Right-wingers
are in a tizzy over excerpts from a new book by two of the GOP’s
leading voter-fraud hucksters alleging that Minnesota’s Democratic
Senator Al Franken would not have won a statewide recount in 2009 were
it not for ex-felons voting illegally.
They are jumping to the false conclusion that illegal felon voting in November 2008 not only tipped a recount in which Franken
won
by 312 votes—out of 2.4 million cast between the two men—but that
tougher state voter ID laws would have changed the result. Both claims
are wrong.
“And that’s just the question of voting by felons,” wrote the Washington Examiner’s
report by Byron York, chief political correspondent. “Minnesota Majority also
found all sorts of other irregularities that cast further doubt on the Senate results.”
The problem with this assertion—from a new
book by
The Wall Street Journal’s
John Fund and George W. Bush Justice Department attorney Hans von
Spakovsky—is that it is not just factually wrong, according to Minnesota
Supreme Court records, the Minnesota prosecutor who investigated most
of the cases, and some of the country’s top election scholars, but it is
intended to rile a segment of the Right that thinks it is
patriotic to demonize voting by non-whites and disrupt voting for everyone else.
“They are talking in code to their base,” said Rutgers University’s Lori Minnite,
co-author of
Keeping Down The Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters. “My guess is that von Spakovsky and Fund know exactly what they are doing.”
“There
is no basis in fact, whatsoever, in these inaccuracies propagated by
the Minnesota Majority here, none,” Hennepin County Attorney Mike
Freeman said Wednesday. “After the most closely scrutinized election in
Minnesota history in 2008, there were zero cases of fraud. Even the
Republicans lawyers acknowledged that there was no systematic effort to
defraud the election, none.”
“In Hennepin County, 650,000 people
voted,” he continued. “The Minnesota Majority presented us with 1,500
cases that they felt there were problems with voting. Our own election
bureau gave us 100. At the end of the day, we charged 38 cases. And all
but one of them are felons voting who were still under the penalty [of
not legally applying to regain individual voting rights]. There was no
fraud.”
In many cases, former felons are not aware that they have
to go through a legal process to regain their voting rights, unlike
getting a driver’s license.
“How many of the former felons were
registered to vote but never voted,” said Kathy Bonnifield, executive
director of Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota, which issued its
report on scapegoating felons in November 2010—five months after the rightwingers first
raised the spectre of illegal felon voting. “There is a lot of devil in those details.”
The GOP’s Voter Fraud Propaganda War
We must first consider the Right’s devilish messengers and then their dubious details.
John
Fund and Hans von Spakovsky are ideologues whose assertions about
widespread fraudulent voting have not just been debunked by scholars,
but by George W. Bush’s Justice Department itself—where in 2006, von
Spakovsky, a lawyer, led the firing of seven U.S. attorneys for not
zealously pursuing voter fraud.
The scandalous firings were hardly
a federal law enforcement triumph; the full force of the DOJ could only
find three-dozen cases in a country where presidential elections see
upwards of 130 million voters. (Von Spakovsky was then appointed by Bush
to the Federal Election Commission). Between 2002 and 2005 federal
prosecutors under von Spakovsky only
brought 38 cases of voter fraud nationwide, winning 24 convictions.
Fund, a columnist for the
Wall Street Journal and conservative websites, authored a 2004
book
about the threat of sloppy election administration and especially voter
fraud—which he claims are about people voting illegally or
impersonating others at the polls. There is no doubt that elections are
complicated and rife with human error, but Fund’s sophistry is to cite
isolated problems as indicative of a national crisis, slickly ignoring
any sense of scale and pushing ‘solutions’ that help the GOP by
targeting perceived Democratic voting blocks.
Von Spakovsky’s
vigilantism and Fund’s paranoia are vividly displayed in the contention
that Al Franken would not be a sitting U.S. Senator today were it not
for illegal voting by former felons that had illegally cast a ballot in
November 2008. It is also noteworthy that the source of this
conclusion, according to York’s
Examiner report, happens to be
the Minnesota Majority, whose “method” of identifying felon voters was
to compare voter lists with the most rudimentary information in
government databases—a methodology that has been
trashed by one of the nation’s leading election statistical scholars,
Michael McDonald of George Mason University.
“There are solid reasons to suspect that Minnesota Majority has overstated the number of illegal votes,” McDonald
writes,
asking, “Why is it always the Democratic areas that are investigated?”
Going further, he notes that this crew of voting vigilantes does not
care about publicly smearing innocent people who were wrongly identified
as felons. “I find it distasteful to publicize the names of people in
the Minnesota Majority report whose charges were dismissed, perhaps
because they were flagged due to the bad luck of having the same name
and birth year as a felon.”
“The numbers are a complete lie,”
Freeman’s spokesman said before the Hennepin County Attorney came on the
phone. “They keep going on television and repeating this lie, even
though we debunked this with the work we had to do.”
Their
conclusions are consistent with research done by Bonnifield’s group,
Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota, following the 2008 senatorial
recount. Her November 2010
report
found only 26 voter fraud convictions across the state at that time.
