When you hear a conservative blubbering about voter ID or dead people and illegal immigrants voting you know they’re blowing smoke, right? I mean, it’s a conservative. In the real world where truth matters several studies and investigations have concluded that voter fraud at the polls is “vanishingly rare”. But how rare is “vanishingly”, exactly?
The Heritage Foundation, that prominent conservative “think” tank, in a dazzlingly ineffective attempt to convince America that voter fraud is rampant, has a database of actual cases. They list a whopping 13 instances of voter impersonation this century, and two of those are really the same case so they actually only have 12. One of the 12 was a prank, one was done deliberately to prove it was possible, which it failed to do. That leaves us with 10 actual cases of intentional voter impersonation in 20 years, and we’re talking a lot of elections, not just nationals. Some of these impersonations were in county commissioner and even school board elections. In fact, there have been over a billion ballots cast in this country during that time period, so if you divide 10 by a billion you basically get 0. That’s so rare it’s bleeding.
Considering that conservatives gerrymander, sabotage polling places and hours, tamper with absentee ballots, purge voter rolls of tens of thousands of legal voters and try, in short, every damn thing they can think of to suppress the vote, perhaps the strangest thing about this scarcity is that they themselves don’t indulge in impersonation. One might wonder why. And while we ponder that we might also ponder Russian hacking, Trump’s voter fraud panel and the purging of voter rolls, because these are all things better understood if we first know a few facts about voter registration and what I call Scenario 3.
Under the Hood
Each state maintains a voter database. Absent a nationally mandated format, there are trivial variations. One state, for example, may call the field that contains date of birth “DOB”, another “Birthdate”. Both fields contain the same information though. Since they all drive the same process, the management of elections, they are all functionally the same. They will all have, among other things, the voter’s name, address, date of birth, precinct and status. Status is usually “Active” or one of a small set of inactive categories, such as “awaiting confirmation of citizenship” or “awaiting correct street address”. Some states register party affiliation, some don’t.
Each state also keeps a voter history. It records whether a person voted in an election. It does NOT know how you voted. States like Michigan that don’t have registered party also keep a record of which ballot you choose in a primary – Democratic or Republican.
The primary use of the voter registration file is to produce poll books. When you vote, you identify yourself (more on that later) to a poll worker who then matches you to a record in the poll book. No match, no vote. With a match you get a ballot, the ballot has an identifying code, and later, after you’ve turned in your ballot and it gets counted your voter history record is updated to show that you voted in that election.
You can slice and dice this data by party, gender, age group, county, precinct, street, side of the street, block, or combinations of whatever fields float your boat. You can assess how avid a voter is. Do they vote in every election, just the presidentials, hardly at all? You can discover timeless truths like the voters of one age group who live on the even side of a certain block of a certain street vote more often in off-year elections than the same voters across from them.
This data is publicly available. In some states, like North Carolina and Ohio, you can simply download it from a website. Others charge a fee. Michigan, for example, wants $23. Georgia soaks you for $250, Oregon $2000, Wisconsin a mind-boggling $12,500. And yes, that is outrageous.
Notice you do not get access to the actual database. You get an edited copy of the data, a snapshot at a precise moment in time. So your data is always stale. No sooner is your snapshot taken than the database gets new data. You also don’t get everything the real data has. Michigan has my full date of birth but the copy I get contains only my birth year. You also never get social security number. Name plus SSN or full date of birth opens the door to identity theft.
Russian Hackers
A copy of the data is of course useless to nefarious hackers. To properly meddle with voter records you’d need to hack into some Secretary of State servers, which we know has been tried, and, in the case of Illinois at least, with some success. Most of this hacking, if not all, is done by these guys:
Illinois says Boris and Natasha didn’t alter any data. If you’re wondering how they know, they do periodic backups of the data and it’s a simple matter to compare today’s data with a previous version. Question then: why didn’t the Russkis alter anything?
Remember, their goal is to sway elections, not ruin them. They need to be sneaky, they need not to be caught. Remember too, this is not vote counts, this is voter registrations. So what could they do? Purge some democrats? Day late and a dollar short. The Republican secretaries of state are all over that one. They could screw up addresses, move people into different precincts so they can’t vote, but you can only do so much of that before folks figure it out. Probably not enough to sway an important election.
Seems like, other than cheering on their allies in the Republican Party there doesn’t seem much they can do. Without getting caught that is. But what if they wanted to screw up an election? That would be easy, right? They could simply zap the entire database! Ah, but don’t forget those backups. Yesterday’s version no doubt resides on separate media, so the zap would only purge the most recently registered voters. I’m assuming, of course, that the various secretaries of state have enough damn sense to do daily backups.
It seems, then, that really all they get from hacking into voter registration databases is current, not stale, data and avoidance of Wisconsin’s outlandish fee.
Trump’s Panel
Now for Trump’s 2017 voter fraud panel. Bit of a head scratcher, this one. Why all the bruhaha? While some of the states soak saps like you and me for their voter data, they all give it up free to the two major parties. So the GOP already had this stuff, right? Yet many states refused to comply. Huh?
Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed the administration only wanted what anyone could get and non-compliance was nothing but a political stunt. Kentucky’s Republican Secretary of State, however, in her refusal, mentions additional data in the request, namely partial social security number. Cue the spooky music. Whatever could they do with your SSN? It’s just your ID in things like your social security, Medicare and IRS records, to name a few.
In cases like this I always wonder if Sarah Sanders knowingly lied or was being played. Whatever the case, it’s clear the administration wanted more than the publicly available stuff. Question is why.
And I’m not the only one puzzled. Actual members of the commission had to sue it to get its documents, even its schedule. The prime actor was Kris Kobach, then Kansas Secretary of State, the GOP’s leading voter fraud scare mongerer, and even he refused to comply completely to his own commission’s request. Like other secretaries of state he caviled at the SSN request. The Mississippi Secretary of State, a Republican of course, said the commission could go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.
And it might as well have for all it accomplished. The administration claimed it shut down the project due to having to deal with law suits. Like they don’t have an industrial strength department to deal with that. What’s it called again? Oh yeah, the Department of Justice. The true bottom line is they found no voter fraud and the real question is, did they even bother to look? Best guess is they were trying to find yet another way to suppress the vote. It’s what they do.
Secretary of State Bulemia
The Meuller report cites several cases of Russian imposters on social media posting pro-GOP, pro-conservative, pro-Trump articles or Tweets. One is footnote 110: “North Carolina Finds 2,214 Registered Voters over the Age of 110”. This Russian “finding” was gleefully shared and further elaborated by oodles of conservatives. Breitbart, to name one, added that some of these supposed geezers had recently voted! One wag, commenting on the Breitbart article, said:
“100% of dead people vote democrat”, though, to be accurate, no one knows how a voter voted, dead or alive.
But whatever. What’s the story here? Is it not fishy to have thousands of centenarian voters? Doesn’t it open the door for dead people voting? Shouldn’t these records be purged? After all, said another commenter:
“If we can’t remove deceased voters from the rolls, how many of the deceased are being mailed Social Security checks?”
Okay, that wasn’t fair of me. That remark is braindead even by conservative standards. A second’s thought should tell you that a state’s voter registration data has zero connection to the national social security data. Let’s try another comment, see if we can do better:
“This is exactly why voter registration rolls need to be cleaned up & why the Democrats fight it tooth & nail. Voter I.D. is just good common sense, again this is why the Dems don’t want it.”
Now that’s more like it. We’ll get to the voter ID being good common sense later. For now, though, who doesn’t want clean data? And even though all this Methusaleh voters business was started by Russians bent on mischief, that doesn’t mean it ain’t true, right?
As it happens, it is true. Sorta. But not really. You see, North Carolina didn’t collect a voter’s date of birth until a couple decades ago and, of course, when they started there were already a gazillion registered voters, and the state had no birthdates on any of them. Needing to put something in their new data field they put in 00/00/00, which means, if you calculated the age of one of those voters, you’d be calculating it from 1900. I would be 119. I am actually 75. Of course all new registrations got real birthdates and whenever an old registration was updated it also got a real birthdate, so that, over time, most records now have actual birthdates. So, yes, there are records whose age calculations would come out to be over 110, but no, those actual voters are not actually that old.
In fact, all those voters would now be 119 because it’s now 2019. I don’t know what year the Russians did their age calculations but all those ages would have been 110 in 2010. Get it? Those 2,214 people weren’t simply “over 110”. They were all exactly the same age. So you know the Russians understood perfectly what they were seeing. And, of course, all the subsequent conservatives who chimed in either also understood or were too lazy to check the data themselves. I mean, if you did the calculation in 2016, you’d have 2,214 116 year olds. That doesn’t seem fishy?
Okay, you might say. So that’s just a data artifact. There are still voters who die or move out of state, right? Those records should be removed, right? What happens if we don’t clean the data? Well, the poll book still has those stale records, but no one matches them. So – nothing happens. No match, no vote, no updated history. Nada. Nil. Zip. Pretty dramatic, eh?
Still, aren’t these databases going to just grow and grow and grow? Goodness. They might need servers nearly the size of a porn site’s. But okay, how’s this? We have the history. Keep track of how many elections go by without Mr Deadguy voting. Michigan does this. After 6 consecutive years not voting the record status changes from Active to one of the inactive values. So let’s change it to “Termination Notice Sent” and send a notice to the voter. All they have to do is send it back to restore their Active status. If the notice isn’t returned then we can deactivate the registration. Whatever the process, it should be uniform across states and should err on the side of retaining the registration rather than removing it. The sole downside to zombie registrations is they take up space in the database and poll books while the eminently possible downside of removing them is denying citizens their right to vote. Bit of an imbalance there.
One last thing to consider re purging. Our Breitbart commenter can be forgiven for not understanding the data but the various Republican Secretaries of State who oversee the purging of thousands of registrations? They don’t understand what they’re doing? If they don’t, they should be replaced. If they do, they should be in jail.
Voter ID Malarkey
As previously mentioned, when you vote you identify yourself somehow and the poll worker looks you up in the poll book. Conservatives contend there is massive chicanery in this process and that’s why, they claim, ID is needed. Recall our Breitbart commenter who said voter ID was just common sense. Some states require photo ID, others merely request photo ID; some require some form of ID, not necessarily photo, others merely request it.
