Wisconsin and the voter fraud myth

(I was originally going to find something else to say about Sarah Palin, but variety is the spice of life, hey?)

Via my mother, some troubling news from my home state: J.B. Van Hollen, Wisconsin's attorney general and the possessor of a car-dealer name if I ever saw one, has filed suit to force the state's Government Accountability Board to review the legality of every voter registration card filed by mail or through a registration drive between 2006 and last month. In practice, this means that local election clerks would have to check over 240,000 voter registration records against a state database of drivers' licenses, criminal records, and other information.

I'm calling bullshit. This is the same old attempt to scare up fears of voter fraud that we've been hearing from Republicans since at least 2002. Yet in five years of investigation of the alleged conspiracy to swing close elections through massive voter fraud, the Justice Department turned up a grand total of 120 indictments and 86 convictions by 2005. The GOP was particularly interested in Milwaukee as a locus of potential fraud in the 2004 presidential election, but after a lengthy investigation, Steven Biskupic, the U.S. Attorney for Milwaukee, concluded, "We don't see a massive conspiracy to alter the election in Milwaukee." This is true even if your definition of "massive" is particularly generous: Biskupic, a Republican appointee, prosecuted fourteen fraud cases and won five of them. Now, Van Hollen - who just so happens to be the co-chair of John McCain's Wisconsin campaign - is trying the same crap again, with a suit that just so happens to disproportionately affect voters who live in heavily democratic, majority-minority Milwaukee.

Now, the disclaimers. Having voted in Milwaukee and observed our electoral system in action, I will certainly not claim that we're perfect, or even close. The state's voter record confirmation database faced glitches that kept it out of action well past the federal deadline. Milwaukee's election commission faces impressive backlogs. Most poll workers are poorly trained - so much that one poll worker allowed a felon to register to vote on election day, even though he presented his prison ID card to verify his identity. And over the summer, both ACORN and the Community Voters Project turned in a few employees in their own voter-registration drives for filing made-up cards. Yes, Wisconsin's election system has some big problems, and Van Hollen, as the attorney general, certainly has a role to play in rectifying them.

But Van Hollen's lawsuit is hardly going to help those problems, and not just because it's logistically impossible to check 240,000 voter records before November 4. The Help America Vote Act, which calls for the records checks he wants, is completely ambiguous about what happens when an election clerk finds a mismatch between the database and the voter registration records. Van Hollen acknowledges this:

Asked Wednesday if he was seeking to remove people from the voter rolls if their data did not match, Van Hollen said: “We’re not addressing that at all. The law is not clear and leaves some discretion within the Government Accountability Board as to how they enforce (the law) and how they make sure the voter rolls are accurate based upon the checks.”

In fact, the Journal Sentinel reports that voters with a records mismatch, even if they don't respond to the election clerk's request to correct their records, will remain eligible to vote - so if the checks were to magically uncover a widespread voter fraud conspiracy, they still wouldn't fix the problem.

There's a simple reason why this policy of not automatically removing voters from the rolls makes sense: because the vast majority of mismatches don't result from fraud; they result from simple data entry errors. If I register to vote as part of a registration drive, and the election officials can't read my terrible handwriting and enter my birth date incorrectly, I'll come up as a mismatch. If J.B. Van Hollen is registered to vote as J.B., but his driver's license lists his name as John Byron Van Hollen, he'll come up as a mismatch. In fact, all but two members of the Government Accountability Board, which would be charged with implementing Van Hollen's request, have records mismatches because of typographical errors or name variations. In short, Van Hollen is going after a problem that's hardly big enough to tip the election one way or another, in a fashion that will result in no actual change.

A tip for all you aspiring state attorneys-general out there: if you're really committed to eliminating voter fraud, maybe you should start by professionalizing the poll workers, streamlining records checks, or educating people about registration and eligibility - and maybe do it more than three months before the election.

Real Election Reform

While it is great that many election reform laws are being passed, they are all very superficial in many respects. They ignore some of the serious fundamental flaws in our system.

A reform we need urgently for our legislatures is proportional representation. While the Congress is a difficult institution to change, state legislatures could be fixed rather easily.

The need for proportional representation comes from many places. Importantly, it allows for full representation of the electorate. Instead of a plurality of voters being represented (which is sometimes as low as 30% of voters), PR makes every vote counts. It gives a voice to the minority, but still allows majority rule.

Another solution PR provides is the elimination of gerrymandering. Because representatives are elected at-large, there is no need to create districts, thus no way to gerrymander them.

While there are problems with PR, the biggest ones don't apply to most of our governments. For example, PR is usually derided as creating unstable government. However, since our legislatures do not need to elect the executive/leadership, there is no need for formal coalitions which are prone to breakdown as is the case in parliamentary systems.

There are also many questions to be dealt with by the implementation of PR. An important one is the selection of committee chairs in legislatures. This can be done through majority vote (preferably IRV) in the committee or in the body at-large.

Of course, PR is only for legislatures. However, a related reform would be to elect executives through IRV so that a majority chooses them and not a minority/plurality.

There is a reason that the newest democracy in the world, Iraq, as well as a majority of the world's democracies (especially the major ones) use PR. It's about time our country caught up and adopted full(er) democracy.