Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at
Risk
By John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky
(Encounter Books, $16.99, 256 pages)
The cry, “Bring out yer dead,” is dark humor of a high
order in the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy
Grail. When it could easily serve as the slogan for a
presidential campaign’s get out the vote effort, however, it’s not
so amusing. Rather, it would call for a sensible and well-informed
discussion on election integrity. We should be pleased that two
very experienced experts have authored a book that meets this need
fairly and squarely.
John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky both have impressive
credentials on voting rights and “vote fraud.” Mr. Fund, a senior
editor of this magazine, is the author of Stealing Elections:
How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, published in 2004; he
has also authored numerous opinion articles on the subject for the
Wall Street Journal, New Republic, and other
publications. Mr. von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the
Heritage Foundation, is a former member of the Federal Election
Commission; he had responsibility for enforcing federal voting
rights laws when he served as counsel in the Department of Justice;
he has also served as an election official in both Virginia and
Georgia.
In Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your
Vote at Risk, Messrs. Fund and von Spakovsky have
co-authored a very readable and informative new book, one that is
welcome as both a useful reference and a persuasive response to
rampant inaccurate reporting and political posturing about efforts
to reduce fraud and increase public confidence in our electoral
system.
Who’s Counting? treats readers to a trove of actual
facts about the tactics of fraudsters, along with lucid
explanations of the relevant legal issues. By way of illustration,
we learn that a Pew Center study published in February 2012 found
that 1.8 million dead people are still on state rolls of registered
voters, and 2.75 million voters are registered in more than one
state. Small wonder, then, that a Rasmussen poll found 82 percent
of Americans — including 67 percent of African-Americans and 67
percent of Democrats — “supported requiring that voters prove
their identity before voting.”
In addition, the authors explain that the Supreme Court and
lower federal courts have consistently upheld voter identification
laws. The charge that reasonable identification requirements are
somehow illegal or unconstitutional is utterly baseless.
Nevertheless, and despite well-documented evidence of fraud and
abuse in numerous states and localities, “only 17 states require
some form of documentation in order to vote.”
The authors’ brief mention of requirements in other countries is
also revealing. One striking example is our southern neighbor,
Mexico. To obtain voter credentials in Mexico, “a citizen must
present a photo, write a signature, and give a thumbprint. To guard
against tampering, the voter card includes a picture with a
hologram covering it, a magnetic strip, and a serial number. To
cast a ballot, voters must present the card and be certified by a
thumbprint scanner.” This system protected the integrity of the
electoral process, and in 2000 Mexico elected its first
opposition-party president (Vicente Fox) in 70 years. As this and
other examples illustrate, by international standards the United
States’ voter registration and election processes are unusually
vulnerable to fraud.
Most examples of actual vote fraud presented in the book
involved Democrats, but Fund and von Spakovsky are prudently
sensitive to charges of partisanship, and they address the issue
forthrightly. “Voter fraud occurs both in Republican strongholds
such as Kentucky hollows and Democratic bastions such as south
Texas.” Moreover, when Republicans “operated political machines…
they were fully capable of bending — and breaking — the rules.”
Still, as Larry Sabato has noted, “Republican-base voters are
middle-class and not easily induced to commit fraud,” and the inner
city populations that “appear to be available and more vulnerable
to an invitation to participate in vote fraud tend to lean
Democratic.”
For the enlightenment of skeptics, the book provides detailed
descriptions of numerous vote fraud enterprises, and they are by no
means limited to big city political machines. The authors acquaint
us with fraud that perpetuated the power of local Democratic Party
politicians in rural Alabama and Mississippi — where both
perpetrators and victims were largely African-American, and the
candidates on both sides were Democrats — to a variety of schemes
in Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Georgia, New York,
Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, the District of Columbia, and
elsewhere.
We also learn of the methodology of vote fraud. Absentee
ballots, early voting, and voting by mail are especially
vulnerable. In more egregious schemes, voters are provided
“assistance” in the polling place by officials who actively advance
the fraud by directing voters how to mark their ballots, a coercive
tactic to which the elderly are particularly vulnerable. Of course,
voting by non-citizens, illegal aliens, dead people, and “deadwood”
voters who have moved but remain on the rolls, are all facilitated
by lax registration requirements and failure to clean up voter
rolls as required by federal law.
Just as we read how fraud is implemented, so we are informed
about what works to deter it. Voter ID is vital because it “can
deter not just impersonation fraud at the polls, but also voting
under fictitious voter registrations, double-voting by individuals
registered in more than one state or locality, and voting by
illegal aliens.” Unfortunately, in “states without identification
requirements, election officials have no means for preventing the
casting of fraudulent votes.”
The authors make a strong case for voter identification laws and
provide extensive data demonstrating that such requirements have
not suppressed turnout. They likewise debunk claims that many poor
and minority citizens lack photo identification, with detailed
studies supporting the common sense notion that, in today’s world,
virtually everyone has “photo ID.”
The relatively lengthy chapter on “Holder’s Justice Department”
is essential reading. This is especially so because the national
media have been conspicuously silent on the very aggressive
politicization of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which is
responsible for enforcing federal voting laws. Unfortunately, “fair
and impartial enforcement of the law is hampered by the radical
ideological makeup of almost all of the employees in the Civil
Rights Division, especially the Voting Section.” Career attorneys
in that office have been told that the Obama administration will
not, as a matter of policy, support “race neutral” enforcement of
civil rights laws.
Under Eric Holder, the Department of Justice has declined to
pursue clear violations of the law, such as intimidation of white
voters by armed members of the New Black Panthers, and has shown
contempt for the law by refusing to respond when its own conduct is
investigated. The authors have explored this subject thoroughly,
and their carefully documented report is truly alarming.
The authors also address other election-related topics that
should be of interest to concerned citizens. One of these is the
“national popular vote scheme,” a proposed interstate compact that
would essentially nullify the Electoral College provisions of the
Constitution. We are provided a succinct review of the history and
purpose of the Electoral College, which “prevents candidates from
winning an election by focusing solely on high-population urban
centers, and forces them to seek the support of a larger cross
section of the American electorate.” Fund and von Spakovsky offer a
thoughtful and informative discussion of why the proposal is almost
certainly unconstitutional. And beyond that, they describe the
incentives for nationwide vote fraud, and the potential for equally
extensive recount disputes, implicit in the scheme. Readers will
come away with a better understanding of just how fraught with
peril the proposal is.
Who’s Counting? concludes with a chapter that
enumerates reasonable measures state and local governments — and
citizens — can take “to safeguard America’s elections and improve
the integrity of the process.” These include voter identification
laws, “a basic requirement for secure elections” that “should be
implemented in all states.” In addition, the authors propose steps
to assure that all voters are citizens, to reduce the likelihood of
absentee ballot fraud, to provide for robust voter registration
databases, and to increase information sharing among states to
eliminate duplicate registrations and otherwise keep the lists
clean.
In their concluding recommendations, the authors urge that we
avoid “any attempt to create artificial barriers to voter
participation,” while recognizing that “citizenship requires
orderly, clear, and vigorous procedures to ensure that the
integrity of our elections is maintained.”
This is an excellent primer on vote fraud and election issues,
which I heartily commend to readers on both sides of today’s
political divide.
