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A glimpse of the inconceivable scale of Democratic Party voter fraud
Karl D. writes:
Slate has a piece on the fact that 41 percent of Milwaukee’s black voters have disappeared since the last election and pathetically claim that they have moved.
LA replies:
I don’t get the point.
Karl replies:
The voters probably didn’t exist in the first place. It is all DNC voter fraud tricks. Like registering dead people to vote.
- end of initial entry -
N. writes:
A group called the Voter Integrity Project has a list compiled from state records of deaths that it compared to voter registration lists.
About 30,000 dead people are registered to vote in North Carolina, according to their work.
This is an effect of the Motor Voter law of the Clinton years, which not only made registration easier, but limited the states in how often they can purge voter registration rolls. The opportunity for fraud is obvious.
Ken Hechtman writes:
If you’re using phrases like “vote fraud on an inconceivable scale,” you’ve obviously never worked off a four year old voter list in an all-rental city core neighborhood. People in that kind of neighborhood move around a lot and a four year old list is always going to be garbage. This is such a problem that one of the first things I did when I started working on election campaigns ten years ago was to start up an unofficial (and not completely legal) system of sharing lists between federal, provincial and municipal campaigns just to keep all of our records up to date.
For the record, the Census figure for five year mobility for the whole state of Wisconsin is 46 percent, For downtown Milwaukee it’s 74 percent (on page 5).
Andrew B. writes:
As one of your commenters noted, the missing voters are primarily an artifact of people moving and not reregistering at their new address. It has nothing to do with voter impersonation at all. When I was in college and starting out after college, I had 13 addresses in 10 years. Needless to say, this made keeping up with voting a difficult and trying experience.
If your original commenter were the least bit familiar with election returns, he would also know that the lowest turnouts by both registrations and voting age population are in poor black and Hispanic districts, closely followed by poor white districts, where inevitably the ill-informed are constantly crying wolf about overvoting and voter impersonation fraud.
Voter impersonation is essentially non-existent and impossible. The idea that people could successfully move around from polling station to polling station voting multiple times in front of partisan election judges and poll watchers and precinct captains who know all the local voters by sight is pretty silly too. Real and successful vote fraud occurs on the inside by rigging the count of machines at the outset, or through absentee ballot fraud.
This is also what makes the whole ID to Vote issue so irksome. Why should you need a fee based government permit/license to exercise a basic constitutional right, and speaking from the perspective of the German peoples, a basic human right—a voice in self government? What is next? Requiring government Id’s to have free speech or get a jury trial?
LA replies:
Andrew B. writes:
“The idea that people could successfully move around from polling station to polling station voting multiple times in front of partisan election judges and poll watchers and precinct captains who know all the local voters by sight is pretty silly too.”
Andrew B. claims to be highly knowledgeable on the issue and dismisses others as ignorant. However, his assured statement that poll watchers in big cities, such as, you know, Chicago, can recognize and identify all voters by sight, as though they were living in Dixville Notch, is ludicrous and makes me doubt his judgment and knowledge on this issue. News articles in past elections have reported on the phenomenon of people voting multiple times and boasting about it.
Buck writes:
So, what we have, here in the United States, the leading “democracy” in the world, is a system in which free men and women have to be searched for and discovered, or otherwise found and identified, informed and convinced, registered, kept track of, then transported on time to a place that they would likely never visit on their own or may have never even known of or cared that existed, as their right: their polling place. And these “citizens” seem to be the most important Democrats on any given election day; the totally ignorant and uninformed vagrant voters. Real or not.
Ed H. writes:
One thing that is clear to me is the willingness of the Democratic Party to commit voter fraud. Does anyone believe that the requirement to produce a photo ID at the polls is an impossible hardship for anyone? They have no problem producing a valid ID to cash their welfare checks, now do they? The number of people who really have no form of ID in this country is minuscule.
Wouldn’t the sensible thing be to get these people an ID card of some kind? But no, the only solution for the Democrats is to ban the citizenship/ID requirement altogether.
