Turning the Real Issue of Voter Fraud into a Crutch for Defeat

October 18, 2016

Yesterday Donald Trump tweeted, "Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!"

Indeed, why would a Trump-supporting governor like Rick Scott in Florida or Terry Branstad in Iowa allow large scale voter fraud to occur in their states on their watch? Or, put another way, why does Trump have so little faith in his allies' ability to run a legitimate election in their state?

Iowa's Secretary of State, a Republican, felt obligated to issue a statement saying no, the election is not rigged, at least in his state.

"I take the integrity of our elections very seriously. It is my number one priority. As the state's Commissioner of Elections, I can assure you Iowa's elections are not rigged. My pledge to every Iowan is that you will be able to cast your vote and your vote will count."

"Iowa is one of the best states in the nation for both voter participation and voter integrity. Participation and integrity are not mutually exclusive. We work on a bipartisan basis every day with Republicans and Democrats, and all 99 county auditors, to maintain the integrity of the vote. I will do everything in my power to ensure Iowa's elections remain clean and fair." — Paul Pate, Iowa Secretary of State

High on the list of complaints about Trump is his habit of speaking in rambling half-sentences, full of hyperbolic adjectives and unfinished thoughts. He rarely goes into detail of whatever it is he's talking about. Even when he's right, you're sitting there, on the edge of your seat, desperately hoping that he'll put that half-remembered point he read somewhere in context.

Here's the headline on a Trump in interview with ABC News discussing his claim of a rigged election: "There's a lot of stuff going on." Really? What kind of stuff? By whom? Where? When? Who did he hear this from?

Eventually Trump elaborates, "the kind of voter fraud, people who have been dead for ten years."

Reporters and election-integrity officials do find dead voters! The CBS Denver affiliate found, in two separate reports, four voters recorded as casting ballots after they died, and "dozens" of individuals still listed on the voter rolls after they died. No doubt, every one of those cases is a concern and deserves investigation. Anyone who gets to vote twice — for themselves and on behalf of the dead person — devalues the one vote that the rest of us get.

But keep in mind, Obama's margin of victory in Colorado was 137,858 votes. Cory Gardner's margin of victory in the 2014 Senate race was 39,688 votes. No one has found tens of thousands of dead voters casting ballots.

The CBS affiliate in Los Angeles found 265 in Southern California.

CBS2 compared millions of voting records from the California Secretary of State's office with death records from the Social Security Administration and found hundreds of so-called dead voters.

Specifically, 265 in Southern California and a vast majority of them, 215, in Los Angeles County alone.

The numbers come from state records that show votes were cast in that person's name after they died. In some cases, Goldstein discovered that they voted year after year.

Across all counties, Goldstein uncovered 32 dead voters who cast ballots in eight elections apiece, including a woman who died in 1988. Records show she somehow voted in 2014, 26 years after she passed away.

It remains unclear how the dead voters voted but 86 were registered Republicans, 146 were Democrats, including Cenkner.

Could that swing a close local election? Sure. But the Democratic victors in California's presidential and Senate elections in 2012 won by more than 2 million votes.

Trump later mentions, "People voting five times, or ten times, like we have in many communities."

There are cases of people who are registered to vote in two communities and voting in both places.

The New York Daily News, back in 2004:

Some 46,000 New Yorkers are registered to vote in both the city and Florida, a shocking finding that exposes both states to potential abuses that could alter the outcome of elections, a Daily News investigation shows. Registering in two places is illegal in both states, but the massive snowbird scandal goes undetected because election officials don't check rolls across state lines. The finding is even more stunning given the pivotal role Florida played in the 2000 presidential election, when a margin there of 537 votes tipped a victory to George W. Bush. Computer records analyzed by The News don't allow for an exact count of how many people vote in both places, because millions of names are regularly purged between elections. But The News found that between 400 and 1,000 registered voters have voted twice in at least one election, a federal offense punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Slate, back in 2004 as well:

The Orlando Sentinel found that 68,000 Florida voters are also registered in Georgia or North Carolina (the only two states it checked), 1,650 of whom voted twice in 2000 or 2002. The Kansas City Star discovered 300 "potential" cases of individual voter fraud, including Kansans voting in Missouri and St. Louisans voting in both the city and the surrounding suburbs. "I probably shouldn't have voted in Kansas," a Kansas City businesswoman named Lorraine Goodrich told the paper, owning up to the offense. "That was a mistake. Whoops! Oh my God, I'm going to get in so much trouble, aren't I?"

Will fraudulent votes be cast in the 2016 election? Almost certainly, and every case should be investigated and prosecuted. But will those fraudulent votes occur in large enough numbers to swing a state? So far, investigations have only found a few fraudulent votes here, a few dozen there, a couple hundred in Los Angeles. The closest margin in 2012 was Obama's 74,309 vote margin in Florida.

