen when they got their license would be a citizen, and therefore eligible to vote, when they later register to vote. In fact, during the same time frame that this state study covered, more than 32,000 Colorado residents became American citizens. It would hardly be a surprise if 1/3 of those who became citizens during that time period registered to vote after having earlier received a driver’s license.
The more you examine these claims of voter fraud, the more obvious it becomes that it is virtually non-existent. And the Republicans resort to these kinds of obvious distortions to justify policies that could disenfranchise millions of poor and minority voters. But that’s a feature, not a bug.
Talking Points Memo also points out that Cooper has a serious credibility problem himself. He was one of the staffers convicted of falsifying disclosure reports to cover up illegal gifts from Jack Abramoff, a charge to which he pleaded guilty.
18 comments
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Michael Heath
August 8, 2012 at 12:13 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I voted yesterday here in Michigan. I had to fill out a voter card asserting I was a citizen. I also had to give them my driver’s license which now has a magnetic strip on the back which they scanned to verify who I was prior to handing me a ballot. I didn’t realize we’d passed a voter ID law in Michigan until I went through this process yesterday.
I passively went through it because it didn’t really hit me until after I voted what had just happened. It made feel like shit.
Jordan Genso
August 8, 2012 at 12:19 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I have a new idea for a reality show:
We take wingnuts (from both sides, to be “fair and balanced”), and present them with factual evidence that disproves their claims, and record their reactions & justifications. I think we could dominate in the psychologist demographic, which would have to generate better numbers than most of the crap that’s on TV.
I say this only because I would love to watch Horace Cooper try to justify his position once he is presented with what Ed wrote.
I imagine the fatal flaw to this show is that it would be incredibly difficult to get people to willingly participate. Oh well. It’s worth a shot.
Jordan Genso
August 8, 2012 at 12:25 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Michael Heath.
What’s really bullshit is that the voter ID laws didn’t pass. The governor vetoed the bills, but the Republican Secretary of State doesn’t care, and she is enacting the legislation regardless.
Do I care about the “Are you a citizen?” question on the ballot? Not really, but it’s again just a part of the conservative plan to discourage certain demographics from voting (like new citizens, who may misunderstand the question), and so it shouldn’t be there.
I would love to ask someone who is in favor of having that question on the ballot if they would also support including the question “Are you a homo sapien?” and invalidate the ballots of anyone who refuses to answer or answers ‘no’. To me, there is no difference between the legitimacy of the questions, since non-homo sapiens are not legally allowed to vote.
hexidecima
August 8, 2012 at 12:29 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
doubling down on lies. Expected. So much for their pious prating about how much they respect some god that hates lies and liars.
Area Man
August 8, 2012 at 12:47 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“But all but 11,699 of those people had registered to vote long after they got their driver’s license, often many years later.”
I think the “all but” doesn’t belong here. Unless you’re saying that only 106 people registered to vote long after they got their drivers license.
gshelley
August 8, 2012 at 12:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Don’t you have to be 18 to register to vote? And younger than that to get a driver’s licence? Wouldn’t there be people with a driver’s license who weren’t eligible to vote when they got it because they weren’t old enough, but by the time of the election, had had their eighteenth birthday? Are these people accounted for?
wscott
August 8, 2012 at 12:55 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I read something the other day (can’t find it now) about a study claiming several hundred felons had illegally voted in the 2008 Minnesota election (Franklin-Coleman). Smelled like BS at the time, but I didn’t have time to follow up. Same study?
fifthdentist
August 8, 2012 at 12:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Yes, it protects the poor and minorities from voting their consciences and for the candidate they think best represents them.
Michael Heath
August 8, 2012 at 1:36 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Jordan Genso asks rhetorically:
After I was driving away from the polling site my reaction was that I cared; primarily because I perceived that question as validation the MI government was now being administrated by racists with the intention of discriminating against non-white citizens.
I had no idea the Sec. of State was executing policy which was rejected by the legislative process. You’d think that’d be big news in this state but what I went through yesterday and what you assert here is the first time I’ve encountered both.
Jordan Genso
August 8, 2012 at 1:55 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@Michael Heath
Agreed. The question being there is evidence of conservatives pushing bad policies under the guise of “common sense”, and most of the public not realizing that the policies are instead designed to harm the democratic process. There is no benefit to having that question there, just as there’d be no benefit to asking people if they are homo sapiens, but they don’t need to identify their policies’ benefits if they can instead accuse those that are against their policy of being in favor of letting non-citizens vote.
You would think that, but because no one wants to be accused of being in favor of letting non-citizens vote, very few are willing to actually make noise about it.
A good friend of mine got his absentee ballot in the mail, and it had that question. He mailed in his vote without answering it. When the clerk contacted him to tell him he needed to answer the question, or his vote wouldn’t count, my friend explained that the legislation that required that question be on the ballot was vetoed. The clerk looked into it, and said that the ballots were designed/ordered before the legislation was vetoed, and so it’s too late to change them and get the question off them (even for the November election, even though we didn’t know which names would be on those ballots until today), and the SoS office is ordering the clerks to still require the question be answered.
