Public Integrity and Vote Fraud vs. Voter Suppression

Host Spencer Graves will discuss what we know of the positions of the political parties in the Kansas City area on public integrity and the question of vote fraud vs. voter suppression. Kansas got an F and Missouri a D- in the 2015 state integrity investigations initiated by the Center for Public Integrity. Graves asked all the political parties with offices in the 6-county primary KKFI listening area to comment on these issues as well as candidates who appeared at “Meet and Greet” events sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Johnson County and the candidates for Governor and Secretary of State of Missouri. He will discuss what he knows about this. The Republican National Committee has been under a Consent Decree since 1982 to cease and desist from attempts in 1981 to remove people living in predominantly minority communities from voter rolls. This consent decree has been renewed several times and is still in effect because of new violations. This practice may have cost Al Gore the presidency in the 2000 US presidential election, because African-Americans accounted for 88% of people removed from the lists of registered voters but were only about 11% of Florida’s voters.

This program included segments from an interview with Greg Vonnahme, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.

Public Integrity

The methodology for these state integrity investigations was based on consulting almost a hundred organizations and individuals working in governmental reform.  They developed a list of 245 different indicators in 13 categories.[1] They then hired investigative journalists in each of the 50 states to develop answers, assign scores and document sources for each of the 245 questions.  You can find the answers to each of the 245 questions for each of the 50 states on the web.  A separate page for each state gives a summary of the scores in each of the 13 categories.  If you click on a category, you can drill down to the detailed answers for each of the 245 questions.  For more on this, visit their web site or listen to the interview we did August 23rd here on RadioActive Magazine with Erin Richey, who did the Missouri Integrity Investigation;  that podcast is available on our web site.  

Public integrity is, I believe, undervalued by our mainstream commercial media, who could lose advertising if they reported too aggressively on the favors that major advertisers get from government.  

Every media organization in the world sells changes in the behaviors of their audience to their funders.  Commercial media outlets rarely bite the hands that feed them.  

Survey of Parties and Candidates

To prepare for today’s show, I sent emails in late September to all the county parties in the 6-county primary KKFI listening area plus all the candidates for Missouri Governor and Secretary of State for whom I could find contact information.  I asked the parties to forward that email to their candidates for state office.  I also attended “Meet and Greet” events and extended similar invitations to candidates who presented there.  

I asked for their thoughts on the 2015 State Integrity investigations and their view on the vote fraud vs. voter suppression issue.  In Missouri I also asked for their position on Missouri Constitutional Amendment 6, regarding a Missouri Voter ID Requirement.  The “vote fraud vs. voter suppression” issue and Missouri Constitutional Amendment 6 was the subject of the September 27th episode of RadioActive Magazine.  

Vote Fraud

Conservatives claim there is a major problem with vote fraud in the U.S. that can be fixed by stringent voter identification laws.[3]

What you believe is largely a function of what sources you find credible. No source is perfect.  While journalists too often err on the side of scandal, courts tend to enforce much stronger rules of evidence.  

Just this year, several judges have ruled that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has violated US and Kansas law in trying to disenfranchise some 18,000 Kansans, who registered under the federal “motor voter” law without showing a birth certificate or passport.  Kobach ultimately agreed to accept those registrations in lieu of being officially held in contempt of court.[4]

Before Kobach relented, he complained that his opponents, the League of Women Voters and the American Civil Liberties Union, were “Communists.”[5] The mission of the ACLU is “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.”[6]  They famously note that people in every country in the world are free to say whatever they want — provided it’s popular with those in power.  I’d like to know how Kobach and his supporters define the word, “Communist.”  