What does it mean to “request” ID? My state, Michigan, requests photo ID. If you don’t have one you sign an affidavit, then vote like anyone else. The affidavit contains nothing but name and address. Basically, you’re simply swearing that you’re you. Some states ask for nothing more than that, for you to swear you are you. In other words, no ID required, we’ll take your word for it.
Now that does sound hinky, right? You walk in, tell the poll worker your name and address, a match is found, you sign your name and then vote. Isn’t that just asking for the impersonation conservatives allege? So let’s see how this no ID thing works. Turns out there are 3 basic scenarios:
- I am the only person who claims to be Joe Schmoe and I am Joe Schmoe.
- Joe Schmoe has already voted and second person claims to be Joe Schmoe (doesn’t matter which is the real one).
- I am the only person who claims to be Joe Schmoe but I am not Joe Schmoe.
Case 1 is the no fraud scenario. Nothing to see here, it’s all good.
Cases 2 is a fraud scenario, and a particularly dumbass one as it is immediately detected. The poll workers may not know which is the real Mr. Schmoe but they do know they can’t both be. 3 of the 10 voter impersonation cases listed by the Heritage Foundation were caught this way. Since these cases have happened in only 3 out of more than a billion ballots, states may not have a procedure in place for handling them. After all, they happen approximately never. Still, it’s easy enough to imagine a procedure. Assuming the poll workers can’t determine which is the true voter, simply allow both votes but tag them, then post-election ascertain which is the true voter. Allow that ballot, toss the other. Pretty simple.
Case 3 is the only time the fraud is not immediately apparent, so if we’re going to fret over impersonation, this is the case. That said, we know it pretty much never happens, so why not?
Say my neighbor, good ol’ Joe Schmoe, croaks or absconds to Bimini, in which case I know I don’t have to worry about him showing up at the polls and getting caught in scenario 2. There are still problems, though. I still have to identify myself both as me and as Mr. Schmoe. If we’re in the same precinct, I would need to do this at the same polling place with the same poll workers. I suppose in between votes I could put on a pair of Groucho Marx glasses or a Harpo Marx wig or otherwise disguise myself. I run the dual risk of someone knowing either me or Mr. Schmoe and thus knowing I ain’t him. And remember, polling places are local joints and precincts are pretty small. Plus, it’s not just the poll workers. Anyone within earshot might know one or the other of us. Could be tres awkard. It is, in fact, how 1 of our 10 impersonators was foiled.
But let’s say I get lucky. Let’s say Mr. Schmoe and I are in different precincts and let’s also stipulate that in my state either the matching process doesn’t require me to also know Joe Schmoe’s date of birth or last four digits of his SSN, or I somehow happen to know that information. You can see the ifs piling up here. But hell, for the sake of argument, let’s say I pull it off . Wow. I’ve doubled my vote. At the risk of jail time and being fined a few thousand dollars. Now, how many of these do I need to sway the election?
So one reason this doesn’t happen is it’s a crap idea. Clearly this is only worth it if done large scale. Okay then. How might that work?
The to-do list:
- Get my state’s registration data. Totally doable, if possibly expensive (damn you Wisconsin!).
- Identify those who’ve moved out of state or died. Getting tricky now. I need to iterate over the entire set of records, usually some millions, and determine, somehow, for each one if that person no longer lives at that address. How do I do that, exactly? Is there some database of folks who’ve croaked since the last election? Do I screen scrape all the state’s newspaper websites for obituaries? For those who’ve moved maybe I can shell out some hefty cash and get the Post Office’s National Change of Address data, the stuff advertisers use to make sure you don’t escape your junk mail. Maybe I can get the state’s DMV data. Let’s say I manage all that and also either have the services of a data techie or am one myself.
- Now I need to recruit an army of morally dubious impersonators who are unconcerned about voter fraud felony convictions. They also can’t be blabbermouths.
- I need to get this army organized and to the correct precincts. What’s more, they all have to also vote as themselves as well or I haven’t gained anything.
- We all go to jail – there’s no way to get away with this.
And I think that explains why Scenario 3 never fucking happens. Organizing and coordinating large numbers of fake voters, whether intending to cast multiple votes or to vote as dead people or to vote pretending to be citizens, is just not feasible. And, if Scenario 3 is the sole pressing reason for voter ID, what does that tell us about those who clamor for it? Either they’re FOS and don’t understand how voting works or they know perfectly well how it works and are just FOS cynical lying turds trying to suppress the vote.
Finally, and this doesn’t really apply to the topic of this article, but I say it whenever I can, every election that will send people to national offices should have national requirements. The Constitution has this now, the age and citizenship of U.S. Senators for example, but it needs to be extended. All the citizens in the country have a right to know the financial situation of any candidate for the presidency, vice-presidency, Senate or House. We have a right to know a state isn’t sending a crook, we have a right to know a state isn’t sending a security risk, we have a right to know a state isn’t sending some bozo who can’t pass the same test applicants for citizenship have to pass.
