Worrisome: Florida Voting Problems

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
21

It’s not just Florida – this election is going to be awash with accusations of cheating and other problems:

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/summit/1096018375266600.xml

1,000 cases of suspicious voter registrations
Lake, Summit officials intend to investigate
Friday, September 24, 2004
Steve Luttner and Michael Scott
Plain Dealer Reporters

More than 1,000 voter registration forms and absentee ballot requests may be fraudulent in Lake and Summit counties, where investigations of irregularities are broadening.

Lake County Sheriff Daniel Dunlap said Thursday that he will investigate an attempt to register a dead person and other possibly fraudulent documents that were submitted to the Lake County Board of Elections

Dunlap also said he has notified the FBI and the Ohio secretary of state.

“We want to make sure the election here in Lake County is the best possible,” Dunlap said. “I don’t know if this was a concerted effort or if it was just an overzealous, independent person here and there who decided to push the envelope.”

Elections officials have said hundreds of absentee ballot applications and dozens of voter registration cards are in question. Lake County Prosecutor Charles Coulson, also involved in the probe, said the problems are more significant than originally thought.

“We’ve seen voter fraud before, but never on this level,” Coulson said Thursday. “I grew up in Chicago and this looks like the politics of Mayor Daley in the '50s and '60s.”

Lake election and law enforcement officials said their investigation is centered on absentee registration attempts by the nonpartisan NAACP’s National Voter Fund and an anti-Bush, nonprofit group called Americans Coming Together, or ACT Ohio.

The National Voter Fund could not be reached Wednesday or Thursday at its Washington, D.C., offices.

A spokesman for ACT Ohio, however, said the group believed the allegations would prove groundless.

Several registration applications submitted by campaign volunteers for a candidate are also being scrutinized, Lake elections board Director Jan Clair said.

None of the officials would identify the candidate, however.

Dunlap said the probe will include visits from detectives to addresses of the voters in question.

In one other instance, an elderly nursing home resident who usually signs with an “X” appeared to have a firm, cursive signature when she registered.

“We are going to have to see who’s alive and who’s well,” Dunlap said.

“We’re going to have to burn up some shoe leather.”

In Summit County, meanwhile, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation has agreed to assist the Sheriff’s Department in the examination of 803 suspect voter registration applications.

Bryan Williams, director of the Summit County Board of Elections, said high interest in this year’s presidential election has resulted in unprecedented numbers of voter registrations, absentee ballot requests and irregular voter applications.

Williams said the suspect voter registration applications include some with nonexistent addresses while others from the same street all have the street identically misspelled.

Williams said that usually people applying to vote fill out their own cards before signing them, drawing attention to the odd fact that the street name is not spelled correctly.

Still other voter registration cards bear strikingly similar handwriting, suggesting one person submitted a group of fraudulent voter registration cards.

“We are not certified handwriting experts, but we believe that these were common looking signatures,” Williams said.

He said there are many groups aggressively trying to register new voters in time for the November election.

He said that in most instances, it’s difficult to determine what group or individual submitted voter registration cards.

To reach these Plain Dealer reporters:

sluttner@plaind.com, 1-800-628-6689

mscott@plaind.com, 440-602-4780

? 2004 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.

22

Actually, the ballots have been shown to be confusing. University students didn’t make any errors on a double column ballot, but in a sample of ‘average’ people ‘off the street’ (actually, in a mall), 7% made errors on a butterfly ballot like the one used in Florida (0% screwed up a single column ballot). Even if it doesn’t confuse those of ‘above average intelligence,’ those ballots were still problematic for a portion of the populace. The study was done by a group that was at my department at the time, and is published in Nature (one of the most highly regarded/highest impact scientific publications in the world).

http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v408/n6813/full/408665b0_fs.html

I’m not taking sides in the whole Dem/Rep debate, but there is scientific evidence indicating that those ballots were problematic and may have effected the election results.

For those who can’t access the whole article, here’s the abstract.

Nature 408, 665 - 666 (07 December 2000); doi:10.1038/35047160

An electoral butterfly effect

Part of the controversy surrounding this year’s presidential election in the United States concerns the potential for systematic bias in the ballot-card format ? could the butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida, have led to confusion and caused people who had intended to vote for Al Gore to vote for Pat Buchanan by mistake? Here we show that not only is the double-column butterfly ballot more confusing than a single-column ballot, but that it also appears to cause systematic errors in voting which call into question the validity of the results from Palm Beach County in the 2000 United States presidential election.

