Imagine going to the polls on election day and having to prove you’re a citizen in order to vote. Never mind that you’re a registered voter and you have a valid voter’s ID card. You have to provide documentation (like a valid passport) when showing up to the polls to vote, too.
Sound ridiculous? Sound like something that would happen in some backwards, far-away country? Sound like something from the days of communist governments in Russia and Eastern Europe?
Well, guess what? It’s coming to a voting booth near you. At least, if Congress gets its way and passes a law requiring proof of citizenship in order to vote in Federal elections. If you’re lucky enough to live in Arizona, Georgia, Indiana or Missouri you’re going to have to do the same thing in order to register to vote and to vote at the polls for state or local elections.
The politicians behind these initiatives claim that these measures are necessary to combat vote fraud by immigrants — legal or otherwise. But there’s a bit of a flaw in their argument, and here it is: Statistics for the state of Arizona show that of 2.7 million registered voters, 238 were non-citizens, and of those 238, only 4 have ever attempted to vote. So, to put it another way, if every voter in Arizona showed up at the polls when these 4 individuals tried to vote, the proportion of improperly cast votes would be in the range of one in a million. If only half of the registered voters showed up, the proportion would be a whopping 2 in a million.
Now, if the statistics for Arizona are indicative of the rest of the country (a few states may have slightly higher percentages, but I suspect most states are the same or even lower), then if we had a total registered voting population of say, 200 million voters who actually showed up at the polls (not bloody likely, but that’s a whole other rant), then roughly 200 votes would be by non-citizens. This is not enough to swing an election, unless of course you’re talking about the 2000 Presidential Election results in Florida. And that’s assuming the fraudulent votes all happened in one state.
(Side note: The one thing that all the squabbling after the Florida vote did was to take the focus off the actual mandated recount procedure, which required the state to do a full manual recount for elections with a margin of victory of less than one-tenth of one percent. In other words, Katherine Harris got away with not doing the recount, even though the margin of victory there required her to do so, due to all the legal challenges from both sides. Is that messed-up, or what?)
One thing that the politicians behind this effort are conveniently forgetting (or at least, conveniently forgetting to tell you) is that most illegal immigrants are afraid to have encounters with governmental authorities — including election workers — because that risks getting caught and sent home. And legal immigrants would not want to risk having their visas revoked.
Now, in the world of business, companies strive for a defect or error rate of 1 in a million. They even give it a fancy name, taken from the world of statistics, called “Six Sigma.” Imagine if only one in a million cars produced by GM, Ford or Chrysler was defective. The companies would be producing only about a dozen defective vehicles a year. Pretty good, eh? They would be crowing about how good their products are, and deservedly so. You only have to do a spot poll of your friends, relatives, neighbors and co-workers to find that they probably don’t achieve that goal.
Our election process is already a Six Sigma process. If the execs at the auto companies, or any number of other manufacturing companies achieved this result, they wouldn’t try to fix it. They’d brag about it. And they’d tell their troops to keep up the good work.
So what’s really going on here? It’s simple, this is an issue that people can easily understand and agree on. Voting is a right accorded to citizens, non-citizens don’t get this privilege. So who would be against taking measures to prevent non-citizens from voting? And how could anyone argue against such a policy? Those who did would see their words misconstrued in such a way that they would be made to look like they’re in favor of allowing non-citizens to vote in our elections.
This is a classic political technique — focus efforts on an insignificant problem everyone can agree on, while ignoring a bigger, real problem. In this way, politicians can appear to be doing something about an issue without really addressing the issue.
We have a real problem developing around electronic voting in this country, and that’s how easy it is to hack electronic voting machines, change the vote totals, and make the changes virtually untraceable. And in many areas, the states or municipalities using these machines do not require any sort of paper trail to match against the electronic records. With the electronic machines, if there’s no paper trail there really isn’t a re-count option.
When conducting a re-count on an electronic voting machine, all you’ll get is the same result as before, because the total numbers are stored in a simple file format. And it’s very easy, apparently, to get into that file and make changes. Votes apparently aren’t stored in a database, but even if they were re-counts would still yield the same results as the initial tally.
However, if you have a paper trail to match against the electronic records, you have a system that can verify whether the voting machines actually recorded votes properly. Without that, we’re running the risk of having election results that can’t really be trusted.
Another problem with voting machines: What if the machine records your vote wrong? This is the electronic equivalent of a spoiled ballot. But in the latter case, you could go to an election official, get a new ballot and correct your vote. With an electronic machine, what mechanisms are in place to ensure that the voter’s vote is cast the way he or she intends it to be cast? And what mechanisms are in place to handle the electronic spoiled ballot?
In 2004, various comedians joked about machines that would cast votes only for a particular candidate. It was funny because it sounded ridiculous. But I’ve heard one story, of a friend of a friend, where that allegedly happened. If true, it’s very disturbing, because someone was rigging the elections.
The real vote fraud that’s being perpetrated on us right now is the implementation of electronic voting systems that are as or more vulnerable to manipulation than the current systems, but that have fewer real safeguards to ensure that the voting process itself is conducted in a free, fair and impartial manner.
This is not an issue of Democrat versus Republican. It’s an issue of democracy versus dictatorship, which is what we’re likely to get if a person, or company or organization can rig the results to their own advantage.
