Category Archives: fraudulent fraud squad

Philadelphia Inquirer:

Then there’s absentee voting. David Oh, now a freshman on City Council, had sought office in 2007 and had a solid lead in unofficial tallies from voting machines. Yet it became a 122-vote loss – thanks to hundreds of absentee ballots, dozens of them “voting for exactly the same candidates, filled out in exactly the same way,” Oh recalls.

Wider problems with absentee ballots led a federal judge to overturn results of a key Philadelphia legislative race in 1993, deciding which party controlled the State Senate. Republican Bruce Marks was declared the winner over Democrat Bill Stinson after Judge Clarence Newcomer found forgeries and other problems affecting hundreds of ballots – about 90 percent of which favored Stinson.

The new law does add ID requirements for issuing absentee ballots, which could have helped curb the abuses suspected in the 2007 race and documented in 1993.

But the law’s main provision, requiring the state’s 8.2 million registered voters to produce drivers’ licenses or other official forms of photo ID, appears to target a kind of fraud that by all accounts hasn’t cropped up in recent years in the city or state.

“The phrase used is voter impersonation, where John Doe pretends to be Henry Jones in order to cast a vote,” Harvey said. “No one has identified any such cases, certainly in Philadelphia, in my time frame.” Harvey is 75.

The Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts reported last month that there had been no convictions for voter impersonation or voter fraud in Pennsylvania in the last five years. And at a recent budget hearing, when Corbett’s secretary of the commonwealth, Carol Aichele – who as head of the Department of State oversees elections – was asked about evidence of voter fraud in the state, she said she wasn’t aware of specific cases, adding, “There is no method to detect or deter voter fraud.”

Here, at KPCC’s Patt Morrison show.

Weigel.

The Business Insider reports.

Michael Thielen digs himself deeper into a hole. The released chapter of my forthcoming book discusses the best academic studies available on voter i.d.  The simple reason my book does not cite any evidence from the Carter-Baker commission is its age: it predates the Indiana voter i.d. law (the first of the stricter voter id laws implemented).  Instead, I focus on the actual empirical work on voter id, including important work by Pitts, Erikson and Minnite, and Ansolabehere and Persily.  There is no original empirical research in the Carter-Baker report: only (unsubstantiated) claims about voter confidence, claims which Ansolabehere and Persily tested in an article published later in the Harvard Law Review.

The truth?

Virtually no evidence that voter i.d. laws prevent the kind of fraud (in person, impersonation voter fraud) which is a serious threat in American elections.

No evidence of a link between voter i.d. laws and voter confidence.

The chapter explains these points in detail.  I have yet to see good empirical evidence refuting either of these two points.  Certainly nothing in Carter-Baker does.

And, for the record, I have come out before and in the last chapter of the book I will come out again in favor of a national voter identification card, with all the costs paid for by the government, and registration conducted by the government (not third party groups) and the optional use of a thumbprint instead of the voter identification card for voters who choose to use it.  This would be part of a package of fundamental reforms to make our election system more uniform, efficient, and fair.

The Fraudulent Fraud Squad is getting a new member: Sharron Angle.

State senate just passed the bill. Details to come.

UPDATE: Details here and here.

Must read expose of Fraudulent Fraud Squad, South Carolina edition.

Pam Fessler reports for NPR: “The South Carolina State Election Commission has just released its initial review of allegations from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles that more than 950 deceased voters appeared to have ballots cast in their names after they died. And no surprise, the commission found that of the 207 cases reviewed, there was no evidence in 197 of them that fraudulent votes had been cast. The commission said that records in the other 10 cases were ‘insufficient to make a determination.’”

For blog readers, this is no surprise.  What would be a surprise would be if people who complained about rampant voter fraud with dead voters in South Carolina when the initial report came out would come out and admit the error of their ways.  Not counting on it.

Pam also covers the Murphy-von Spakovsky debate over voter id today at the National Press Club.

UPDATE:  Pam has updated her post to include a quote from the state’s attorney general’s office that they are still on the hunt for dead voter fraud.  Sigh.

David Firestone has written this post on the NYT “Loyal Opposition” blog about the sneak preview of my forthcoming book, The Voting Wars.

