-Caveat Lector- REVIEW & OUTLOOK The Voter Fraud Iceberg Punch cards are the least of the problems. Monday, March 12, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST One of the great ironies of all the high-mindedness that surrounded the Presidential vote recounting in Florida last year is that the groundswell for accuracy must have had politicos quaking in their boots from San Francisco to Philadelphia. Honest vote counting? Egad! The fact is that if one was able to insist on the kind of honest balloting that we demand of, say El Salvador, some of America's biggest cities would look like electoral sinkholes. Increasingly, though, voter fraud is finding its way onto local agendas. The U.S. Justice Department and local officials in St. Louis have just shown what a coordinated effort can do to clean up election irregularities. The voting last November in St. Louis was a mess and included charges of voter fraud. That is changing. A grand jury there is investigating 3,800 suspect voter registration cards, including some for dead local officials, that were turned in shortly before the deadline for last week's mayoral race. In that primary vote, election workers were allowed to ask for photo ID from voters, and a local judge ruled that the election board could throw out a list of 54,000 voters it said had moved. Joe Neill, the election board chairman, noted that if he had been forced to use the inactive list, the city would have had 13,000 more registered voters than the U.S. Census lists as the total number of adults over age 18 in St. Louis. Attorney General John Ashcroft says that sending Justice Department monitors to places like St. Louis, which aren't covered by the Voting Rights Act, can help local officials cope with problems of access and intimidation. He also announced that he will appoint a new senior counsel to make certain "Americans' votes are not diluted by voter fraud." That's a great idea. This country doesn't just have a voting-machine problem; it's rife with incompetent or nefarious practices that make U.S. election procedures "the sloppiest in the industrialized world," according to noted political scientist Walter Dean Burnham. Philadelphia is another example. Eight years ago, a federal judge had to overturn the results of a special state Senate election due to absentee ballot fraud. At that time, the Reno Justice Department refused to investigate and local officials let the issue slide. Now Philadelphia is the focus of a joint legislative committee tasked with improving the accuracy of elections. A Philadelphia Inquirer review of results from last year's election in 200 precincts found that more than 3,000 votes were miscounted--often because poll workers simply didn't add the totals correctly. Philadelphia has just over one million registered voters; that's just about the number of eligible voters the Census estimates live in the city. Something is clearly wrong. We ought to be able to agree that if any degree of trust is to be maintained in how we vote, then local lists of exactly who may vote ought to be reasonably accurate. Today, however, voter rolls, notably in California, are full of dead, moved or ineligible people--most of whom must remain on the books to satisfy federal mandates. The most famous mandate is the 1994 National Voter Registration Act, or "motor voter law." It required state social service agencies and motor vehicle departments to hand out voter registration forms to its customers. Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge told us that "the single worst vote I cast in Congress was in favor of the Motor Voter law." It's increasingly evident that the law hasn't increased turnout, but instead has made voter rolls more inaccurate. When you put unreliable voter lists and the hallowed but corrupt tradition of election-day "street money" in the wrong hands, the result is predictable. Last week a state grand jury declared that Philadelphia's habituation to city-judge candidates forking over $100,000 or more in street money was corrupt, and said it should be replaced with judges chosen by merit appointment. Four officials were indicted for violating election laws. "Money just disappeared," says state Attorney General Mike Fisher. Former Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell admitted to us that unions often handpick judicial candidates, and then make sure there's enough street money spread around to get them elected in the expectation that the judges will blink at union misconduct, such as the infamous 1998 beating of anti-Clinton protesters Don and Teri Adams by Teamster thugs. We don't mean to single out Philadelphia, which at least appears to be trying to clean up its act. And Attorney General Ashcroft's apparent intention to clean up election procedures all over the country should be commended. But a lot more work needs to be done to ensure an accurate and fraud-free voter count in places where clean elections are simply no longer part of local traditions. We trust that the Justice Department's new counsel on election reform will strive to look beyond Florida, and we trust that the complainers about the Florida count will be right alongside, cleaning up balloting across America. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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