Rover's Voter Fraud Think Tank Disappears

THE FRAUDULENT FRAUD SQUAD

RICHARD HASEN tells of the case of the incredible, disappearing American Center for Voting Rights

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, June 10, 2007


Imagine that the National Rifle Association's Web site suddenly disappeared, along with all the data and reports the group had ever posted on gun issues. Imagine that Planned Parenthood inexplicably closed its doors one day, without comment from its former leaders. The scenarios are unthinkable, given how established these groups are. But even if something did happen to either, no doubt other gun or abortion groups would quickly fill the vacuum.

Not so for the American Center for Voting Rights, which has vanished with no notice, little comment and with no apparent replacement. This operation – the only prominent non-governmental organization claiming that voter fraud is a major problem – simply stopped appearing at government panels and conferences sometime late last year.

Its Web domain name has expired, its reports are all gone (except where they have been preserved by its opponents), and its general counsel, Mark Hearne, has cleansed his résumé of his affiliation. He also won't speak to the press about the group's demise.

Its life and death says a lot about the Karl Rove-led Republican strategy of raising voter fraud as a crisis in American elections. One part of the attack, at the heart of the Justice Department scandals, involved getting U.S. attorneys in battleground states to vigorously prosecute cases of voter fraud. After exhaustive effort, Justice discovered virtually no polling-place voter fraud, and its efforts to fire U.S. attorneys who did not push the voter-fraud line enough has backfired.

But the second prong of this attack may have proven more successful. This involved using the American Center for Voting Rights to give "think tank" cachet to the unproven idea that voter fraud is a major problem. The center's work was used to support the passage of onerous voter-identification laws that depress turnout among the poor, minorities and the elderly – groups more likely to vote Democratic.

The short organizational history of the center, chronicled indefatigably by Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog, shows that the group was founded in March 2005, just days before its representatives testified at a congressional hearing on election-administration issues chaired by then-Rep. (and now federal inmate) Bob Ney. The group was headed by Mr. Hearne, national election counsel to Bush-Cheney '04, and staffed with other Republican operatives, including Jim Dyke, a former RNC communications director.

Consisting of little more than a post-office box and some staffers who wrote reports and gave helpful quotes about the pervasive problem to the press, the group identified Democratic cities as hot spots for voter fraud, then pushed the argument that "election integrity" required making it harder for people to vote.

The American Center for Voting Rights argued extensively by anecdote, such as someone, somewhere registering Mary Poppins to vote. Anecdote would then be coupled with statistics showing problems with voter rolls not being purged of voters who had died or moved, leaving open the potential for fraudulent voting. Given this great potential for mischief – yet without actual evidence – allegedly reasonable initiatives such as purging voter rolls and requiring ID seemed the natural solution.

At least in hindsight, the center's line of argument is easily deconstructed. First, arguing by anecdote is dangerous business. A new report by Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College looks at these anecdotes and shows them to be, for the most part, wholly spurious. Sure, one can find a rare case of someone voting in two jurisdictions, but nothing extensive or systematic has been unearthed or documented.

But perhaps most importantly, the idea of massive polling-place fraud (through the use of inflated voter rolls) is inherently incredible. Suppose I want to swing the Missouri election for my preferred presidential candidate. I would have to figure out who the fake, dead or missing people on the registration rolls are, then pay a lot of other individuals to go to the polling place and claim to be that person, without any return guarantee – thanks to the secret ballot – that any of them will cast a vote for my preferred candidate.

Those who do show up at the polls run the risk of being detected and charged with a felony. And for what – $10? Polling-place fraud, in short, makes no sense.

The Justice Department devoted unprecedented resources to ferreting out fraud over five years and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country. Of the many experts consulted, the only dissenter from that position was a representative of the now-evaporated American Center for Voting Rights.

The arguments against vote fraud were built on a house of cards, a house that is collapsing as quickly as the U.S. attorney investigation moves forward.

But despite the demise of the voting rights center, the idea that there is massive polling-place voter fraud has, perhaps irrevocably, entered the public consciousness. It has infected even the Supreme Court's thinking about voter-ID laws. And it has provided intellectual cover for the continued partisan pursuit of voter-ID laws that may suppress minority votes.

Richard L. Hasen, the William H. Hannon distinguished professor at Loyola Law School, writes the Election Law Blog. His e-mail address is rick.hasen@lls.edu. A longer version of this essay appeared at Slate.com.


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