Oh, There’s a Princess Registered in IL-10
The GOP is suing for…well, I’m not real sure:
The lawsuit seeks a court order directing the Lake County clerk’s office, which oversees elections, to create separate, special codes for all voter-registration forms gathered by a Chicago group called Citizen Action/Illinois and a worker named Terrance LeNoir. In court papers, the GOP and other plaintiffs blame the group and LeNoir for delivering “fraudulent, incomplete or illegitimate” voter applications to the clerk’s office.
Additionally, the complaint requests ballots cast by voters registered by Citizen Action or LeNoir to be considered provisional ballots that wouldn’t be counted until two weeks after Election Day.
“We need to restore confidence in the electoral process in Lake County and across the country,” Lake County GOP Chairman Dan Venturi said during a news conference at the party office in Libertyville.
Citizen Action/Illinois Executive Director Lynda DeLaforgue denied any wrongdoing and said the voters the group has registered in Lake County were handled “in accordance with the law.”
She said the group registered about 600 people in Lake County in 2008, far fewer than the roughly 5,000 applications GOP representatives said they’re seeking to segregate.
So let’s run through the scenarios where voter fraud could be occurring. The only cases where any of this matters is where individuals register by mail/registration drive and provide a unique identification number from a Social Security number or Driver’s Licence number. Those are the people who do not have to present either a photocopied identification with the registration or bring it to the polling place when they first vote.
So this one group who provided information in the form of a Driver’s License number or the last four of their Social Security number and those numbers match to the name with the SS number or the DL number are the relevant group that are at issue.
This means anyone who is voting illegally is either choosing to vote in Lake County over their true home and since this can be documented, opened themselves to prosecution or choosing to vote twice meaning they vote in their home address and in Lake County and there will be evidence of this after the election with which to prosecute them.
Of course, the GOP will argue this is some large group of people, but it’s a story that doesn’t pass the laugh test. We can barely get people to vote once, but under this theory people will vote in one location and then take the time to go vote again in Lake County from another County. Lake County made the point previously that they check registrations against others in the county so the potential of intra-county fraud in this case simply isn’t possible. So thousands of people are going to cross the Lake County border and vote even though they leave a trail back to a real person to prosecute should they vote in two places.
There’s a fairly simple answer to all of this that doesn’t involve any further effort on the voter trying to register. Using updated and current street files a GIS program can weed out potential problems in a matter of minutes. If someone were offering a limited solution to the worst potential of this problem, the entire argument would have more credibility. Then you simply mark those addresses as needing further confirmation or a provisional ballot.
The larger problem to the argument over wide spread voter fraud is that new voting technology–meaning the punch card systems and computerized voting lists–has made it too difficult to be cost effective. Stuffing ballot boxes was easy when simple paper ballots were used or the Republican alternative of short pencilling was cheap. You didn’t need lots of people to be transported, find polling spots and be registered multiple times and having some form of unique identifier whether it be mail or SS or DL numbers–you simply stuck ballots in the box. It’s far more cost effective to develop effective GOTV operations and find legal voters.
But that’s not nearly as interesting of a story. Even if it’s true.