LA replies:
I agree. To me the Dems’ absolute opposition to Voter ID is absolute proof that they are committing and intend to keep committing voter fraud.
William R. writes:
Mr. Hechtman makes a good counterpoint, but I don’t see how it speaks to the thrust of the original article. If Quantavious and DuShawn swap trap houses between 2008 and 2012, and thus become individually lost to the Democrats, how does that affect the overall efficacy of the Democrats’ GOTV efforts? Isn’t one ghetto black as good as another for those purposes—even more so with Obama in office?
While ghetto blacks might be more micro-mobile than middle class whites and Asians, I would think that the latter are more macro-mobile, moving across regions to take higher-paying jobs. By canvassing the same inner-city areas, wouldn’t you turn up most of the same people, even if a majority of them are a mile away from where they were before? I don’t imagine that black population centers have shifted all that much over the past four years, and I’m sure that the Democrats pay very close attention to such data.
September 5
Andrew B. replies to LA:
It would probably be instructive to your readers who don’t live in cities to get a glimpse of what voting and elections are actually like in the city.
I lived in Philadelphia, and was registered as a Republican there in a Republican neighborhood in the Northeast (the entire city was once a well oiled Republican machine, we were among the last remnants of that). Every election, the Republican and Democratic precinct committeemen (there are two for each precinct of each party) were out canvassing the neighborhood, focusing in particular on their voters and registered independents, but also visiting people of the opposite party so they could come to recognize them.
The canvass has multiple purposes: they can find out if any voters need a ride to the poll, they can help people apply for absentee ballots, and they know who the voters are and what their preferences are and whether they are likely to vote, which helps create a count of voters as well as a target list of people to be gotten to the polls. Each precinct in the city is only about 1,000 people, which means that in a typical election, about 500 or 600 turn out to vote, which was split slightly in favor of the Republicans in my particular precinct. The parties use this information to build up a database of likely vote tallies to be expected from each precinct, ward, and thus the entire city well ahead of the vote. This has many obvious uses, the biggest of which is that if it looks like your candidates are going to lose for lack of turnout, you can put extra energy into getting people to the polls and soliciting absentee ballots. Sometimes the canvass would be combined with a local candidate walking the neighborhood to press the flesh with voters. That is most common for State Representative and City Council, but I’ve done door-to-door walking with Rick Santorum and local committeemen in 1992 in Pittsburgh after he was gerrymandered into a new Congressional district where the Democrats thought they could defeat him. And I’ve heard of other candidates for Congress doing personal canvassing, especially in walkable cities, towns, and suburbs.
At the polling place, the committeemen stand outside the polls and hand out sample ballots to their party members and allied independents so that they are informed of who the party has endorsed in a primary and what the slate is in a general election, greeting as many as possible by name, and checking people off the registration lists as they come in. This comes in handy later in the day, as one of the committeemen can go out and recontact voters they previously met at their houses who haven’t appeared yet starting after 5 or 6 p.m. to make sure they show up to vote. The committeemen are performing electioneering, so they must keep a certain distance from the entrance of the polling place.
Inside the polling place, voters must wait in lines that usually take 30 to 60 minutes to get through where they then have to run a gauntlet of two poll watchers (one from each party) and a judge of elections. These people are all from the neighborhood and for obvious reasons of election integrity, know all the voters by sight as well. They also keep running tallies of the number of voters who have shown up from each party and independents, which allows for later checks vs. the totals to ensure against overvoting, padded totals, and falsified returns. As you check in, you must give your name, and then sign a matching signature in the election book prior to being allowed into the booth. If there is any question of your identity, or something is wrong on the voter list, you get handed a provisional ballot to be sorted out later and are not granted admission to the machine booths.
I’ve also lived in more overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhoods in a number of cities including Philadelphia, and the same process takes place there. Each precinct is its own little village-like neighborhood, and the boundaries are usually partially related to other institutions in the city like Catholic parish, elementary school, and neighborhood boundaries, promoting natural social cohesion and identification.
