Vote! Just do it!
#voterfraudisafraud
Accusations of Voter Fraud
Voter fraud is incredibly rare. An analysis by News21, a national investigative reporting project, identified 10 voter impersonation cases out of 2,068 alleged election fraud cases since 2000 — or one out of every 15 million prospective voters. The two types of alleged voter fraud are voter impersonation and non-citizen voting.
Voter Impersonation
In all cases it would be incredibly difficult to commit fraud by pretending to be a dead person or pretending to be someone else who is still alive. To impersonate someone else, the fraudulent voter would have to appear to be the correct age and gender, would need to know where the dead or alive person was registered and which polling place to go to, would have to forge the person’s signature, and in the case of someone still alive, would have to know that the registered person will not vote. And there are severe consequences under federal law for attempting voter fraud such as up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each act of fraud. Contrary to some assertions, same-day-registration does not open the door to voter fraud or impersonation, because same-day-registration for federal elections requires the same standards as for early registration, i.e., photo ID and proof of citizenship. According to Heather Gerken, a professor of law at Yale Law School, fraud almost never takes place through in-person voting, and it is far easier to steal an election by bribing an election official or through mail-in/absentee voting, with all the evidence of serious fraud concerning the latter sort. It’s much easier to forge a signature, impersonate a voter, or buy a vote in the privacy of one’s home than it is in a voting booth at the polls. Still absentee voter fraud is relatively rare but could be dealt with by restricting absentee voting, permitting it only when voters have a good excuse, like illness or when they will be actually absent during an election. It’s interesting to note that absentee ballots are widely considered to favor Republicans, and early in-person voting is typically viewed as favoring Democrats.
Non-Citizen Voting
All states require voters to be U.S. citizens for presidential elections. There’s very little evidence of non-citizen voter fraud because there are major disincentives. Besides it being illegal for an unauthorized immigrant to vote, a person can be deported and be permanently inadmissible for return to the U.S. for attempting to vote. Non-citizens have little motivation to risk their stay in our country by committing voter fraud.
The claims of potential voter fraud by Donald Trump in which he said “24 million people — one out of every eight — voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or significantly inaccurate. More than 1.8 million deceased individuals, right now, are listed as voters” are misleading. He intimates that there will be 1.8 to 24 million fraudulent votes on November 8th. His figure refers to a Pew Charitable Trust report, “Inaccurate, Costly and Inefficient: Evidence That America’s Voter Registration System Needs and Upgrade.” The report did not allege the 1.8 million deceased people actually ever voted, or that 24 million inaccurate registrations would be used for 24 million voter impersonations. What the Pew report actually said is that the report is evidence of the need to upgrade voter registration systems. Trump’s numbers are from a news story based on this report. Those who manage the data on which the report is based have said that the story misinterpreted the data.
Voter Suppression
The real threat to a fair election is voter suppression. This is the first presidential election in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act.Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, jurisdictions with a long history of discrimination were required to submit election changes with the federal government. This part of the VRA blocked 3,000 discriminatory voting changes from 1965 to 2013. In the June 2013 Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision, Section 5 of the VRA was effectively made inoperable. The result is a resurgence in measures by states and local jurisdictions to disenfranchise voters. One of these measures is closures of polling places.
Poll Closures
There are 868 fewer places to cast a ballot in 2016 in 381 of the 800 counties previously covered by Section 5 of VFA, according to a survey where polling place information was available in 2012 or 2014, that’s 43 percent of counties covered by the survey showing reduced voting locations. Arizona closed the highest percentage of polling places, and Pima County, which is 35 percent Latino and leans Democratic, was the nation’s biggest closer of polling places, having closed 22 percent of polling places from 2012 to 2016. Consolidation of polling places can be an acceptable way to save money and streamline operations. Section 5 of VRA was meant to make sure that closures were not discriminatory. Jurisdictions were required to give substantial notice to voters about any planned polling place closures, and they were required to consult with the communities to ensure that any proposed voting change would not disenfranchise voters. With Section 5 lifted, in the vast majority of instances, closures have gone unnoticed, unreported, and unchallenged. The result is people have to travel longer distances to vote and wait on longer lines to vote once they find their new polling place.
Voter Roll Purging
A 2008 report by the Brennan Center for Justice of voter roll purging, a practice of removing voters from registration lists in order to update state registration rolls, found that the purge practices of 12 states revealed that “election officials across the country are routinely striking millions of voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation.” Recently, in Ohio, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the state’s reliance on lack of voting activity as a trigger for purging people from the voting rolls violates federal law. Since the Shelby decision, 27 states have attempted to purge their voting rolls in ways that have led to numerous lawsuits claiming these purges targeted minority voters.
Other changes in the electoral process that have lad to voter suppression are reduced operating hours at the state offices where residents can obtain IDs to meet the requirements of the photo ID laws, reduced hours at voting sites, and decreasing the period of time allowed to register in advance of an election.
Voter ID laws
Used as an argument to keep non-citizens from voting, they result in making it more difficult for the elderly, disadvantaged, and disabled to vote. It’s estimated that 11 percent of U.S. citizens, or roughly 21 million citizens eligible to vote don’t have government-issued photo IDs. How many people would be dissuaded to vote due to Voter ID laws is hard to know, but decreased voter turnout is estimated to be from between 0.8 and 2.4 percent. Thirty-four states have either strict or non-strict voter ID laws. The rest of the states continue the tradition dating back to the beginning of the Republic of not requiring a photo ID.
Conclusion
Suffrage has been an evolving effort from colonial times when only male freeholders could vote, to universal white manhood suffrage, to Black freedman suffrage after the Civil War, to women’s suffrage in 1920, to the elimination of poll taxes in 1964, and in 1971 to expanding the right to vote to those 18 years of age. Our goal for the health and longevity of our democracy should be that our elections are free and fair. Our efforts should be toward ensuring a transparent and accountable electoral system that encourages and enables every eligible voter to participate in this great democratic process.
Sources:
University of Kentucky College of Law. Joshua Douglas, an election law professor.
The Migration Policy Institute. Sarah Pierce, an associate policy analyst.
The Leadership Conference for Civil Rights. November 2016. “The Great Poll Closure.” http://civilrightsdocs.info/pdf/reports/2016/poll-closure-report-web.pdf
National Conference of States Legislatures. http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voter-id.aspx
Brennan Center for Justice. 2008. “Voter Purges,”
https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/voter-purges
Southern Poverty Law Center. 2016. “Richard Cohen’s remarks at the Congressional Forum on the Current State of Voting Rights in America”
Pew Charitable Trust. 2012. “Inaccurate, Costly and Inefficient: Evidence That America’s Voter Registration System Needs and Upgrade.”
We will not benefit by furthering the political and cultural divide in our county. We have common ground and there we must stand. The map to that common ground shows routes around the slippery slopes of stereotype and detours away from the steep canyons of bigotry. We must be willing to wander onto the unfamiliar path of understanding and compassion even when the easier familiar path of self-righteousness is straight ahead. We must make our way out of the brambles of tribalism and find our way to the trail that leads to the land promised two centuries ago, where all people can share equally in the bounty of the green valley of freedom.
Unpatriotic, some say. Sour grapes, others say. I say resisting a trump presidency is the most patriotic action I can do right now. I insist on a president who will uphold the principles of our Constitution and defend the Bill of Rights, who has a core belief in the dignity of all people – all colors, cultures, creeds, and gender. If the electorates vote on November 19 to put trump in the oval office, then on January 20th trump will take the oath of office – to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Yet, his record shows that he has not respected our Constitution and has threatened our freedoms.
soundwords 