You Give Fraud a Bad Name

It’s easy to make fun of my home state of New Jersey. Yes, the turnpike is a blight, Jon Bon Jovi can’t sing, there really are mafiosos and too many strip malls, and we aren’t the friendliest people in the world. Before New Jersey went to the polls to elect a governor a couple weeks ago, a whole new smear made its way through political circles: that New Jersey is impossibly corrupt and that the fix is in for the Democrats. As with most conservative voter-fraud scares, this charge had more to do with race-baiting and delegitimizing potentially unfavorable election results than with securing the sanctity of the voting booth.

It’s true that there’s a very powerful Democratic machine in Camden and Newark, and soon-to-be-former Governor Jon Corzine milked urban New Jersey for all it was worth. But helping voters get to the polls, sending out operatives to knock on doors, and readying lawyers to make sure polling places operate smoothly—these machine tactics help you win an election, but they are not fraudulent, and both sides employ them when they can.

Conservative kvetchers usually have a more serious bogeyman in mind: voters using dead people’s names, campaign workers coercing or bribing people into voting for their man—that sort of thing. But their evidence is almost always mere innuendo. Consider The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, who leads a cottage industry of voter-fraud hyperventilators. The day before the election, Fund laughably tried to tie ACORN, that all-purpose conservative bugaboo, to anticipated wrong-doings in New Jersey: “Philly operatives associated in the past with ACORN may now be advising their Jersey cousins,” he warned. In other words, black people—and, furthermore, black people voting.

The conservative scare tactics always confuse voter-registration fraud, which is as harmless as illegitimately filling out a registration form, with voter fraud: when illegitimate people actually vote. Take poor Uremia Rojas, who told Fund that “a man with a clipboard knocked on my door and had me sign something so I could vote by mail. I was skeptical but signed and got a ballot. I never really wanted one.” I understand it can be distressing to possess a ballot that you don’t really want to fill out, but here’s a suggestion: Throw the ballot away!

The conservative pursuit of voter fraud has a long and sordid history. The Bush Justice Department sent its U.S. attorneys out hunting for it, but they turned up nothing—a few dozen cases of mistakes and misunderstandings, a few small-time conspiracies in local elections, but no evidence of corruption in federal or state elections. This, of course, wasn’t what the Bush administration wanted to hear, so they fired U.S. attorneys who they thought weren’t being aggressive enough.

Despite this pathetic record, fears of voter fraud have served to justify restrictive laws and tactics that end up disqualifying eligible voters. Six swing states, using flawed and possibly illegal criteria, purged “tens of thousands” of eligible voters from their rolls in the run-up to the 2008 election. Some states passed laws to restrict voter registration drives; the threat of some prankster signing up as “Mickey Mouse” is just that terrifying! And others require extensive photo identification from in-person voters, which serves not to reduce fraud (in-person voter fraud is extremely rare) but to exclude eligible voters who don’t have the right forms of identification. Naturally, it is a feature of these requirements, not a bug, that poor, inner-city minorities (read: Democrats) are those least likely to have things like driver’s licenses and passports.

There’s a really simple remedy to voter fraud, insofar as it even exists, and that is universal voter registration. You can’t pretend to be eligible to vote if everyone’s automatically registered. This is one area among many in which the U.S. lags behind other advanced democracies. Of course, Republicans dread the possibility that we might catch up; an influx of young, poor, and minority voters would cost them many an election.

Sure, it will benefit Democrats to universalize voter registration, and self-interest is a much more powerful motivator than respect for rights. But the Democrats would clearly have the latter on their side as well, if they had the gall to bring the issue up. When the government takes a right away, or makes it harder to exercise, that’s a much more serious offense than an individual’s abuse of her prerogative. So, ignore conservatives’ crocodile tears over voter fraud; New Jersey may be home to money-laundering mayors and kidney-selling rabbis, but it’s not, you know, Afghanistan.

Sam Barr ’11 is a government concentrator in Dunster House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.