Dr. Mark Finney
Associate Professor
Mass Communication
Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012: the Washington Post and NPR report that after all the votes were certified for the Republican caucus in Iowa, the winner was actually Rick Santorum, not Mitt Romney, as had been previously reported.
December 12, 2000: The Supreme Court rules in Bush v. Gore, resolving the 2000 presidential election in favor of Bush. In addition to this ruling, the Supreme Court previously halted a recount of ballots and refused to certify countless other ballots.
November, 2010: Saguache, Colo. clerk and recorder fails to accurately count votes in an election for that same position, later stating that a box of ballots had not been counted and the incumbent (and official vote counter) had won the race.
These high and low profile cases of election irregularities are neither isolated nor rare. They are the norm these days. A local election in Aspen last year took the spotlight when election officials refused to provide actual ballot results to groups concerned with the validity of the election. We have electronic voting machines that do not record actual votes and cannot provide details, we have hanging chads, and we have dishonest election officials and media pundits who act to ensure their favored result instead of the fair process of democratic change.
Meanwhile, there’s a huge stink (mostly among Republican politicians) about a completely different kind of voter fraud – in which people supposedly vote illegally in droves – leading state legislatures to enact draconian laws (requiring voters to produce government issued picture IDs, limiting voter registration, purges of election roles, proof of citizenship requirements and provisional ballot restrictions.) to curb such fraud.
As Andrew Rosenthal reported in the New York Times in November, 2011 “[c]ounting all the Alabama incidents separately and throwing in Ann Coulter, that brings us to a grand total of eight cases. That is most certainly not a national crisis requiring action from the government.”
But the result of these laws that are supposedly designed to curb voter fraud, is to disenfranchise “hundreds of thousands of voters,” according research conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law legitimate voters.
The Brennan/Lawyers’ Committee research reports that just photo ID laws “lock out…10 percent of the voting-age population…36 percent of voters over 75…78 percent of African American men 18-24 [and]…97 percent of students.”
That these most of these voters tend to turn out for Democrats seems to be both the focus of the laws as well as immaterial to the real issue. Voter fraud and election irregularities are happening in this country – but they’re not the kind of voter fraud we typically think of. Instead, when we think about voter fraud, we ought to be thinking about the systematic disenfranchisement of minorities, students and older voters. We should be thinking about the inability (or unwillingness) to count legitimate votes when they get in the way of election officials’ desires.
Why, then is this not on our radar? Why is media attention so focused on voter irregularities and not on election irregularities? I can’t say. I haven’t done the research. But I’ll ask you – who benefits from both sets of irregularities and who suffers?
What’s Been Said…