Reality Check: Voter Fraud

Let's take a pause in this series about voter fraud to see how Republicans and Fox News have been misleading the American public, persuading many Americans there are huge numbers of people voting illegally. We've already shown that to be untrue.

Voter Fraud Watch: Illegal Voting Reports in Ohio. (2012, 6 November). Fox News. Read it here.

Voter Fraud Watch: Group Claims Unions in Nevada Registering Illegal Immigrants to Vote. (2012, 6 November). Fox News. Read it here.

Barnes, Ed. (2010, 12 July). Felons voting illegally may have put Franken over the top in Minnesota, study finds. Fox News. Read it here.

The articles, which are clearly meant to drive white voters to hysteria, sometimes have a kernel of truth, but the claims made are overstated, deliberately misdirecting, and often simply untrue. Let's look at the Barnes article as an example of all three: overstatement, misdirection, and downright lying.

Study finds... Whose study? Minnesota Majority, a conservative group. They claimed to have matched voting records to lists of felons.

The final recount vote in the race, determined six months after Election Day, showed Franken beat Coleman by 312 votes -- fewer votes than the number of felons whose illegal ballots were counted, according to Minnesota Majority's newly released study, which matched publicly available conviction lists with voting records. 

But check this out:

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.

“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.” -- Rosenfeld.

Twenty-six ineligible felons registered to vote in Minnesota. Of those, one-third didn't vote. That's hardly a surprising number, since most felons don't realize they can't legally vote while on parole or probation.

 [Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota's] 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.

Yes,voter fraud exists. No, it's not widespread. No, its not frequent. When it does happen, it's generally due to a misake. There is no fraudulent intent. There are no hordes of voting illegal immigrants, felonious voters, or dead people voting. There just aren't.

Source

Rosenfeld, Stephen. (2012, 8 August). GOP Voter Fraud Hucksters Latest Lie: Felons Made Franken U.S. Senator. AlterNet. Read it here.

Gerrymander Blues

Both Republicans and Democrats gerrymander, and in hopes of either getting all their voters into one district or carving out a district that will disenfranchise a large number of voters of the other party by making them a minority, both have made their share of ridiculously-shaped districts. You can see a bunch of them in the previous post.

How well does gerrymandering work? Check this out.

...since the GOP not only flipped the House in 2010 but totally controlled 21 state governments, including Pennsylvania's, it allowed the party to master post-census congressional redistricting around the country. On Nov. 6, Democrats won the popular vote by 500,000 votes nationally but took just 201 of the 435 U.S. House seats. In Pennsylvania, Republicans took hold of 13 of 18 congressional seats while being outpaced by 75,000 total votes. Mr. Obama won 53 percent of the state's vote, but Democratic candidates won 28 percent of the seats. -- McNulty, 2012

McNulty also wrote:

Tasked with resetting congressional lines after the 2010 census, Republican mapmakers in Harrisburg took that reality and ran with it. They made the five seats Democrats eventually would win on Nov. 6 solidly Democratic, going by voting performance statistics kept by Cook Political Report. They wrangled the district lines of three GOP seats near Philadelphia -- most notably District 7, which stretched across parts of five counties -- to make them more Republican. Finally, forced by population losses to cut one seat, they combined two outside of Pittsburgh to make Democratic incumbents Jason Altmire and Mark Critz run against each other in the new District 12.

That's how it recently worked on the national level. It works that way at state and local levels as well.

This process has worked so well for so many politicians that the New York Public Interest Research Group reports that in 2008 more than half of the state’s 212 legislators were re-elected with more than 80 percent of their districts’ votes. In 57 districts, the incumbents ran unopposed.

Gerrymandering is a huge threat to the idea of one man (or woman), one vote. It's both legal and effective, and it disempowers millions of voters, removing their ability to choose their political leaders. It's institutionalized corruption, perpetrated politicians who, as the New York Times editorial states, have a clear conflict of interest. -- Editorial, New York Times

Those interested in voting reform should remember: a very real problem with the voting process begins and ends with gerrymandering.


Sources

Gerrymandering, pure and corrupt. (2009, 11 November). Editorial, New York Times. Read it here.

McNulty, Timothy. (2012, 26 November). How gerrymandering helped GOP keep control of House. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Read it here.

What Gerrymandering Looks Like

To see how some preposterously gerrymandered districts, click here.