As for the other parts of the legislation that was vetoed, I don’t believe much of it was enacted. For instance, you still could’ve voted yesterday without your license, but you would have had to sign an affadavit of identity (the same it has been for a while) and your signature would’ve acted as your proof of identity (that’s why they make you sign twice when you register to vote, to get multiple copies of your real signature to compare against in case you don’t have ID later on).
Ed Brayton
August 8, 2012 at 2:17 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Michael and Jordan:
More information on the citizenship question and Sec. of State Ruth Johnson’s actions here.
flex
August 8, 2012 at 2:31 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Michael Heath wrote,
For the record, the voter card you filled out has been in place for quite awhile, decades. It is held by the clerk’s office against challenges. It contains your name, street address, signature, and the number of your ballot. If a challenge occurs, this card is used to determine your eligibility to vote, and only if your vote was determined to be void would the ballot itself be pulled.
No, our voting system has never been entirely anonymous, and a little reflection will show you that it cannot be without far greater risk of serious fraud. Keeping the voter card which connects the voter with the ballot until the ballot is turned in, and then physically separating the two, greatly reduces the opportunity for a ballot to be linked to an individual. It is still a secret ballot, but there is trace-ability should that secrecy need to be broken.
As far swiping the driver’s license goes, Michigan started using a driver’s license ID system several elections ago. Not all municipalities have adopted them yet, but they have been around since (IIRC) 2004. If you do not have a driver’s license you can still vote, but they have to look up your name in the voter rolls manually rather than simply using the driver’s license scanner. You are not required to have a driver’s license to vote.
The step where you are verified to be the person signing the voter card is usually performed by the person who gives you the card. You may recall that this person asked for identification. They should have looked at the signature on the identification as well as the voter card and checked that they are the same. Most people use their driver’s license for this but other ID’s like a state issued ID or a passport will work just as well. (Albeit some election workers may be confused if you use one of these as pretty much all they see are driver’s licenses.) This process has also been around for decades.
The only change to the voting procedure that I noted was that very strange check-box asking if I was a citizen. It kind of assumes that there are people who are not citizens who decide to wander into the voting area, or that there are non-citizens who are trying to vote. Since your name and address are verified against the voter roll later in the process this question at best is superfluous and at worst downright insulting.
If you have questions about how the elections are run, I would recommend talking to your local clerk’s office. The primary function of the township/county/city clerk’s office in Michigan is to run elections and they are usually happy to explain how it all works as well as what the changes are. I would caution that talking with them within a few weeks before an election may lead to some short answers, they are very busy then.
Off the record, the vast majority of the clerks in Michigan do not want voter ID laws because they know such laws will disenfranchise voters, create a lot of unnecessary work for them, and the clerks will be ones who will be blamed by the citizens. Most clerks would also prefer no-reason absentee balloting, as that also makes the work on election days much easier.
Brandon
August 8, 2012 at 2:56 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
From Ed’s link above:
That strikes me as quite similar to claims that “everyone can easily get ID”. I don’t know what the author is basing the claim that everyone knows you have to be a citizen to vote on.
d cwilson
August 8, 2012 at 3:44 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
In the US, barely half the people who are eligible to vote show up to cast ballot, even in a good year. The idea that there are hundreds of thousands of ineligible people voting is absurd.
Michael Heath
August 9, 2012 at 6:01 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I previously wrote:
flex responds:
I never claimed our voting system was previously “entirely anonymous”. My point wasn’t that I had to fill out a voter card to reconcile the ballot to my voter registration, but that it required me to assert I was a citizen. So your debating a non-existant argument here.
flex writes:
I realize this could be an FYI for all readers here, but again, this process had never been used in my township prior to last Tuesday. And given your subsequent false assertion which I note below, I’d appreciate a citation on this claim.
flex writes:
This is simply not true; this is the first time I had to pull out an ID to vote. In the past signing a voter card which was reconciled to the voting rolls was all it took. Until last Tuesday, it wasn’t true in my township where I’ve been voting since 2004, it’s not true when I voted in San Diego in the early-2000s, it’s not true in Pinellas county, FL prior to that, it’s not true in a handful of southern Michigan and CA towns I lived in prior to that, and on and on going back to my first vote in 1978.
flex writes:
I’d appreciate seeing the surveys which reveal clerk preferences. Do you have a cite?
Michael Heath
August 9, 2012 at 6:12 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ed links @ 11 . . .
Thanks Ed. I’m angry at my local and regional newspapers. There’s not a lot that goes on up here, so you’d think they’d at least report stories that effect a large number of us, like this new voter card and ID process.
The reporter from Ed’s link notes:
I’ll be encouraging my local news source to report on this so we know our rights prior to the Autumn election. I have no desire to check I’m a citizen or hand the election workers my driver’s license again.
sunsangnim
August 9, 2012 at 6:34 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@ Jordan Genso:
The BBC did a show like that with 9/11 conspiracy theorists. But you’re right, it would be interesting to do that with a more typical wingnut as well.
shouldbeworking
August 9, 2012 at 9:45 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I wonder if the state government thinks worrying about a potential of 19 fraudulent voters is such an important issue, just how save the roads would be if they worried about all the confirmed speeders out there.