George Will reviews John Fund's new book "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy".
Even though the 1992 election saw the largest percentage increase in voter turnout since 1952, Bill Clinton quickly sought to address the supposed "crisis" of nonparticipation with the National Voter Registration Act -- a.k.a. "Motor Voter." It, Fund says, imposed "fraud-friendly" rules on the states, requiring them, for example, to register to vote anyone receiving a driver's license, and to offer mail-in registration with no identification required.
Given such measures, perhaps we should not be surprised that, as Fund reports, since 1995, Philadelphia's population has declined 13 percent but registered voters have increased 24 percent. Are we sure we should we be pleased?
The unexamined belief that an ever-higher rate of voter registration is a Good Thing has met its limit in the center of the state that this year is the center of the political universe -- Ohio. The U.S. Census Bureau's 2003 estimate is that in Franklin County -- Columbus -- there are approximately 815,000 people 18 or over. But 845,720 are now registered.
One reason for such unacceptable numbers in various jurisdictions across the nation is that voter rolls are not frequently enough purged of voters whose status has changed.
Unfortunately, there is reluctance, especially among Republicans, to support measures that might appear to have a "disparate impact" on minorities and therefore be denounced as racist.
Today Americans demand, as a California voting official says, the kind of convenience in voting they enjoy in buying airline tickets. So election "day" can be three months long (in Maine). Absentee voting has come to be considered a right -- yet another one -- of convenience rather than a limited privilege understood as a concession to necessity. Soon, voting by mail (Oregonians all vote this way) and even online will be regarded as rights.
These measures are supposed to increase turnout. However, according to Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, all research is "unequivocal in showing that easy absentee voting decreases voter turnout" because "you are diffusing the mobilizing focus away from a single day."
What liberalized registration and voting procedures do increase are opportunities for fraud, including the sort that Milwaukee televisionstation WTMJ found in 2002. Fund says it "filmed Democrat campaign workers handing out food and small sums of money to residents of a home for the mentally ill in Kenosha, after which the patients were shepherded into a separate room and given absentee ballots."
In 2000, in heavily Democrat St. Louis, at 6:30 p.m., a judge, responding to a Democrat complaint filed in the name of a man the judge did not actually hear from (the man was dead), ordered polls to remain open until 10 p.m., three hours longer than the law allows, and ordered one voting place downtown to be open until midnight.
Partisan issues aside, I must say that this is one aspect of American democracy that seems quite out of step with the well-deserved American reputation for efficiency and proper engineering. The two countries I voted in (Belgium and Israel) both have compulsory national ID cards. Every citizen of voting age is automatically registered to vote, and gets a convocation mailed to his/her home. Come voting day, one is supposed to present both the picture ID and the convocation, both of which are checked off against voter rolls for that precinct. Voting outside one's precinct? In Belgium one could request an absentee ballot, in Israel I'm not even sure it's possible. (Israel allows no expat vote at all, except for diplomatic personnel and others serving abroad on official business.) There are still instances of voter fraud: Israel has stories every election about how the dead vote in predominantly ultra-Orthodox districts. (Allegedly, deaths go unreported to the authorities, and some living guy brings the picture ID and convocation --- and to the people at the balloting station, one bearded guy in black hat and black clothes looks like another.) But the effort required for cheating is much greater.
Every attempt to introduce a national picture ID in the USA has met with fierce resistance from civil rights groups on both sides of the political spectrum. While this is pretty incomprehensible to a person who has always taken mandatory IDs for granted, I do not pretend to tell Americans how they should run their country. But the "unbearable lightness of voting" as it presently exists should give all Americans pause.