Democracy is alive and well in the United States, at least when there is no incumbent running for reelection and voters have a choice between two clear alternatives (witness the recent closely-contested House election in upstate New York). Partisans of all persuasions are dissatisfied with the process, in particular how votes are counted. Democrats still remember Florida 2000, when George W. Bush won the majority of the votes counted, even though analyses accounting for overvotes and the notorious “butterfly ballot” in Palm Beach County showed that tens of thousands more voters in the state were intending to vote for Al Gore. The memory of this carried over to 2004, when more questionable claims were made about Ohio’s vote count. On the other side, Republicans have expressed concern about ballot fraud dating back to the old-style big-city political “machines.” And, of course, supporters of third parties of left, right, and center struggle against restrictive ballot laws and the difficulties of state-by-state registration for national campaigns.
In a new book, “The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System is Failing and How To Fix It,” Yale law professor Heather Gerken reviews the problems of our election systems and suggests an intriguing way to improve things: as she puts it,
We should create a Democracy Index that ranks states and localities based on election performance. The Index would function as the rough equivalent of the U.S. News and World Report rankings for colleges . . . It would focus on issues that matter to all voters: how long did you spend in line? How many ballots were discarded? How often did voting machines break down? The Index would tell voters not only whether things are working in their own state, but how their state compares to its neighbors.
Heather Gerken worked on Barack Obama’s campaign team, and unsurprisingly her suggestions focus on issues of particular concern to many Democrats. That said, I think her idea could — and should — be of interest to Republicans as well. Americans of all political persuasions have an interest in our major institutions — including business, the military, education, the news media and, yes, government too — retaining the confidence of the people.
What makes Gerken’s proposal particularly appealing is its feature of using open sharing of information to create incentives for states and localities to improve their electoral systems, by setting up specific targets that voters can follow.
I like her idea — a lot — and just have a couple of concerns and suggestions.
First, as noted above, Gerken compares her proposed ratings to the U.S. News rankings of colleges. She immediately disassociates herself from the particulars of the U.S. News rankings — which are notorious for being “gamed” by colleges, for example by manipulating early admissions — but this brings to mind another problem, which is that rankings probably won’t change much from year to year. I would’ve liked to see a ranking of the 50 states based on their current voting systems. Illinois and Ohio aside, would the traditional good-government metric of “closeness to Canada” be a good predictor? I can see why Gerken didn’t include such a ranking in her book — if you’re trying to sell a new idea to the nation, it doesn’t make sense to start off by disparaging the 25 states that would be on the bottom half of such a list — but a baseline would’ve given me more of a sense of what the ratings would mean.
My second suggestion to Gerken and fellow reformers is that they broaden their list of concerns. On page 123, Gerken writes that the numbers in the index should “evaluate whether (1) every eligible voter who wants to register can do so, (2) every registered voter who wants to cast a ballot can do so, and (3) every ballot cast is counted properly.” One thing she does not mention here is voter fraud. According to my Barnard College colleague and urban politics scholar Lorraine Minnite, “voter fraud is extremely rare“; nonetheless, fraud is certainly a real political concern. In her report, Minnite writes that “Better data collection and election administration will improve the public discussion of voter fraud and lead to more appropriate policies,” and so it would seem to be a win-win policy to include some measure of voter fraud in the Democracy Index.
In summary, Gerken’s proposals are interesting and appealing, and I hope that the fact that they come from a member of the Obama campaign team does not stop Republicans from taking her ideas, adding to them, and working with Democrats and supporters of minor parties (who might very well have their own reasonable additions to the Democracy Index) to set up a system in which the flaws of state and local election systems are made public in a nonpartisan way that would encourage innovation and improvement.
Voter fraud (as opposed to election fraud) is not a real political concern. Voter fraud is essentially non-existent. The political concern over voter fraud is a fig leaf to cover efforts to disenfranchise certain classes of voters. Here's what's happened in Texas. In 2006, our Republican Attorney General grabbed headlines by announcing a task force to combat what he alleged was widespread voter fraud. His exact words:
"In Texas, an epidemic of voter fraud is infesting the electoral process and it's time we rooted it out."
In the course of his two year effort, he managed to prosecute 26 people (all Democrats, most of them minorities). 18 of the convictions were violating a state law that says if you carry somebody's absentee ballot to the mailbox, you have to sign the envelope. There were two legitimate cases of voter fraud that resulted in jail time and both of them would have been caught in any event without all the posturing.
The AG's office spent millions of dollars which were diverted from a federal grant that could have been used to prosecute child predators or address some real problem. Instead, we paid for their investigators to embarrass themselves by getting caught peeping the bathroom window of an elderly woman as she got out of the shower (they were staking out her home to interview her over allegations of voter fraud). This was a transparent attempt to intimidate minority voters.
In response to all this, the Texas legislature has suspended its rules so that it can pass a voter photo id law. Yep, our Republican controlled legislature thinks the most important issue facing the state is voter fraud. You can forget about getting Republican support for the "Democracy Index". They're actively trying to go in the other direction.
William: See Lorraine Minnite's report (linked above) for a fuller discussion of this issue.
The question is: what method of measuring voter fraud would you propose? There is a real problem here, because even if we take concerns about fraud from the right to be in good faith, it seems to me that measures of fraud would likely fall into two categories:
(1) measures of the rates of actual fraud, which would be both (a) small, and (b) very difficult to measure accurately;
-or-
(2) measures of the _susceptibility_ to fraud, which would in effect be measures of whether some class of anti-fraud policies, probably those favored by Republicans, had been adopted.
