@James: I think that there is far more danger of concerted efforts at vote caging preventing valid votes than there is of people casting invalid votes. I simply do not believe the accusations of election fraud are made in good faith.

One person one vote is right one. I’m in favor. I’m not defending any fraud. Just pointing out that the problem is small, compared to the firestorm of controversy, and that the real fraud in the vr program is being commited against ACORN by workers who would rather copy from the phone book than do their job. ACORN is required by law to submit all the cards it collects, even the ones it catches as bad, incomplete, or obviously fake. That’s the real deal. In the end you will find that the vast majority of the cards ACORN submitted were for real people who want to cast ballots in November and do it legally.

That doesn’t cheapen the right to vote, it celebrates it.

@ Nathanhj - Melissa IS a legal expert! I’m a legal expert too! Guess what? I happen to know a number of legal experts who would disagree with your statement. I contacted both Mr. Hasen and Mr. Tokaji and they both think you spend too much time commenting on blogs.

@ Everyone Else - How can you defend registration/voter fraud?!? Maybe it doesn’t change the outcome of national races, but it’s against the law and it cheapens the right to vote. Can’t we agree that one person one vote is a good idea?

Quoting only a an e-voting expert and not a voting law expert doesn’t really give anyone a good idea of what’s going on either. I’m surprise you could not track down Rick Hasen at Loyola in Los Angeles, widely acknowledged to be an expert on voting law or Dan Tokaji at Moritz in Ohio to talk through this stuff. They’ve spent years researching and writing about it.

Further what any legal expert will also tell you is that the amount of voter fraud in the United States is miniscule and has almost no effect on the outcome of elections. They will also tell you things like voter purging, no match no vote laws, voter ID and documentary proof of citizenship requirements keep far more legitimate voters from casting ballots than they stop illegitimate ones.

In the absence of any other metrics, having one that shows actual convictions and one that shows actual prosecutions (both in the reports I referenced above), provide useful context for the relative frequency of this kind of stuff.

The number of people tried and convicted for voter fraud is in no way an exact calculation of the number of times voter fraud was committed — as any expert will tell you, the data simply isn’t good enough to know exactly how many fraudulent votes were cast in a single election. So tossing around a statistic like the “death by lightning” example without clarification is either wishful thinking, or simply an attempt at spin.

This passage is indicative:

“Meanwhile, ACORN is rushing to restore its reputation with a PR blitz including a press release that states the following:

According to [voting rights] experts, spreading fears of fraudulent voting—which happens less often in the U.S. than death by lightning—is done to discredit voter registration efforts and justify restrictive laws that place additional barriers to full participation for all Americans.

For the record, around 90 people per year are killed by lightning in the U.S. Investigators are looking into at least 2,100 possible bogus voter applications in Indiana alone—not to mention thousands more in Ohio, Michigan, and Nevada. So there goes that theory.”

First, an investigation is not the same thing as proof.

Second, do you know what “possible bogus voter applications” could encompass? Incompletes, duplicates (people already registered when they thought they were not, people who sign multiple cards in a short period of time), bad handwriting, as well as people who do not exist are all reasons why cards could be bad.

Third you are commiting a basic error in defining your terms and you end up comparing apples to oranges. The passage out lighting refers to “voter fraud” - that is, people casting illegal ballots by either claiming to be someone they are not, or voting multiple times, or voting when they are not eligible to do so. From 2002-2005, there were 82 convictions on the Federal level for these offenses. That’s less than 90, even in new math.

The 2100 number refers to voter registrations applications, not votes. And if those applications are determined to be bad, then they will never be put on the rolls and anyone who’s info appears on them will not be able to vote. In other words, the safeguards in the system will have worked. But for the purposes of your cutesy turn of phrase the 2100 number simply doesn’t apply. You want to find instances of people voting illegally. And you will find that it will in fact be fewer people than the number hit by lighting.

For more on this you can go here (which is where you should have gone in the first place): http://projectvote.org/fileadmin/ProjectVote/Publications/Politics_of_Voter_Fraud_Final.pdf

For the truth from the horse’s mouth, you can go here: http://www.acorn.org/index.php?id=17855

“

Sorry, but this semantic difference that is rarely observed really drives me nuts,
Connie