Kobach is the only Secretary of State in the nation with authority to prosecute voter impersonation cases.  A recent web search suggested he has gotten only four convictions in such cases.[7]  On May 15, 2016, an editorial in the Kansas City Star concluded that he had “come up with nothing scandalous in almost a year,” and “should be stripped of his power to prosecute these cases.”[8]

Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump is correct, of course, that our electoral system is rigged.  However, it’s hard to find evidence suggesting it’s rigged the way he claims.[9]   

Vonnahme concurred that his study of the literature indicated that voter impersonation, the kind that can be fixed with strict voter ID laws, is extremely rare.  Moreover, the perception of fraud appears NOT to reduce participation by legal voters.[10][11]

Voter Suppression

There have been numerous reports of efforts by certain groups to disenfranchise people who would likely support their opposition.  Some Sanders supporters complained that the primary process was stacked against them.[12]

However, most of the claims of vote rigging involve Republicans allegedly disenfranchising likely democratic voters, especially minorities and youth — dating back over a quarter of a century.  In 1980 Republican strategist Paul Weyrich famously said, I don’t want everybody to vote. … [O]ur leverage in the elections … goes up as the voting populace goes down.”[13]

In 1981 and again in 1986, the Republican National Committee (RNC) sent out letters to African-American neighborhoods. When tens of thousands of them were returned undeliverable, the party successfully challenged the voters and had them deleted from voting rolls.  The Democratic National Committee (DNC) was able to document this and get a judgment against the RNC for violating the Voting Rights Act.  This resulted in a Consent Decree, which has been maintained to the present by repeated Republican violations.  

This practice allegedly cost Al Gore the presidency in the 2000 US presidential election, because African-Americans accounted for 88% of people removed from the lists of registered voters in Florida but were only about 11% of Florida’s voters.[14]  In 2013 the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by the RNC, letting stand the judgements of an Appellate court to continue the consent decree.[15]  

Recent reports have suggested that early voting in Ohio shows Whites up by 3 percentage points and blacks down by 7 — with the difference at least partially attributed to an alleged massive purge of likely African-American voters in Ohio.[16] And Democrats recently filed a new suit claiming more violations of the anti-voter intimidation agreement by the Republican National Committee.[17]

This is consistent with a report published in August by Rolling Stone.  That report discussed a “Crosscheck” program to purge voting rolls of people illegally registered in multiple locations, led by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.  This program officially claimed to look for people with the same name, birthdate and last 4 digits of their social security number in different locations.  In practice, election officials reportedly matched only on first and last names, ignoring birthdate and social security number.  For example, Donald Alexander Webster Jr. in Ohio may be declared the same person as Donald Eugene Webster (no “Jr.”) in Virginia. Both might therefore be deleted from the voter registration rolls and not know it until they try to vote.[18]

A study cited by Vonnahme found that 93 percent of whites had driver’s licenses, while only 89 percent of Latinos and 85 percent of other non-whites, a gap of 8 percentage points, with similar gaps due to age and education.[19] Thus, voter ID requirements could make voting more difficult for minorities, those with less education and lower income.

Missouri Constitutional Amendment 6 on Voter ID Requirements

This Republican concern with vote fraud appears on this year’s ballot in Missouri Voter ID Requirement, Constitutional Amendment 6.  This would allow the Missouri government to require the presentation of voter IDs at elections.  This may sound sensible on the surface.  However, Judy Morgan, who represents downtown Kansas City in the Missouri legislature, said it would affect 220,000 people in Missouri, who may not drive or travel anywhere by air, and may not even have a birth certificate.  In addition to elderly born before births were almost universally registered, some were born in hospitals where records were lost or destroyed in a fire.  Republicans have so far been unable to provide adequate documentation of the thousands of cases of voter fraud that could be prevented by a voter ID requirement like this.  Dr. Mikah Kubic, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties of Kansas, noted that Kobach had the budget and the motivation to prosecute such cases.  The limited number of convictions he has obtained so far is one more piece of evidence against the claims by Republicans and Conservatives of a massive problem of vote fraud that could be fixed by an onerous voter ID requirement.[20]  