Then there's the question of illegal immigrants voting. A study released in October 2014 offered the shocking assertion that roughly 700,000 illegal immigrants voted in the 2008 election, and probably provided Barack Obama his narrow margin of victory in North Carolina. But note that the study extrapolated those massive numbers from a relatively small sample, and offered the surprising conclusion that most of the illegal immigrants told interviewers they already had photo identification that permitted them to vote.

The study concluded:

We also find that one of the favorite policies advocated by conservatives to prevent voter fraud appears strikingly ineffective. Nearly three quarters of the non-citizens who indicated they were asked to provide photo identification at the polls claimed to have subsequently voted.

Is it really that a significant number of illegal immigrants now have a fake photo ID that looks realistic enough to fool voter registration and ballot box authorities? (If that's the case, it's not really accurate to call them "undocumented immigrants," now is it? More like "forged document immigrants.") Or is it that the poll workers manning the polling places that day aren't really bothering to examine the IDs shown to them?

As I noted at that time, the interviewees could be telling a lie, confused, or their memories could be faulty. And we're not dealing with a ton of examples from these interviews:

Of the 27 non-citizens who indicated that they were "asked to show picture identification, such as a driver's license, at the polling place or election office," in the 2008 survey, 18 claimed to have subsequently voted, and one more indicated that they were "allowed to vote using a pro- visional ballot." Only 7 (25.9%) indicated that they were not allowed to vote after showing identification.

Voter fraud is a serious concern. It shouldn't be used as a preemptive excuse for a terrible campaign.

Middle School and the Greatest Plot Twists of All Time

This past weekend, I took my older son to see the kid-focused comedy Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life.

Ninety percent of this movie is exactly what is promised in the trailers: Two kids, fed up with the anal-retentive, hyper-oppressive rules of the standardized-testing obsessed principal, lead an insurrection against the regime with a series of increasingly more elaborate pranks. My son loved it.

However, it has one of the biggest, most jaw-dropping plot twists I've ever seen — probably particularly unexpected because it's coming in an otherwise cheery movie aimed at the Nickelodeon set.

Spoilers in

3 . . .

2 . . .

1 . . .

Our protagonist is Rafe, an artistic kid who's been in trouble in several other schools. On his first day in his new school, he finds Leo, a similarly rebellious friend he met at a previous school, and together they launch their campaign of mostly harmless mischief to protest the principal's heavy-handed disciplinary methods.

Early on in the movie, Rafe's mom mentions that it's been a rough few years for them, and a bit later, Rafe tells a teacher his younger brother died from cancer. About two-thirds of the way into the film, Rafe has a heart-to-heart with his mom, and she mentions, "I know your brother was your best friend." We pan to an old family picture showing Rafe, his mother, his younger sister, and Leo, who was his younger brother. The character of Leo we've been watching is entirely an imaginary/hallucinatory figure in Rafe's mind, a way for him to cope with losing his brother.

And then, we realize we never saw Leo interact with any character except Rafe, much like in The Sixth Sense. Put this one next to The Usual Suspects, Fight Club, and Primal Fear for shocking twists, even though it's a completely different kind of movie.

The result is a movie that isn't a heavy drama but isn't quite a light-hearted comedy after that point, either. Justice is done, Rafe's insurrection wins, he makes real friends, and he even explains to the girl he likes that he still talks to his younger brother. I'd recommend it to any parent, as long as the kids — and, sniff, sniff, any parent — who can handle a rip-your-heart-out twist like this.

Two more very old spoilers ahead . . .

I'm reminded the old NBC show Scrubs did something like this in the episode "My Screw Up" in which the audience sees events through the eyes of a character in denial — until the conclusion when he suddenly realizes that everyone around him is dressed in formal black not for a birthday party, but for a funeral.

And for sheer sudden tone shifts, the Miami Vice episode "Out Where the Buses Don't Run" spends about 50 minutes of its hour introducing us to a wacky, lovable mentally unstable retired cop who Crockett and Tubbs have to work with in order to resolve an old case. And in the last five minutes, we learn that the retired cop's mental issues weren't wacky or lovable at all and in fact the pressures of the job drove him to some intensely unsettling actions.

ADDENDA: Reed Galen, pointing out how the country needs change, even if it ends up electing the closest thing to the status quo to the Oval Office:

71% of the voters they questioned believe the United States is on the wrong track. As we conclude this tortuous and ugly election season, we must hope, and probably demand, that our elected leaders take a new tack on how they operate, begin putting those that elect them first and try out different ideas that should upset some of the most entrenched interests.