    • flee
23

Without having read the article, I have a question: what would make a systematic error rate of 7% more likely to cause error for or against one candidate rather than another?

Also, maybe I’m elitist, but I’m sorry – those ballots were not hard to understand, and if you aren’t smart enough to figure them out… well… what does that say?

Obviously, even those of average intelligence could figure them out – the problem only comes from those with the lowest intelligence. Assuming the mall sample was average, that would imply that the bottom 7% of the intelligence pool couldn’t figure them out. [Please, I don’t want to get into any discussions on the definition of intelligence…].

Out of curiousity, how does the intelligence of the average voter rate against the intelligence of the average adult? I would assume the average intelligence of a voter is higher, but I don’t know if that would hold.

Now, all that aside, should they improve them? Yeah. They should have the best, clearest design possible.

24

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Without having read the article, I have a question: what would make a systematic error rate of 7% more likely to cause error for or against one candidate rather than another?

Also, maybe I’m elitist, but I’m sorry – those ballots were not hard to understand, and if you aren’t smart enough to figure them out… well… what does that say?

Obviously, even those of average intelligence could figure them out – the problem only comes from those with the lowest intelligence. Assuming the mall sample was average, that would imply that the bottom 7% of the intelligence pool couldn’t figure them out.

Out of curiousity, how does the intelligence of the average voter rate against the intelligence of the average adult?
[/quote]

Hi BB,

By systematic error, they mean that due to the design of the ballot, errors were always made in the same direction. In this case, those intending to vote for Gore would accidentally punch the Buchanan hole. i.e. it wasn’t just that people screwed up their ballots, it was that when they did, it always had the same effect (a Gore voter became a Buchanan voter).

As for the rest, I looked at the ballots and I wasn’t confused either. But I wouldn’t say the dumbest 7% screwed up, and I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily related to intelligence. More like attention to detail (or spatial abilities), and the ballot was designed such that Gore voters who didn’t pay attention screwed up and voted for Buchanan. Sorry, but you won’t convince me that there was any global difference in ‘attention to detail’ between voter groups, so I tend to think it was the ballot. That said, I’m not big on conspiracies and really think it was just a bad design, not a grand republican scheme.

Oh, and I have no idea how the IQ of voters vs. non-voters rates. It wouldn’t surprise me if voters are higher, but I wouldn’t guarantee it would be significant. Apathy is not necessarily related to intelligence. But I really don’t know, this isn’t even close to my area of study, I just knew some of the people involved. - - flee

25

Given all the worries about voting in FL, this article points to one loudly trumpeted concern that actually isn’t founded on anything:

Wall Street Journal Editorial
The Florida Myth
September 28, 2004; Page A22

In case you were lucky enough to miss it, here’s a recent fund-raising letter from New Jersey Democratic Senator Jon Corzine:

“Voter suppression and intimidation . . . in Florida again!? The GOP used voter intimidation and outright fraud to hand Florida to George W. Bush in 2000, and if we don’t stop them, they’ll do it again.”

Yes, the political urban legend that black voters in Florida were harassed and intimidated on Election Day four years ago is making a comeback. Only yesterday Jimmy Carter, fresh from blessing Hugo Chavez’s dubious victory in Venezuela, moaned that in 2000 “several thousand ballots of African Americans were thrown out on technicalities” in Florida, and that this year more black than (Republican) Hispanic felons are being disqualified to vote – as if all felons weren’t supposed to be barred, regardless of race.

As the Corzine letter and the “Jim Crow” pamphlet nearby suggest, this is all election-year demagoguery. Democrats and their acolytes are raising this myth from the dead to scare up black turnout and lay the groundwork for challenges in court if John Kerry loses. So, before Dan Rather concludes this is another scoop, let’s all remember the fraud that didn’t happen in 2000.

In June 2001, following a six-month investigation that included subpoenas of Florida state officials from Governor Jeb Bush on down, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report that found no evidence of voter intimidation, no evidence of voter harassment, and no evidence of intentional or systematic disenfranchisement of black voters.

Headed by a fiercely partisan Democrat, Mary Frances Berry, the Commission was very critical of Florida election officials (many of whom were Democrats). For example, “Potential voters confronted inexperienced poll workers, antiquated machinery, inaccessible polling locations, and other barriers to being able to exercise their right to vote.” But the report found no basis for the contention that officials conspired to disenfranchise voters. “Moreover,” it said, “even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred,” let alone racial discrimination.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division conducted a separate investigation of these charges and also came up empty. In a May 2002 letter to Democratic Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont, who at the time headed the Judiciary Committee, Assistant Attorney General Ralph Boyd wrote, “The Civil Rights Division found no credible evidence in our investigations that Floridians were intentionally denied their right to vote during the November 2000 election.”