A Dozen Types of Electoral Fraud

The Wikipedia article on “Electoral fraud” lists a dozen different types of vote fraud.  Only one of these involve criminal fraud by individual voters, namely “voter impersonation.” That is the only type of vote fraud addressed by voter ID requirements.  The other eleven involve criminal activity by people with power.  Moreover these other eleven types of fraud are easier for people with power to pursue and may therefore be substantially more common in US and international history than voter impersonation.[21]  

Gerrymandering

Moreover that list of a dozen different types of vote fraud does not include gerrymandering.  Professor Sam Wang at Princeton University claimed that “4 million Democratic voters in seven [Republican controlled] states were disenfranchised” in 2012 by gerrymandering, while “about 400,000 Illinois Republican voters were disenfranchised” by gerrymandering by the Illinois Democratic trifecta.[22]  No credible evidence exists of a problem voter impersonation even close to that scale.  

Candidates for Secretary of State in Missouri

Chris Morrill, Libertarian Party Candidate for Secretary of State in Missouri, responded to my questions as follows:  

  1. As a Libertarian, I favor as much government transparency as possible on every level.

However, I believe the Center for Public Integrity, despite its alleged non-partisan orientation, may be rating Missouri unfairly due in part to the Republican domination of the General Assembly.

  1. Neither voter impersonation nor voter suppression have been major problems in modern Missouri. A more restrictive voter ID law could, however, be construed as “suppression.”  For this, he cited a comment posted on Politifact.com on January 4, 2015, claiming that “Numbers don’t support Will Kraus’ statement on voter fraud;” Kraus justified his support for Missouri Constitutional Amendment 6, because “there’s over 16 people in the state of Missouri who have been convicted of some type of voter fraud.”[23]   
  1. I do not support [Missouri Constitutional] Amendment 6, nor do I support any voter ID requirements that are more restrictive than the current Missouri laws provide. Voting is a constitutional right and thus we should strive to err on the part of the voter.

This is consistent with the position of Democratic candidate for Secretary of State, Robin Smith, and contrasts sharply with the claims of the Republican candidate, Jay Ashcroft.  Ashcroft is the son of former Missouri Governor, US Senator and Attorney General, John Ashcroft.  Jay wrote Constitutional Amendment 6 and beat Will Kraus in the Republican primary for Missouri Secretary of State this year.[24] It seems difficult to understand how 16 people convicted of vote fraud should be given more weight than the 220,000 who would likely be disenfranchised by Constitutional Amendment 6.  This is particularly true if none of those 16 would have been prevented by the voter IDs that the Republicans are pushing, as suggested by Judy Morgan, previously quoted.  

 

[1] Nicholas Kusnetze, “State Integrity 2015:  How we investigated State Integrity;  All about our scoring methodology”, November, 2015, Center for Public Integrity (www.publicintegrity.org/2015/10/14/18316/how-we-investigated-state-integrity), accessed 2016-10-25.  

[2] Wikipedia, “List of Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Justices_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States), accessed 2016-10-25.  

[3] e.g., “Vote Fraud News”, Republican National Lawyers Association (www.rnla.org/votefraud.asp), and Fox Insider, “Voter fraud” (http://insider.foxnews.com/tag/voter-fraud), accessed 2016-10-25.  

[4] Robin Shulman, “Avoiding Contempt of Court, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach Says He’ll Let People Vote”, Sept. 29, 2016, American Civil Liberties Union (https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/avoiding-contempt-court-kansas-secretary-state-kris-kobach-says-hell-let-people), accessed 2016-10-25.  

[5] Peter Hancock, “Kansas Republicans hold to hard-right stance; ACLU and League of Women Voters ‘communists,’ Kobach says,”, Lawrence Journal-World, February 20, 2016 (www2.ljworld.com/news/2016/apr/22/kobach-wins-2nd-conviction-double-voting-prosecuti), accessed 2016-10-25.

[6] Wikipedia, “American Civil Liberties Union” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union), accessed 2016-10-25.  

[7] “Kobach obtains fourth illegal voting conviction”, May 4, 2016, Lawrence Journal-World (www2.ljworld.com/news/2016/may/04/kobach-obtains-fourth-illegal-voting-conviction), accessed 2016-10-25.   

