-Caveat Lector- http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/18473.htm IT'S THE FRAUD, STUPID Wednesday,December 20,2000 By STEPHEN BRONARS & JOHN R. LOTT JR WITH last month's political turmoil, there is a strong consensus to reform how we vote. Pollster Frank Luntz reports that well over 50 percent of Americans now support some form of electronic voting, including voting at home via computers. Yet, our understandable desire to relegate the distinction between "dimples" and "pregnant chads" to history books overlooks most of the irregularities in voting: votes cast illegally. Without these irregularities, Bush would have carried Florida with at least a few thousand more votes. For example, a review of voting rolls by the Miami Herald reveals that more than 5,000 felons, over 75 percent of whom were registered as Democrats, apparently voted. News stories from around the nation point to other widespread problems. Missouri: In St. Louis, a judge, who was a former aide to House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, ordered city polls held open for an extra three hours. The suit filed by Democrats on behalf of two voters claimed that they had insufficient time to vote. Yet, one of these "voters" had died in August 1999, and the other turned out not to be registered. While city polls were eventually closed down after an hour, the Missouri gubernatorial and senatorial races might well have been affected, as the democratic margins of victory were slim - only 22,000 and 49,000 respectively. Wisconsin: A Marquette University student newspaper found that 174 out of a 1,000 students surveyed had exploited Wisconsin's permissive Election Day registration procedures to vote more than once. Most voted twice (at school and at home by absentee ballot), though some voted four or more times. In Milwaukee homeless people were offered cigarettes so that they would go with Democratic campaign workers to obtain absentee ballots. Gore won Wisconsin by only 5,396 votes. Oregon: In that state voting is now exclusively done by mail. Election officials caught four people posing as election officials and collecting mail-in ballots that voters were dropping off at the elections department on Election Day. Similarly, at a Bush rally in Oregon, voters who tried to hand in their ballots to Republican officials were apparently deceived into giving them to people not connected with the campaign. Gore won Oregon by 6,800 votes. But the biggest problem is bloated voter registration roles. Take Philadelphia, where people apparently take their civic responsibilities seriously. In that city, 1,025,259 are registered voters out of 1,065,455 residents aged 18 and over. As a number of adults are ineligible to vote (e.g., felons and non-citizens), the number of registered voters clearly exceeds the number of eligible people. These numbers cannot be explained simply by voters being left on the rolls after they have moved or died. Preliminary numbers show some precincts had 100 percent of the registered voters voting, with 99 percent of their votes going for Gore. There is no obvious explanation for how this is possible. It is one thing to ensure convenience in registering to vote. It is quite another to have no real checks on who is registered. The federal 1993 Motor Voter law allows nonvoters to remain on the registration rolls for up to four years before they can be removed, preventing states from regularly checking registration rolls for nonexistent people. Few jurisdictions check voter identifications and criminal backgrounds checks are virtually never done. Rules allowing voters to register on Election Day even prevent verifying the voter's address. These problems occur all over America. Some are humorous, such as the discovery of some Chicagoans successfully registering their cats to vote. But the numbers don't add up in cities ranging from Detroit to St. Louis, and many races apparently turned on these results. Simply making sure that we "count all the votes" - the mantra repeated constantly over the last month - is not the answer if those aren't real votes. Stephen Bronars is chairman of the University of Texas Economics Department, and John Lott is a senior research scholar at the Yale University Law School -- The best government is the one that charges you the least blackmail for leaving you alone.- Thomas Rudmose-Brown <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. 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