Voter ID and Election Fraud

By request, here's a breakdown of new legislation on how Virginia and Tennessee propose to prevent people from voting in both states. The correspondent who requested this topic also requested that we report on election fraud laws in Illinois, where a TV program, not identified in the request, featured a fraudulent voter who claimed to have been able to sneak into thirty-one polling sites.

The Virginia General Assembly proposed a variety of ways to identify voters and pin a name (and appropriate address) on each person who votes. House Bill #9 was a fairly straightforward offer to give inadequately identified voters "provisional ballots." It's stuck in committee processes:

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?121+ful+HB9

HB56 was one of several bills I didn't like because it fails to guarantee all voters' right to furnish only a mailing or office address. It was, nevertheless, approved by both houses of our state legislature. It also contains the statement "that whoever votes more than once in any election in the same or different jurisdictions shall be guilty of a Class 6 felony."

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?121+ful+HB56ER

Worse, HB556 specifically fails to protect the home addresses even of people at special risk from stalkers and violent criminals from being circulated via the Internet...and was approved:

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?121+ful+HB556ER

And HB1007, which hasn't been enacted into law but has passed a vote in both houses, specifically directs the Department of Motor Vehicles to transmit people's identity information electronically:

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?121+ful+HB1007

SB663, approved by both houses, also legalizes the oh-so-backward procedure of shouting out people's names at the polling place. Of course all people present in a polling place are good citizens whose only thought, on hearing the name of any person they recognized, would be to cooperate with the election judges: "John Doe on Main Street? That man's fifty years younger than the John Doe who lives on Main Street, and I heard John Doe was in the hospital anyway," etc., etc., thus annoying and embarrassing John Quincy Doe, the grandson of the man our busybody voter has in mind. Of course nobody would ever be paying attention to the looks of voters and making a note of which voters they or their co-conspirators might be able to impersonate: "Priscilla King from the Cat Sanctuary? That's what she looks like? Abdulhakk's mother could pass for her!"

However, at least SB663 denies legitimacy to the "photo ID" farce, recognizing that Abdulhakk's mother is much more likely to resemble that astoundingly bad photo on my state ID than she is to be carrying around my voter registration card, or mail addressed to me...or a concealed handgun permit, if I had one.

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?121+fuh+SB663ER+700648

(Note to Arabists: Having read that "Abdulhakk" is, according to some officially accepted systems of transliteration, a bogus name no real Muslim would actually use, I've decided to use it as a generic name for a terrorist. I read that, although it looks to Americans like a real Muslim name that means "servant of God," it's a more accurate transcription of a parody-of-a-name that means "slave to scratching." If this is incorrect, please educate me.)

Meanwhile, down in Tennessee, where the system displays bill texts in a very clunky and annoying format--no links for older legislation referenced, no integration of changes into existing legislation, and the site uses an awkward "slideshow" instead of Virginia's streamlined "text" format--both houses of the legislature have enacted bills that do buy into the fetish for photo identification:

http://www.capitol.tn.gov/Bills/107/Bill/HB0007.pdf

Multiple voting can be punished by up to ten years in prison.

The Illinois General Assembly site is a real mess...I feel sorry for anyone who undertook to read bills in Illinois. Here's the link to their existing election code:

http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs4.asp?DocName=001000050HArt%2E+17&ActID=170&ChapterID=3&SeqStart=57000000&SeqEnd=60900000

Note that requiring voters to shout out their names, which is part of existing Illinois law, does not prevent election fraud in Illinois. Here's the quote:

"Any person desiring to vote shall give his name and, if required to do so, his residence to the judges of election, one of whom shall thereupon announce the same in a loud and distinct tone of voice, clear, and audible; the judges of elections shall check each application for ballot against the list of voters registered in that precinct to whom grace period, absentee, or early ballots have been issued for that election, which shall be provided by the election authority and which list shall be available for inspection by pollwatchers."

Possibly one reason why this hasn't worked is that the existing Illinois election law doesn't provide for voter registration cards of any kind. Only if someone raises the question of whether an individual has a vote in a given election: "the person so challenged shall provide to the judges of election proof of residence by producing two forms of identification showing the person's current residence address, provided that such identification may include a lease or contract for a residence and not more than one piece of mail addressed to the person at his current residence address and postmarked not earlier than 30 days prior to the date of the election, or the person shall procure a witness personally known to the judges of election, and resident in the precinct (or district), or who shall be proved by some legal voter of such precinct or district, known to the judges to be such, who shall take the oath following..."

Of course some urban parts of Illinois have long had reputations for allowing anybody to "square" just about anything by offering the enforcers of the law a little money, but since nobody at this web site has actually lived there, we'll not comment further on that. I'm surprised...somehow I thought all states issued voter registration cards.

Arkansas, where Roger Morris affirmed in Partners in Power that "Voters were bused from precinct to precinct with changes of shirts" when Bill Clinton was elected governor, has on the books a very stiff set of laws about election procedures:

http://www.sos.arkansas.gov/elections/Pages/votingFAQs.aspx

"Q. If election officials know me, do they have to ask me to present identification? A. Yes."

But if they've found a ten-dollar bill in their hands after shaking hands with a campaign worker, do they have to notice whether the person identified is even an approximate match in age, race, or gender? Was that why the Arkansas election stealers bothered to give the fraudulent voters changes of shirts?

Both Arkansas and Illinois election codes specify the presence of "pollwatchers," which aren't mentioned in any Virginia legislation I've read. Pollwatchers are not the same as election judges; their job is to challenge election judges and ballot counters. But apparently using pollwatchers doesn't protect the election process from fraud, either.

It's funny how many of the issues this web site has addressed, recently, are exacerbated by population density. I did mention the possibility that a small-town election judge might feel so proud of a Home Boy (or Girl) Who Made Good that the election judge would go on letting him/her vote for years after s/he had moved to a different state, without asking where s/he actually lived and voted...but how often would individual "exceptions" of this kind affect the outcome of a statewide election? By and large, the best way to prevent election fraud will probably always be for election judges and voters to be personally acquainted. In sparsely populated districts, this does work.