Last week, Yale University Press released a sneak preview from my forthcoming book, The Voting Wars.  The preview is The Fraudulent Fraud Squad: Understanding the Battle Over Voter ID.

In connection with the release, I wrote two blog posts:

How many voters actually deterred by new Republican voting laws?

and

Why Tough State Voter ID Laws Should Be Opposed—Even If Effects of Law on Turnout May Be Small and Claims Exaggerated.

Jonathan Adler discussed the chapter on Volokh, and there are now 178 comments posted—many of which illustrate the intensity of partisan feeling in The Voting Wars.  Similarly, there are 78 strong comments to Eric Black’s MinnPost article on my chapter.

Jonathan Adler blogs about The Voting Wars.

Eric Black writes for MinnPost about voter id and my newly-released work, The Fraudulent Fraud Squad: Understanding the Battle Over Voter ID: A Sneak Preview from “The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown.

I am very excited to announce that Yale University Press has ePublished “The Fraudulent Fraud Squad: Understanding the Battle Over Voter ID,” a sneak preview of The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown.  The book itself will be published this summer (preorders http://amzn.to/y22ZTv (Amazon); http://bit.ly/z5PosP (Barnes and Noble); no preorders yet on the Kindle version of the entire book.)

The sneak peek from the book will be available in electronic form only.  Right now you can get it from Amazon, and you can read it on the PC or MAC if you don’t have a Kindle.  It should be available at Barnes and Noble and in other electronic formats shortly.

Here is my letter to the readers on the Amazon page explaining the chapter:

In 2000, the U.S. presidential election went into overtime as just a few hundred votes, out of millions cast, separated Republican George W. Bush from Democrat Al Gore in the state of Florida, whose twenty-five electoral votes determined the nation’s next president. For thirty-six days, the country was riveted and divided between Democrats and Republicans as the election went into overtime. Election contests, recounts, and almost two dozen lawsuits culminated in one of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions in U.S. history, Bush v. Gore. Everything related to the election controversy went under the microscope, from the varieties of election machinery, to the rules for vote-counting, to the poor drafting of Florida’s election statutes, to the partisan officials involved in the recount, to the role of the courts in resolving election disputes. Calls for reform came from everywhere, including the Supreme Court.

If you think that nearly a dozen years later the country would have fixed its problems with how we run our elections, you’d be dead wrong.

Since Florida we have witnessed a partisan war over election rules. The number of election-related lawsuits has more than doubled, and election time brings out inevitable accusations by political partisans of voter fraud and voter suppression. These allegations have shaken public confidence, as campaigns deploy armies of lawyers and the partisan press revs up whenever elections are expected to be close and the stakes are high.

We are just one razor-thin presidential election away from chaos and an undermining of the rule of law. In summer 2012, Yale University Press will publish my book, The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown, looking at these questions: How did we get here? Why haven’t things improved since 2000? How has the rise of the Internet and social media made the potential for a catastrophic electoral meltdown much worse? But the book won’t be out until this summer, and the public is hearing a lot of information—and misinformation—now about states adopting new, tough voter identification wars. The Fraudulent Fraud Squad: Understanding the Battle over Voter ID presents an excerpt from The Voting Wars for readers who want to get an immediate handle on the partisan fight over these controversial new voting requirements. Are they really needed to prevent fraud? Will they suppress the votes of thousands of Democratic voters? The answers might surprise you.

Lee Rowland: “When you scratch beneath the surface, you see that O’Keefe and others who make a living crying “fraud!” resort to manufacturing evidence of voter fraud that doesn’t otherwise exist — and potentially commit fraud in the process. If those who support photo ID are willing to commit fraud in the name of preventing it, maybe it’s time to stop taking these claims at face value. Like fool’s gold, the claims of widespread voter fraud are fast, cheap, and shiny — and collapse under close inspection.”

Facing South has this post.

Media Matters reports.

“I think it’s nonsense, nobody voted, and if they voted, they’re facing a five year jail sentence, and I think very few people would be willing to risk that…I think the whole thing is bullshit, frankly. It’s another one of these O’Keefe bullshit actions. Let them cast a vote, see what happens.”

–Frank Askin, speaking to TPM