Peter Kirsanow, a Republican member of the Civil Rights Commission, told us in an interview that “the press has tried to spin what happened in Florida into something sinister. But there’s a disconnect between what was actually found [in these various investigations] and how it’s been portrayed.”

Senator Corzine’s letter references the New York Times, where heavy-breathing columnists are trying to link a routine investigation of voter fraud in an Orlando mayoral election with a statewide effort by Governor Jeb Bush to intimidate blacks into staying home in November. Elsewhere, the NAACP and People for the American Way have issued a report claiming that “intimidation” led to racially motivated voter disenfranchisement in Florida. These and other left-wing groups are planning to dispatch 5,000 lawyers nationwide on Election Day in the name of “voter protection,” presumably to prevent a “repeat” of something that didn’t happen the first time.

Another prong of the attack on the legitimacy of the Florida outcome, at least as it pertains to the notion the black voters were intentionally disenfranchised, is the number of black voters whose ballots were spoiled. The Civil Rights Commission concluded that blacks were more likely to spoil their votes than whites by a factor of 10 to 1. Other investigations put that ratio closer to 3 to 1. In any case, the numbers are educated guesses extrapolated from sample precincts because ballots don’t record the race of the voter.

But the idea that racial animus rather than all-around incompetence produced higher spoilage rates for blacks, or accounted for their misplacement on the infamously inaccurate “felon purge list,” is fanciful at best. In Florida, as in many other states, the manner in which elections are conducted, including all of the essentials of the voting process, is determined at the county level.

Which leaves the “stolen election” crowd with these inconvenient facts: In 24 of the 25 Florida counties with the highest ballot spoilage rate, the county supervisor was a Democrat. In the 25th county, the supervisor was an Independent. And as for the “felon purge list,” the Miami Herald found that whites were twice as likely to be incorrectly placed on the list as blacks.

The real spectacle here is that some Democrats are only too willing to exploit the painful history of black voter disenfranchisement for some short-term partisan advantage. And it just might backfire. Democrats played up the Florida fiasco in the 2002 midterm elections, repeatedly telling blacks that their votes hadn’t been counted in 2000. Rather than being riled up, many black voters believed what they were told and stayed home.

26

More problems in FL – I’m hoping the election won’t be close enough for stuff like this to become a real problem - I myself wonder why someone would pick up absentee ballots, which can be dropped in the mailbox:

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/09/28/State/Vote_fraud_case_raise.shtml

Read the whole thing, but here are the lead paragraphs:

ORLANDO - Local politicians call him the absentee ballot king.

Before each election, Ezzie Thomas appears at the homes of hundreds of black voters and picks up their absentee ballots.

In a predominately black Orlando neighborhood, it seems everyone knows the 73-year-old Thomas. He was the local television repair man for years, extending credit to black residents when no one else would.

But now Thomas’ tactics in the spring Orlando mayoral election are at the center of a controversy that once again has put Florida elections in the national spotlight. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigated Thomas, closed its case, then reopened it. Now the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights are investigating the FDLE investigation.

Critics of Thomas’ methods argue they are illegal and give Democrats an edge. Critics of the FDLE investigation say all candidates go after absentee ballots like Thomas does and call the probe an attempt to scare black residents into not voting in November, which would help Republicans.

“If there was evidence of widespread absentee ballot fraud, I don’t think anyone would question their right to investigate,” said Democratic lawyer Joseph Egan, who wonders why the FDLE would focus so hard on someone like Thomas.

27

Here’s a blog that is chronicling evidence of fraud:

http://billhobbs.com/hobbsonline/cat_voter_fraud.html

28

Yes, but if you read carefullly you can see that word games are being played. There were no SYSTEMATIC issues.

This doesn’t meant that there were no issues, it just means that if there were issues it wasn’t due to government directed abuses.

I don’t know if wingnuts on the left or right did shady things in Florida, but regardless, it sure is one screwed up state with respect to handling elections. Talk about incompetence.

If things are close and in heavy contention again the damned electoral college should just eliminate Florida’s votes unless and until it can run a credible election.

29

vroom:

All the phrasing means is that the authors appreciate how hard it is to defend a universal claim such as “absolutely nothing untoward went on.” The claim is that nothing of any serious importance occurred, and that certainly nothing like the unsubstantiated claims of “Millions of disenfranchised black voters” occurred. That’s about as strong a claim as one can make for an election involving this number of people and locations.