Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Voter Suppression vs Registration Fraud vs Voter Fraud

The ACORN scandal is serious, but conservative talk shows and radio are absurdly trying to connect this effort to the Obama campaign in irrational and unethical ways. Vote fraud is not much of a problem in the USA where sophisticated voter suppression ... is a problem.

Forget Acorn, I'd hire Ken Blackwell if I was in the vote manipulation biz:

In 2004 in Ohio Blackwell tried to preferentially and illegally enforce a rule that said the *weight* of the paper would disqualify registrations. Even his own offices forms did not qualify as well as standard forms around the state. His ruling was overturned eventually, but had some suppressive effect. It's hard to measure suppression and I don't think it turned the 2004 election but I now think it's clear that without the very strategic suppression efforts against Florida voters in 2000 Gore would have *easily* won the state even with the butterfly ballots disallowed as they were.

As everybody should know but does not, there is *no rational dispute whatsoever* that the butterfly ballot spoilage lost the election for Gore. It's not clear you could have done anything about that legally (eg allocate votes proportionally rather than destroy them), but it is clear that in terms of voter intent Gore won Florida. Also not well known, but shown by a Miami Herald recount of every ballot (a great read!), is that even if the Supreme Court recounts had gone through Bush would have won using most of the prevailing counting standards of 2 or more chads disconnected. (Gore did not challenge the factors that lost the election - Palm Beach spoilage and/or voter suppression). Bush was "necessarily" installed as President after losing the Florida election, although there was a precedent for keeping those ballots and proportional votes.

I think if one is truly interested in Democracy working more than partisan concerns, they should be a lot more worried about the suppression efforts, especially in Ohio and Florida. These are simply appalling. The system is very good at finding fraud and very bad at avoiding suppression and ballot spoilage.

The reason suppression is a lot more worrisome is that it appears they keep a lot of legitimate voters from voting where voter fraud is likely to be very uncommon (convicted felons, for example, even if registered by ACORN, are hardly gung ho to go in and vote illegally).

I started looking at the situation after the Florida fiasco of 2000 and was really appalled because until then I'd bought the line that fraud was the big deal. I do think fraud helped Kennedy win Illinois thanks to Daley and possibly the mob, but suppression is more relevant now.

Electoral Counts Give Obama the Win

With a large and stable lead in the polls, an even more favorable lead in the electoral analysis, and a huge amount of money in the bank the Obama campaign juggernaut looks very hard to beat:


"The Bradley Effect", where polled people tend to vote differently than they tell the pollsters due to race, seems unlikely to play a role although some think this may work against Obama in the final tallies.

Clearly the most important factor at this late time is the mother's milk of American politics....money. Obama's campaign raised a jaw-dropping 150 million in September and will be able to outspend McCain by something like 3 to 1. This is a huge advantage and makes it much harder for McCain to "raise his voice" and profile in the public eye at this critical time.

Vote Fraud vs Vote Suppression

There's a massive campaign in the conservative media to connect the Obama campaign to the ACORN vote registration scandals. There does not appear to be a significant connection - certainly no suggestion that the Obama campaign has done anything to encourage ACORN to cheat on their behalf. Here's my summary of the situation:

ACORN registration fraud is at the individual level, where workers are padding their registration piles with fake registrations to make more money.

No signs that the fake registrants would actually be voting in the election. FOX is very conspicuously failing to talk about this, though I'd guess somebody will find a small number of ACORN people who had plans to go and try to vote based on the fake registrations.

It is possible, but I think unlikely, that there is a conspiracy on the part of ACORN to conduct a large scale vote fraud campaign based on the fake registrations. The evidence does not support this at all. For example "Mickey Mouse" mass duplicated names, and pro football name registrants are going to get scrutinized at the polling places and likely rejected.

Far more significant in terms of affect are the voter suppression campaigns where secretaries of state are removing huge numbers of names from the registration rolls. Often this appears to be a legitimate attempt to clean ineligible voters from the rolls but in some cases such as Ohio 2004 it appeared to be a very calculated approach to change outcomes. This year Ohio's voting process is under the control of the Democrats and it appears they are working too hard in the opposite direction - effectively having too few checks on the registration process.

The system failed in 2000, and Democracy is still reeling from our inability to qualify voters and count votes properly. Partisans who are more interested in outcomes that the Democratic process should bow their heads in deep shame (warning: do not hold your breath on this).