My concern is that, since (1) is logistically and empirically a tough nut to crack, opening the door to measuring fraud will lead to proposals to incorporate (2) into the index. This is obviously a problem. Part of the point of the index is to move away from checklists of preferred practices and toward empirical measurements of results. But when you are swatting at a nearly nonexistent problem, "results" are hard enough to see that you may instead find yourself creating variables to measure that are more like favored practices.
(Disclosure: I'm a former student of Gerken's and a big fan of her proposal.)
The issue is Election Fraud. Voter Fraud is non-existent.
Election Fraud is pervasive.
2004-2008 Election Fraud Analytics: Response to the TruthIsAll FAQ
Updated: Mar. 30, 2009 by TruthIsAll
The analysis has been updated to include 2008 Election Fraud Analytics. Obama won by 9.5 million recorded votes – but the landslide was denied.
Part I (Election Fraud Analytics) is a comprehensive statistical analysis of the 2004 and 2006 elections. In 2000, Al Gore won by several million more votes than his recorded 540,000 margin. In 2004, John Kerry actually won by 8-10 million votes. In the 2006 midterms, a Democratic Tsunami gave them control of congress, but the landslide was denied; they did much better than the official results indicate. And the True Vote does not include the disenfranchised, the great majority of whom are Democratic minority voters.
Part II contains the original ‘TruthIsAll FAQ’ with my responses included. The author of the FAQ, Mark Lindeman, has tried to debunk the work of independent analysts who maintain that pre-election and exit polls are powerful statistical evidence that Kerry won handily and that the 2006 Democratic landslide was denied. Mark has posted on the Democratic Underground as ‘On the Other Hand’, on Daily KOS as ‘Hudson Valley Mark’ and numerous other forums.
Bush had a 48.5% average approval rating on Election Day. The Nov.1, 2004 Election Model, based on the final state and 18 national pre-election polls, projected Kerry as the 51.8-48.2% winner of the two-party vote. His expected 337 electoral vote was calculated as the average of a 5000 election-trial Monte Carlo simulation. The projection model was confirmed by the state and national exit polls.
Edison-Mitofsky provided four state exit poll measures. Kerry won the first three; Bush won the Final:
1) WPE 51.8-47.2% (unadjusted)
2) GEO 51.0-48.5% (adjusted to incoming recorded votes)
3) Composite 50.3-49.1% (12:22am-adjusted to pre-election polls)
4) Final 48.5-51.1% (matched to recorded vote)
WPE is the only unadjusted (‘pristine’) measure. It was based on the average discrepancy between the exit poll result and recorded vote for all state precincts which were polled. Measures (2) and (3) are adjusted estimates which incorporate pre-election polls and recorded votes. The final state exit polls were forced to match the recorded votes, therefore implying ZERO election fraud. Why should we believe them? And why bother doing exit polls at all if they will just assume that the recorded vote count was the True Vote?
Some say that exit polls are not designed to predict the True Vote but to provide a demographic snapshot of the electorate. But if that’s the case, and the recorded vote count is corrupted, then so are the demographics.
Kerry also had a steady 51-48% lead throughout the National Exit Poll timeline: at 4pm (8349 respondents); 7:30pm (11027); 12:22am (13047) – after the polls closed. Of course, Bush won the Final NEP by 51-48% (13660 respondents) which was posted at 2pm the day after the election. The Final NEP was forced to match the Recorded Vote count with impossible weights and implausible vote shares, so why should we believe it?
Excel–based models were developed to calculate the True Vote. Links to the models are provided in this document. They confirm the massive documented evidence of elections which were compromised by a combination of uncounted and miscounted votes. The essential input for the models include state and national recorded votes, pre-election and exit polls, Census total votes cast and mortality rates. Users can enter their own assumptions and then view a ‘sensitivity analysis’ of resulting state and national vote shares and margins. The scenarios are displayed in numeric tables and charts. Many examples are provided in this document.
The Election Calculator and Interactive Election Simulation models determined that Kerry probably did 1-2% better than the exit polls indicate.
The Election Calculator is an Excel model for analyzing 1988-2004 elections. Users can override the pre-set default assumptions for voter mortality, uncounted vote rates, prior election voter turnout and vote shares of prior and new voters. The base case scenario indicates that Kerry won by nearly 10 million votes with a 53.2-45.4% vote share. Interested readers can download the model, review the base case scenario and then enter their own assumptions. Sensitivity analysis tables provide an instant view of vote shares over a range of input assumption scenarios.
The Interactive 2004 Election Simulation Model (also Excel) enables users to run simulations based on state and national pre-election and exit polls. State exit poll vote shares are based on the following user options: 1) WPE, 2) Best GEO and 3) Composite (12:22am). The National Exit poll data includes the 12:22am update and the 2pm Final. The only pre-election model assumption is Kerry’s projected share of Undecided Voters. The only state exit poll inputs are the method (1, 2, or 3) and assumed cluster effect. A Monte Carlo simulation consisting of 200 election trials generates both the projected popular and expected electoral vote. The probability of Kerry winning the election is the percentage of trials in which Kerry received at least 270 EV. Additional model analysis includes National Exit Poll timeline, Gender vote, exit poll response optimizer, Census data and the Ohio exit poll.
In the 2006 midterms, a Democratic Tsunami gained 31 congressional seats. But they actually did much better than that. A regression trend analysis of 120 pre-election Generic polls (all won by the Democrats) projected they would win by 56-42% and gain over 40 seats. The 7pm National Exit Poll update (55 Dem-43% Rep) confirmed the pre-election trend. But the next day, the Final NEP was once again forced to match a corrupted vote count with implausible weights and vote shares. The Democratic margin was cut in half to 52-46%. The fraud resulted in the loss of 10-20 seats.