Are 1.8 million dead voters bad?
February 14, 2012 by Don Surber
Never let a crisis go to waste. Following the non-fiasco in the Florida in the 2000 presidential election — the vote count was off by only 44 votes out of 6 million cast, giving Bush a 493-vote win instead of 537 — Congress decided to federalize elections. The late Democratic Senator Robert C. Byrd said at the time:
While states run elections, Congress was given specific responsibility in the Constitution to alter election regulations, Byrd said.
Not to beat a dead bird, but once again Robert Carlyle Byrd was totally and unequivocally wrong. Here is what the Constitution actually says: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”
The only roll Congress has is determining the validity of the election to the House or Senate. (Bold underline emphasis mine NEH)
But hey, reporters never question authority unless it is Republican.
So now, 10 years later, what do we have?
1.8 million dead people are registered to vote,
2.8 million people are registered to vote in more than 1 state,
and according to the New York Times, “12 million registrations have errors serious enough to make it unlikely that mailings based on them will reach voters.”
This was the finding of the liberal tax-exempt corporation, Pew Center for the States in a report, “Evidence That America’s Voter Registration System Needs an Upgrade.”
Among the problems found by Pew: “Third-party organizations are most active close to an election, and thus submit millions of paper applications just before registration deadlines. Voter lists rely upon the information solicited by these groups, but if a voter moves, election officials are unlikely to learn of it, if at all, until immediately before the next registration deadline, when paper forms again flood election offices.”
In the case of ACORN, chaos is the whole purpose.
In its report, the New York Times recycled the lie that Florida’s election in 2000 was screwed up. Just because Al Gore said it was screwed up did not make it so. A media recount of the ballots cast found the final vote count was off by only 44 votes.
If only reporters were so accurate that they made only 44 errors out of 6 million “facts” reported.
From the New York Times:
The flaws in the voter registration rolls have a disproportionately negative impact on mobile populations, including students and other young people, the poor and members of the military, the Pew report found.
“It’s not clear that it has a uniform partisan effect,” Nathaniel Persily, a law professor and political scientist at Columbia, said of those findings. But he added that “it is now pretty clear that Democrats want to enact measures that make voter registration easier, and Republicans fear that would be an invitation to fraud.”
The Pew report compared state voter registration lists with a database maintained by Catalist, a company that collects and sells information about voting-age Americans based on data from public and commercial sources.
The United States differs from most other modern democracies in relying on a decentralized election administration system that places the burden of registration on voters rather than treating registration as a government responsibility.
The Pew report shows a crisis, but is it?
Do 1.8 million dead people on the voting rolls out of 160 million registered voters really so bad? People die and they are not automatically purged from the rolls. This is only a problem if someone votes in their name.
As much as we tease about cemetery voting, that is not as frequent as advertised.
As for being registered to vote in two states, that happens. In some cases it is nefarious. In other cases,it is just a matter of moving and failing to cancel a registration in another state. States can work it out among themselves to fix this without congressional interference.
Again, being registered in two or more states is no problem unless someone votes in each state.
Mass purges can wait until off-years and down time for election officials.
We panicked in 2000 and wound up replacing perfectly good punch card voting with touch computer voting and optical scanning ballots. What a mess. The punch cards were really, really accurate. Let’s not panic again and wind up with an even worse system — again.
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