REVIEW & OUTLOOK
'Unusable' Voter Rolls
Fraud has become more than anecdotal.
Al Gore may oppose tobacco, but his Wisconsin campaign apparently thinks it's the best way to drag some people to the polls. WISN-TV (themilwaukeechannel.com) has some arresting footage catching Gore campaign volunteers in the act of distributing packs of cigarettes to homeless voters after they'd been given rides to cast absentee ballots. A Milwaukee Rescue Mission employee told WISN that he asked Democratic workers to leave after he caught them trying to bribe potential voters with cigarettes. After viewing WISN's videotape, the local Gore campaign said the volunteers were "acting on their own" and had left the state.
Perhaps they've gone to New Jersey, where the AP reports that former Goldman Sachs executive Jon Corzine is hiring homeless people and former addicts from Pennsylvania to help his Senate bid in a $2 million effort to "get out the vote." With that much money, we guess he'll be paying them, so cigarettes won't be needed.
These shenanigans are warning signs that one of President Clinton's first legislative accomplishments--the National Voter Registration Act, commonly known as "motor voter"--has made our already chaotic state ballot security systems even worse. Motor voter requires all states to allow people to register to vote by mail and when they get a driver's license. States are limited on how they can prune deadwood--people who have died, moved or been convicted of crimes--from their rolls.
Motor voter has helped fuel an explosion of phantom voters. Between 1994 and 1998, nearly 26 million names have been added to the voter rolls nationwide, a nearly 20% increase. The bipartisan polling team of Ed Goeas and Celinda Lake says that perhaps only 5% of those who register when they get licenses routinely vote, which artificially drives down voter turnout. Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, supports national voter registration, but says voter lists from around the country "are virtually unusable" and "more inaccurate than they have ever been."
An investigation by Bill Theobald of the Indianapolis Star found that in Indiana "hundreds of thousand of names, as many as one in five statewide" on voter registration rolls, "are bogus since the people behind those names have moved, died or gone to prison."
"It has become almost ridiculous. I don't know if there is fraud, but it invites the possibility of fraud," says Mark Kruzan, the Democratic majority floor leader in the Indiana House, who has tried in vain to pass a law to purge the rolls of invalid names.
There are things that Indiana and other states could do to clean up what noted political scientist Walter Dean Burnham says is "the sloppiest election systems in the industrialized world." But California's Democratic legislature has four times blocked attempts to require photo ID at the polls because it would be "discriminatory." Even something as simple as checking voter rolls against the Social Security Administration's death list isn't done in many states.
As Americans go to the polls today, most will take for granted not only their right to cast a secret ballot, but that it won't be canceled out by a phantom voter. It may take something dramatic to shake elected officials out of their complacency about the problems that "motor voter" and other laws have created.
"This is about the most boring topic," Democratic House Speaker John Gregg told the Indianapolis Star. "You guys are really scraping for a story." But others don't think so. "It is the kind of scandal people ignore until it's too late and there is a major crisis," Karen Saranita, a former election consultant to the Democratic majority in the California State Senate told us. A crisis of confidence in its election results isn't something the American political system needs just now.