I’m sure some of this seems strange to isolated suburban voters who are used to TV ad based campaigns and no contact from the party beyond the occasional pollster, but this is the way elections have been contested in this country for most of its history—by identifying your voters and driving them to turn out for your candidate in bigger numbers than your opponent. Elections are not popularity contests where the campaigns sit around disinterestedly hoping the people will support them.
The most obvious thing about this process is that going about a city attempting to pass yourself off as someone you are not is difficult and time consuming, and leaves you vulnerable to challenges at the sign in from suspicious partisan poll watchers. You of course need to identify people on the registration list who definitely will not show up to vote and who would be unknown to the partisans at the polls and then attempt to impersonate that person and match their signature. The prevalence of such conduct is shown by the almost total lack of prosecutions for fraud of this sort, when people in the opposing party have every incentive to make sure you are who you say you are and that you don’t get to vote if they don’t know you. Obviously, it’s far easier if you want to win by fraud, if still difficult, to submit absentee ballot applications to the county in the name of people who have moved away and then intercept the ballots in the mail, fill them out, and send them back and hope they are accepted. Or to go to nursing homes and “help” residents fill out their ballots. Or registering to vote at your vacation/second home and voting in both places, one or more absentee (as uncovered with New Yorkers voting in Florida absentee a second time). Etc. Which is why you almost always hear of voting fraud involving absentee and mail-in voting. There is nothing like rooting out fraud by requiring people to show up at their local precincts in front of their neighbors to vote. This is why weekend voting, a mandatory holiday for election day, or multi-day voting but only in person at the neighborhood would be such a significant improvement for election integrity over using mail-in ballots. No ID is required when you must run the gauntlet of your neighbors.
LA replies:
Interesting. I have lived in Manhattan for many years and have never seen anything like what you describe. The voting procedure is entirely anonymous. I show up at the voting place, go to the table for my precinct, and I sign the page underneath my previous signatures for previous elections. No one knows who I am other than that.
Karl D. writes:
You said:
I have lived in Manhattan for many years and have never seen anything like this. It’s entirely anonymous. I show up at the voting place, go to the table for my precinct, and I sign the page underneath my previous signatures for previous elections. No one knows who I am other than that.
I tend to agree with you. I was born and raised in New York City. I used to accompany my mother to the polls when she would vote (before I was of voting age) and I don’t recall anyone knowing her except for maybe another voter waiting on line. As an adult I have voted in Manhattan (for many years) as well as San Francisco and no one knew me in my polling places either. It took until I moved to a small town before the people working at my polling place knew me and I knew them.
Benjamin T. writes:
I live in downtown Richmond, Virginia, in a very walkable neighborhood, and have never seen anything like what Andrew B. describes. In addition, his claim that the precinct committeemen can remember about 1,000 people by sight is specious. Research has shown that the largest manageable social group, i.e. where everyone can know everyone else, is about 150 people. While such trained committeemen may be better than average at remembering faces and names, that’s an order of magnitude difference.
Also, it is well-established that races have difficulty with distinguishing individual members of other races. In mixed-race precincts such as my own, that adds additional difficulty to any such committeemen’s task.
Keep up the great work Mr. Auster.
Robert B. writes:
That’s a wonderful political machine that Andrew B. describes. However, I have witnessed voter fraud with my own eyes and know that Democrats will fight back against any Republican who might challenge voters’ legitimacy. What I saw on one occasion was a school bus load of “homeless” people being vouched for by a few college age people. Minnesota state law says that the homeless must vote in the precinct where their shelter exists and no other place. The problem was that there is no shelter in my precinct—in fact, there isn’t a shelter within five miles of my home. I made this point to the election judges. They shrugged their shoulders, said that they had people vouch for them, and let them vote. I phoned Republican party headquarters and informed them. They did nothing. I had the licence plate number of the bus.
That same election, a middle aged woman from Wisconsin was caught paying homeless people with packs of cigarettes to vote Democratic. She was not prosecuted by the Democratic County Attorney.
This last election, over 22,000 same day registrations were returned to the election commission stamped “no such address.” That’s a lot for a state with a population the size of Minnesota and explains how Mark Dayton won. There were even more in 2008. I saw those ballots. Most had only two names checked off—Obama and Franken. That’s how they won here. Heck, even the Secretary of State’s assistant was caught voting multiple times. Both were ACORN people.
