Home / Dave Brockington / The Voter Fraud Fantasy, Continued

The Voter Fraud Fantasy, Continued

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What really fascinates me about the voter fraud myth is how fervently the zealots believe this shit.  None of their phantom busloads of fraudulent voters transported in from out of state have been verified.  Few if any of the fraudulent votes that they identify appear so much as questionable to elections administrators.  It simply doesn’t exist, no matter how much they try to will it into being.

At the same time, they never question just why in hell somebody would fraudulently vote.  As a student of voter behavior in general with a sub specialty in turnout, I can list at length how the costs associated with voting far outweigh whatever tangible benefits one might accrue.  One has to navigate registration, polling locations, the hours the poling location is open, let alone being in possession of both the internal and external efficacy such that you’re confident in your decision, and that decision will make one iota of difference.  As one who studies and teaches this, it’s amazing to me that so many do vote to begin with.

Why bother to do it twice?  If one is unemployed and has nothing to do with their day, perhaps $20, $50, $100 will get me onto a bus from Chicago (and we all know what type of person lives in Chicago) for a day out up to Wisconsin.  Then you have to ask, for whom is it worth to spend that much money.  The sheer number of fraudulent votes necessary to tip an election such as the Wisconsin recall is not one here, another there, a busload up yonder.  It would have taken 171,106 votes added to the Democratic tally to swing it — to a recount.  Best add another 50,000 to ensure a recount doesn’t happen, as we wouldn’t want this fraud coming to light.  That’s 220,000 voters.  At $20 per fraudulent voter, “labor” costs alone are $4,400,000.  If it costs $100 for a person to give up their day, break the law, and experience both Wisconsin and the interstates, a cool $22,000,000 is required to replace a Republican with a Democrat in Wisconsin.

Then there’s transport.  It would require 2,445 sorties of a Blue Bird All American school bus to transport our wave of nefarious democracy from Chicago to Wisconsin, if packed to their capacity of 90.  I have no idea what it costs to rent, fuel, and provide a driver for one of these, but this cost is not insubstantial.  And don’t forget lunch; in the classic tradition of GOTV, we should feed our anti-democratic legions.

Let’s review.  We need a population of 220,000 people willing to give up their day, knowingly commit a crime, for some modest financial remuneration.  We require the infrastructure to transport them.  And food.

Basically, we need a hell of a lot of money to pull this off.  The entire recall itself, both sides, raised $63 million.  Our project would add a significant pile of cash to this total.

The activists have consumed large quantities of the kool aid.  They believe that these monsters exist.  But those financing the project really know what they’re doing.  It’s more pernicious than preventing granny from voting because she lacks state photo ID.  They’re specifically targeting minority precincts or any other conveniently concentrated demographic that tends to vote Democrat, acting as election “observers”:

In Houston, the group targeted the Congressional district represented by Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat who is black. Ms. Engelbrecht said the group settled on Ms. Lee’s district because thousands of addresses there housed six or more registered voters, which it took as an indication of inaccurate registrations. The methodology, which the group still uses, could disproportionately affect lower income families.

“The first day of early voting, at many of the 37 locations, primarily in minority neighborhoods, dozens of poll watchers showed up sent by King Street Patriots,”

It must frighten these people that six or ten adults live at the same address, let alone that they’re registered to vote at the same address.  This is an economic reality that is incomprehensible to the King Street Patriots.  Yet, here’s the reality:

“They had one particular case I remember very well,” said Douglas Ray, the Harris County assistant attorney who represents the election registrar. “They had identified an address where eight or 10 people were registered to vote. There was no building there.” Mr. Ray found out that the building had been torn down and that the people simply moved.

And then there’s those damned college students:

On Election Day, poll watchers appeared to have slowed voting to a crawl at Lawrence University in Appleton, where some students were attempting to register and vote on the same day.

Charlene Peterson, the city clerk in Appleton, said three election observers, including one from True the Vote, were so disruptive that she gave them two warnings.

“They were making challenges of certain kinds and just kind of in physical contact with some of the poll workers, leaning over them, checking and looking,” said John Lepinski, a poll watcher and former Democratic Party chairman for Outagamie County.

He said that as a result of the scrutiny, the line to register moved slowly. Finally, he said, some students gave up and left.

This transcends lofty concerns about good government.  This is blatant, targeted voter harassment.

And it will have an effect.  In stark terms, this is nothing more than an additional cost that must be incurred to vote.  I can readily understand how it dissuades people from voting to have an election observer, already distrusting your right to vote because you’re the other, breathing down your neck and that of the polling place workers.  Whereas we can roughly measure the effect that a lack of photo ID might have in terms of a reduction of the potential electorate, and we can infer from demographics the asymmetric impact that this has on the two parties, the sort of intimidation discussed in the NYT article linked above will be extremely difficult to account for from a social science perspective.

We’ll never really know what impact that this will have on the election.

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