IT'S THE FRAUD, STUPID
Wednesday,December 20,2000


By STEPHEN BRONARS & JOHN R. LOTT JR.


WITH last month's political turmoil, there is a strong
consensus to reform how we vote. Pollster Frank Luntz
reports that well over 50 percent of Americans now
support some form of electronic voting, including voting at
home via computers. Yet, our understandable desire to
relegate the distinction between "dimples" and "pregnant
chads" to history books overlooks most of the irregularities
in voting: votes cast illegally.

Without these irregularities, Bush would have carried
Florida with at least a few thousand more votes. For
example, a review of voting rolls by the Miami Herald
reveals that more than 5,000 felons, over 75 percent of
whom were registered as Democrats, apparently voted.

News stories from around the nation point to other
widespread problems.

Missouri: In St. Louis, a judge, who was a former aide to
House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, ordered city polls
held open for an extra three hours. The suit filed by
Democrats on behalf of two voters claimed that they had
insufficient time to vote. Yet, one of these "voters" had died
in August 1999, and the other turned out not to be
registered. While city polls were eventually closed down
after an hour, the Missouri gubernatorial and senatorial
races might well have been affected, as the democratic
margins of victory were slim - only 22,000 and 49,000
respectively.

Wisconsin: A Marquette University student newspaper
found that 174 out of a 1,000 students surveyed had
exploited Wisconsin's permissive Election Day registration
procedures to vote more than once. Most voted twice (at
school and at home by absentee ballot), though some voted
four or more times. In Milwaukee homeless people were
offered cigarettes so that they would go with Democratic
campaign workers to obtain absentee ballots. Gore won
Wisconsin by only 5,396 votes.

Oregon: In that state voting is now exclusively done by
mail. Election officials caught four people posing as election
officials and collecting mail-in ballots that voters were
dropping off at the elections department on Election Day.
Similarly, at a Bush rally in Oregon, voters who tried to
hand in their ballots to Republican officials were apparently
deceived into giving them to people not connected with the
campaign. Gore won Oregon by 6,800 votes.

But the biggest problem is bloated voter registration roles.
Take Philadelphia, where people apparently take their civic
responsibilities seriously. In that city, 1,025,259 are
registered voters out of 1,065,455 residents aged 18 and
over. As a number of adults are ineligible to vote (e.g.,
felons and non-citizens), the number of registered voters
clearly exceeds the number of eligible people.

These numbers cannot be explained simply by voters being
left on the rolls after they have moved or died. Preliminary
numbers show some precincts had 100 percent of the
registered voters voting, with 99 percent of their votes
going for Gore. There is no obvious explanation for how
this is possible.

It is one thing to ensure convenience in registering to vote.
It is quite another to have no real checks on who is
registered. The federal 1993 Motor Voter law allows
nonvoters to remain on the registration rolls for up to four
years before they can be removed, preventing states from
regularly checking registration rolls for nonexistent people.
Few jurisdictions check voter identifications and criminal
backgrounds checks are virtually never done. Rules
allowing voters to register on Election Day even prevent
verifying the voter's address.

These problems occur all over America. Some are
humorous, such as the discovery of some Chicagoans
successfully registering their cats to vote. But the numbers
don't add up in cities ranging from Detroit to St. Louis, and
many races apparently turned on these results. Simply
making sure that we "count all the votes" - the mantra
repeated constantly over the last month - is not the answer
if those aren't real votes.

Stephen Bronars is chairman of the University of Texas
Economics Department, and John Lott is a senior
research scholar at the Yale University Law School.
Source:
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/18473.htm 

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