Max P. writes:
Like the neocons telling me not to worry about Iraq because it would be a cakewalk, I somehow cannot accept Andrew B.’s argument that the missing voters in Milwaukee are nothing to be concerned about, and that the checks and balances of the system will prevent fraud.
The potential for voter fraud is always there and is documented to have occurred in past high-profile elections. The Washington Post ran a story in November 2000, documenting some of the shenanigans that took place in Chicago in 1960. From that story is this interesting passage:
So Mazo went out and looked. He went to Chicago, obtained lists of voters in precincts that seemed suspicious and started checking their addresses.
“There was a cemetery where the names on the tombstones were registered and voted,” he recalls. “I remember a house. It was completely gutted. There was nobody there. But there were 56 votes for Kennedy in that house.”
The trouble is cities by their very nature are anonymous and large, and thus offer the opportunity for people to commit fraud. Add to that a highly segregated population with a no-snitch code, who routinely vote 95 percent for one party, and an opposing party who walks on pins and needles so as to not upset that population and bring upon itself criticism from the mainstream media.
Andrew B. says that committing fraud would be tough because the opposing party would have a poll watcher challenging folks he did not recognize. Or that others in the neighborhood would help look out for fraud. Does one really believe a Republican poll watcher, presumably an elderly white person, is going to challenge black voters in a queue of 500? Or would it be a black Republican poll worker, who lives in this same area, fighting tooth and nail to prevent his neighbors from stealing the election? In a safe, civil neighborhood, I would accept Andrew’s point. But this is not going to happen in the more lawless parts of the town.
In my state in 2008, the difference between McCain and Obama was less than 5,000 votes. So it doesn’t take much to alter an election. And the only place to generate fraudulent votes on a large scale is cities.
A town of 1,000 people, with 650 registered voters, is going to cause an alarm to go off if they submit 800 votes. But an urban core with a quarter of a million people, many of whom are ineligible foreign nationals and felons, would not cause too much notice if their vote total was plus or minus 10,000 votes from the previous election.
Here is some food for thought. Everyone knows that Al Gore won the nationwide popular vote in 2000 over George Bush by approximately 543,000 votes. (See Wikipedia article.)
However, do people realize that outside of Cook County, Illinois, George Bush won the popular vote? Gore carried Cook County by a whopping 746,000 votes.
That’s a lot of votes to win by, and because Chicago is so large, no one challenged it since the numbers seemed reasonable given Chicago’s enormous population.
On side note, keep that example from the 2000 election in mind the next time some Democrat tries to persuade us to abandon the electoral college for a nationwide popular vote.
LA replies:
I’m not sure what your last point is.
Max P. replies to LA:
The point is high level Democrats like Al Gore are pushing for a national popular vote to determine the presidency. To many people this sound logical. But to me this makes the fruits of fraud that much greater.
Currently, if you commit major fraud in a big city like Chicago, you might end up winning the state of Illinois and its 20 electoral votes. Given that you need 270 electoral votes to win, this certainly helps, but it in no way ensures your victory. Thus in Al Gore’s case, he won Chicago by over 700 thousand votes which easily gave him Illinois. However, since we do not base elections upon the nationwide popular vote, all he won was Illinois’ electoral votes.
Therefore, a candidate would still need to win other states in order to obtain the required 270 electoral votes. He might even have to commit a Chicago-type fraud in other states to pull this off. But doing this increases the level of difficulty and requires more shenanigans in more states and cities.
If instead the election were determined by the national popular vote, then Al Gore’s massive win in Chicago would have handed him the election given that his vote difference there was greater than his total nationwide vote difference over Bush.
So I wrote that final point as a reminder to folks to think about this issue because I see it gaining traction and it worries me. You will note that it is the Democrats pushing for this, not the republicans.
