Perhaps I’m misreading the editors of Bloomberg View’s take on President Trump’s Election Integrity Committee. On the one hand they acknowledge the need for such a committee:
One in eight voter registrations is invalid or inaccurate, according to a 2012 study. That includes 1.8 million dead people still on the rolls and nearly 3 million who are registered in more than one state. There are also non-citizens on the rolls.
I believe that drastically understates the problems with voter registrations. I doubt that the gravest abuse is non-citizens voting or outright fraud as in somebody casting a vote in a name other than their own although I have little doubt that those abuses take place. I think there are probably hundreds of thousands or even millions of people who are registered in multiple jurisdictions and vote in more than one of them—once in person and one or more times absentee.
They also suggest a justification for the committee:
The Help America Vote Act of 2002 requires states to create “a single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list†with a unique identifier for each voters, and to coordinate their lists with other agencies. They’ve done a poor job of it, and it’s clear that more interstate coordination is needed.
But they’re suspicious of the motives of the members of the committee:
Straightening out this embarrassing muddle should be a national priority, but Trump’s commission lacks the credibility and expertise to do it.
Its vice-chair is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who has led a partisan push for strict identification laws for registration and voting. A federal court recently fined him for making “patently misleading representations to the court†after refusing to turn over a voting memo he delivered to President-elect Trump.
Equally problematic, identifying ineligible voters — and avoiding false positives that could disenfranchise properly registered voters — involves a level of technical expertise that the commission has shown no sign of understanding.
To me that smacks of modern day Donatism. Donatism was the heresy that held that priests needed to be in a state of grace for sacraments to be valid.
There will be no perfect solution as long as the attitude towards voter registration (basically more is better) that prevails today continues. Any commission’s motives will be suspect.
Let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good. If you genuinely want to increase confidence in our system, you should want the process to be as good as we can make it from end to end. That includes voter registration and validation of registration.
The reference in the title of this post is to the famous quip by Augustine of Hippo: “Grant me chastity but not yet.”
You don’t need the commission to show that we have problems with voter registration. Voter fraud has been pretty well studied and we know it comes with absentee ballots and at the voting machine. we have had many years of red state officials looking for the kind of fraud that would be stopped by voter ID. They aren’t finding it.
I am all for trying to fix the kind of fraud that we already know exists. Yet, we never see proposals to correct that kind of fraud. Why doesn’t the kind of fraud we already know exists in the hundreds or thousands cause a loss of voter confidence? This whole effort would have a lot more credibility as anything more than a political exercise if they would first start on the problems we know exist, and have known for along time.
Steve
There are actually two systems (that I know of ) that try to compare registration rolls to prevent voting in multiple jurisdictions. But these are state compacts and not every state has signed on. Florida is one huge exception and it’s one state where there is likely a non-trivial amount of fraudulent absentee voting.
I’m not sure the feds have the power to mandate such a system.
As I wrote in a previous post a federal commission has all the authority it needs to request voter registrations from any state that has a public records act modeled on FOIA. I think that’s all of them.
As PD noted in the comments of that post, those laws are very broad.
What I didn’t get to in the previous post was all of the things St. Clair County started to do to look for voter fraud. They went to the addresses on the voter registry to see if the address existed, and whether a residence existed there. They compared the voter registration rolls with voting records from neighboring counties to identify everyone voting in multiple counties. They looked for single family residences that had more voters than one would expect, in notable cases dozens of people registered to vote in individual homes. They compared the votes with death records. They published voting information so that citizens could help identify voting fraud.
This all involved sharing information and not assuming that a study had found no voting fraud in St. Clair County when nobody bothered to look before.
Yeah, that’s why I can only chuckle when somebody complains that the problem doesn’t exist because no one’s found it.
Also has always seemed absurd when they claim that voter registration fraud doesn’t really matter. Would it be an obvious first step to absentee ballot fraud (to ensure you have a lot of ballots that you can safely send in without being discovered when real voters try to cast their ballots)?
OTOH, I am not worried about Russian tampering in the elections because there is no evidence of it and it doesn’t bother me that the Trump administration isn’t looking.
PD- Which report was that? Everything I have seen on St Clair says that they found absentee fraud, and voter registration of course, but not much else. Not illegals voting or stuff that would be stopped with a voter ID.
http://fox2now.com/2016/10/18/st-clair-county-announces-plan-to-combat-voter-fraud-and-voter-suppression/
Just a reminder that we have been through this before.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/why-republicans-cant-find-the-big-voter-fraud-conspiracy-214972
@steve, everything I listed happened btw/ 2010 and 2014. Of course the County says the 2016 election was clean. They worked on it, and by “they” I mean reform-minded Democrats. Not the sort of Democrats who say: “Hey, aren’t those Republicans the worst?”