They were all ex-felons who registered to vote but never voted (32
percent) or who voted (68 percent) before restoring their voting rights.
This distinction is very important because it further debunks the GOP’s
voter ID case.
Bonnifield sent a questionnaire to every Minnesota
county prosecutor and found not one allegation of voter fraud was
prosecutable beyond the issues facing the ex-felons—there was no double
voting, underage voting, voter impersonation, coercion of elderly or
disabled voters, or non-citizen voting. Instead, 76 percent of the
investigations brought no charge.
In other words, York’s
assertion, “it’s not just a question of voting by felons,” is bogus.
Confusion by ex-felons, one-third of who registered but never voted, is
the only issue. Moreover, the numbers cited by York and his sources
about the extent of felon voting may be from more elections than just
the November 2008 race sparking the recount.
A spokesman for The
Minnesota Court Information Office, operated by its Supreme Court,
Tuesday said there were 14 voter fraud convictions across the state in
2009, 11 in 2010, and 132 in 2011. The Court records did not say when,
or in which election—before 2008, during 2008, or after 2008—the illegal
registrations or voting occurred.
In contrast, York arrogantly
and erroneously states that 1,099 felons voted illegally in 2008, and
that 177 have been convicted, while another 66 are awaiting trial. This
1,099 figure is close to the total number of voter fraud
complaints
that were submitted and investigated, of which the vast majority were
found to be baseless, according to the Hennepin County Attorney, whose
office handled the majority of these allegations.
Fund and von
Spakovsky contend that county prosecutors chose to ignore the bulk of
illegal voting, according to York, because the state’s standards for
obtaining convictions are lax. “The accused can get off by claiming not
to have known they did anything wrong,” he said, citing their book.
“Still, that’s a total of 243 people either convicted of voter fraud or
awaiting trial in an election that was decided by 312 votes.”
That
is another statement that should make any lawyer cringe—and von
Spakovsky, a lawyer, should know better. The issue of criminal intent is
a fundamental precept in American justice. It is the rule and not the
exception in criminal law that intent must be in evidence to convict
someone of violating a law. By glossing over that distinction—a typical
Fund move—these provocateurs are seeking to heighten a sense of
unfairness among their clan. Ignoring criminal intent has never been a
legal standard or even controversial.
Attacking Elections Is Not Patriotic
There
are many reasons why the GOP’s voter ID arguments—including this
rubbery analysis—are an overreaching solution in search of a
barely-existent problem.
In a state where 2.9 million people voted
in November 2008, even if there were 243 illegal voters—and that
includes people who have not yet been proven guilty—less than
one-thousandth of 1 percent of the state’s electorate registered or
voted illegally. The GOP’s ‘solution,’ forcing millions of voters to
present specific government-issued photo ID to get a ballot, is using a
bulldozer to swat a fly.
Moreover, having a photo ID requirement
to obtain a ballot would do nothing to end the confusion surrounding
ex-felons prematurely registering to vote. They can do that with a
driver’s license. If illegal felon voting is in fact a problem, then
the solution lies with telling probation officers to better-inform their
charges, not new statewide voting rules.
But the myth of voter
fraud refuses to die among the GOP. Minnesota’s Republican-led
Legislature passed a voter ID law that was vetoed this spring by its
Democratic governor. It subsequently put a state constitutional
amendment on voter ID on the November 2012 ballot. Secretary of State,
Mark Ritchie, a Democrat, has been sued over ballot language, precluding
him from commenting on this new attack by right-wingers on the
senatorial recount that he oversaw in 2008-2009.
But beyond
arguments over voter ID, there is a bigger point. Republicans
increasingly have been trying to tilt the rules surrounding all aspects
of voting in recent elections—from restricting voter registration
drives, to rules validating voter registration applications, to
presenting more specific forms of ID to get a ballot, to toughening the
rules for counting provisional ballots given to people who lack that ID,
to suing afterwards if the vote count is close. All of these tactics
are in play in the 2012 presidential election.
Beyond ignoring the
facts, the implicit racism in this latest charge may be its most
repugnant feature, as many felons are presumed not likely to be white.
The
further assumption that felons vote for Democrats and not Republicans
should also be disputed. There are a lot of felons in white majority
states that vote for Republicans. In Minnite’s book, she cited the 2004
Washington state gubernatorial recount, where the GOP also claimed that
felon voting benefitted the winner, Democrat Chris Gregoire.
In
that recount litigation, the court found people with felony convictions
who had not yet restored their voting rights had voted illegally—because
local election officials mailed them ballots. There was no finding of
an intent to defraud. In contrast, the court found that the only showing
of an intent to fraudulently vote was by four illegal voters who
supported the Republican candidate.
If the Republican Right
were confident in its candidates and message, they would trust voters to
listen and decide, and abide by the outcome. Instead, they are trying
to game the rules and cast doubt on the public’s confidence in the
process—including the prospect of recounts in swing states this fall.
And they consider these activities patriotic.
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