LA replies:
Ok, but there is also a factor that might very well make it harder for the Democrats to win a popular election for the presidency. This has been discussed in past years, and it was the reason why Democrats in the past, after initially calling for the popular vote, pulled back from it. As I remember, the reason is this. Under the electoral vote system, a relative handful of nonwhite votes located in an urban region can help the Democrats win that state’s electoral votes, but in a single national popular vote those same votes would not be significant. Nonwhite cities give the Dems a lock on certain states’ electoral votes. That advantage would be lost in a single national popular vote system.
Buck writes:
Andrew B.’s account is bizarre to me.
I’ve voted at the same high school for over twenty years. No one has ever recognized and greeted me by name. I stand in a long line of strangers and walk up to tables staffed by strangers to find the one indicating the first letter of my last name. I say my name and the stranger hands me a ballot. I sign no log book containing previous signatures or my voting history. No one knows me from Adam, literally; Adam who lives down the street and who says that he never bothers to vote. I cast a useless vote in Montgomery County, Maryland. Republican voters know that they’re useless and only show for the weak satisfaction of cancelling a Democrat vote. There are 3,681 registered voters in my precinct. Only 439 showed up for the April primary, primaries being an even bigger waste of time. I’m certain that I could walk back into that high school gym and vote under another name. What are the odds that changing shifts of strangers staffing any given table would know Adam from Adam? Way less than fifty percent of Republicans vote here. It would be pointless, but there are hundreds of abandoned Republican ballots if someone wanted to.
It’s an empty feeling, knowing how useless my vote is, and knowing how many useless voters really count.
Buck writes:
This whole sordid process of canvassing and electioneering, as opposed to campaigning for informed and concerned votes, is a measure of the pathetic state of our country. When teams of apparatchiks go scavenging for clueless voters who care only about handouts, how well is our damaged system ever again really going to work?
Clark Coleman writes:
A couple of replies to Andrew B. about Philadelphia. First, columns at NRO concerning the 2008 election mentioned that there were all-black precincts in Philadelphia with not a single registered Republican, and the GOP was able to get zero poll watchers for more than one precinct. Second, there were precincts in Philadelphia that had more votes cast than there were registered voters in that precinct. We are talking about 101 percent and 102 percent turnout. We have had 98 percent or better “turnout” in precincts in Philadelphia and St. Louis several times in the last few presidential elections. Perhaps the fraud is not committed by impersonation, but anything that reduces the votes of the Fraud Party is fine with me.
Buck writes:
Just saw this on Drudge:
“A Democratic state legislator from east Arkansas, his father and two campaign workers pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiracy to commit election fraud after federal prosecutors said they bribed absentee voters and destroyed ballots in a special election last year.”
September 6
Andrew B. writes:
Clark Coleman suggests there are Philadelphia precincts with no registered Republcians and returns over 100 percent of the registered population. I have actual Philadelphia voter registration and election results data, and can assure him that even the blackest Democratic precinct has registered Republicans, that Republicans got votes in every single precinct, and that no precincts have turnout in excess of registration. The highest turnout in the city is in the white middle class precincts in the northeast and northwest, at around 75 percent. The lowest is around 25 percent and is in the poorest black and hispanic precincts. Part of the low turnout is an artifact of people moving and registrations becoming inactive but not yet being purged, and part is a result of apathy among poor voters. Turnout is very high in stable middle class black neighborhoods.
2008 election results for Philadelphia are available online.
It would be appreciated if people spending their time alleging fraud can name the precinct in which the fraud occurred so we could all see the numbers and the local party can take action.
If they can’t actually cite real places, their time is better spent working to elect good men to office instead of crying wolf. I recall discussing this once with an NRO person after the 2004 election, and the single precinct they cited was flagged for having more votes than the 2000 census showed it having residents, not more votes than registered voters. What the person could not know since they were not from here was that a large apartment building had been built in the precinct between elections and hundreds of new voters had moved in.
Immersing youself in this type of distracting nonsense and sitting on your butt complaining about it are why Republcians don’t win elections. Elections are won by getting out among the people turning out your vote, not whining or calling the process sordid. Losers spend their energy whining about process and imaginary slights.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 04, 2012 09:30 AM | Send
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