[8] “Kris Kobach is a big fraud on Kansas voter fraud,” Kansas City Star, May 15, 2016 (http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article77519827.html), accessed 2016-10-25.  

[9] Andrew Gumbel, “The history of ‘rigged’ US elections: from Bush v Gore to Trump v Clinton,” The Guardian, 25 October 2016 (www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/25/donald-trump-rigged-election-bush-gore-florida-voter-fraud), accessed 2016-10-25.  

[10] Stephen Ansolabehere and Nathaniel Persily, “Vote Fraud in the Eye of the Beholder: The Role of Public Opinion in the Challenge to Voter Identification Requirements”, Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 7 (May, 2008), pp. 1737-1774

[11] Stephen Ansolabehere, “Effects of Identification Requirements on Voting: Evidence from the Experiences of Voters on Election Day”, Political Science and Politics, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Jan., 2009), pp. 127-130

[12] Ari BermanTwitter, “The Democratic Primary Wasn’t Rigged.  But now Clinton and Sanders supporters should unite on making it easier to vote,” June 16, 2016, The Nation (www.thenation.com/article/the-democratic-primary-wasnt-rigged), accessed 2016-10-25.  

[13] Wikiquotes, “Paul Weyrich” (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Weyrich), accessed 2016-10-26.   

[14] Wikipedia, “Voter suppression in the United States” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States), accessed 2016-10-25.  

[15] Wikipedia, “Voter caging” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_caging), accessed 2016-10-26.  

[16] “What’s good news at Fox News?  Fewer black people voting,” Oct. 25, 2016, AGR Daily News Service (https://agrdailynews.com/2016/10/25/whats-good-news-at-fox-news-fewer-black-people-voting), accessed 2016-10-26.  

[17] One such report was Matt Friedman, “Democrats: RNC violating anti-voter intimidation agreement”, 2016-10-27, Politico (http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/voter-intimidation-democrats-rnc-230352), accessed 2016-10-26.  

[18] Greg Palast, “The GOP’s Stealth War Against Voters:  Will an anti-voter-fraud program designed by one of Trump’s advisers deny tens of thousands their right to vote in November?”, Aug. 24, 2016 (www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-gops-stealth-war-against-voters-w435890).  See also Mariam Khan, “Inside the Purge of Tens of Thousands of Ohio Voters”, Jun 5, 2016 (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/inside-purge-tens-thousands-ohio-voters/story?id=39586417), accessed 2016-10-26.  

[19] Matt A. Barreto, Stephen A. Nuño and Gabriel R. Sanchez, “The Disproportionate Impact of Voter-ID Requirements on the Electorate: New Evidence from Indiana”, Political Science and Politics, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Jan., 2009), pp. 111-116

[20] RadioActive Magazine, “Kansas and Missouri: Epicenter for Voter Suppression”, Sept. 27, 2016 (www.kkfi.org/program/radio-active-magazine), accessed 2016-10-27.  

[21] Wikipedia, “Electoral fraud” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud)

[22] Samuel “Sam” Sheng-Hung Wang, “Gerrymanders, Part 2: How many voters were disenfranchised?”, January 2, 2013, Princeton Election Consortium, Princeton University (http://election.princeton.edu/2013/01/02/gerrymanders-part-2-how-many-voters-were-disenfranchised), accessed 2016-10-26.  

[23] Adam Aton, “Numbers don’t support Will Kraus’ statement on voter fraud”, Politifact (www.politifact.com/missouri/statements/2016/jan/04/will-kraus/numbers-dont-support-will-kraus-statement-voter-fr), accessed 2016-10-27.  

[24] Betsey Bruce, “Smith, Ashcroft discuss Missouri Secretary of State election,” Aug. 26, 2016, Fox2Now (http://fox2now.com/2016/08/26/smith-ashcroft-discuss-missouri-secretary-of-state-election), accessed 2016-10-27.  


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