Bring Out Your Dead Vote

Jonathan Adler, posting at the Volokh Conspiracy, notes an analysis by the Poughkeepsie Journal that shows a rather large and active group of dead voters in New York State. Oddly, dead Democratic voters are more able to get to the polls than dead Republican voters. Who'd a thunk.

An analysis of state-wide records by the Poughkeepsie Journal reveals that 77,000 dead people remain on election rolls in New York State, and some 2,600 may have managed to vote after they had died. The study also found that Democrats are more successful at voting after death than Republicans, by a margin of four-to-one, largely because so many dead people seem to vote in Democrat-dominated New York City.

Now, this is not to say that the dead are actually going to the polls. Unless Baron Samedi has decided to enter politics in a big way, of course. But either someone is voting for them, or they are incorrectly listed as dead - but vote anyway. One way or the other, there is obviously a problem.

Of course, if the Baron has entered politics, we have an even bigger problem of an entirely different sort, haven't we?

The Supporters Of Election Fraud

John Fund has an article at the Opinion Journal about the many problems with the extensive proliferation of absentee balloting. Simply put, making absentee ballots easily accessible is bad for democracy, bad for voter turnout and is an open invitation to fraud. Those who are pushing these programs are supporting that fraud even if they have the best of intentions. Incidentally, the bipartisan National Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford reached that same conclusion.

Supporters of absentee voting insist that it increases turnout. But that's simply not the case. Curtis Gans, the director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, says that "academic studies all show that easy absentee voting decreases or has no effect on turnout," with the 2004 election a slight exception. This is because "you are diffusing the mobilizing focus away from a single day and having to mobilize voters over a period of time." Mr. Gans notes that the people who really are helped by absentee voting are those who cast ballots anyway.

It's certainly true that voters like no-excuses absentee voting for its convenience. "Forcing voters to go to the polls to cast their ballots is an antiquated, outdated, absurd practice," says Oren Spiegler, a Pennsylvania voter. But it comes at a price. Simply put, absentee voting makes it easier to commit election fraud, because the ballots are cast outside the supervision of election officials. "By loosening up the restrictions on absentee voting they have opened up more chances for fraud," Damon Stone, a former West Virginia election fraud investigator, told the New York Times.

It's so easy to cheat you'd be surprised who's been caught at it. In 1998, former congressman Austin Murphy of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, was convicted of absentee-ballot fraud in a nursing home, where residents' failing mental capacities make them an easy mark. "In this area there's a pattern of nursing home administrators frequently forging ballots under residents' names," Sean Cavanagh, a former Democratic county supervisor from the area, told me. He says that many nursing home owners rely on regular "bounties" from candidates whom they allow to enter their facilities and harvest votes.

Absentee voting also corrupts the secret ballot. Because an absentee ballot is "potentially available for anyone to see, the perpetrator of coercion can ensure it is cast 'properly,' unlike a polling place, where a voter can promise he will vote one way but then go behind the privacy curtain and vote his conscience," notes John Fortier, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, in his new book, "Absentee and Early Voting."

The need for safeguards against strong-arm tactics was proved in East Chicago, Ind.'s 2003 mayoral race. Challenger George Pabey defeated Robert Patrick, the eight-term incumbent, among Election Day voters but lost by 278 votes after some 2,000 absentee votes were tabulated.

Investigators for Mr. Pabey turned up repeated instances of coercion and vote-buying. Shelia Pierce allowed a Patrick campaign operative to fill out her absentee ballot in exchange for a $100 job at the polls. She said the operative later threatened her to keep her from testifying. Elisa Delrio said a local official offered her a similar job and even brought her absentee ballot to her hospital bed, where she was recovering from surgery. But after she wound up voting for Mr. Pabey and handed her ballot to the official, it promptly disappeared. The Indiana Supreme Court concluded that it was impossible to know who had won the election and ordered a revote a year later. Mr. Pabey won with 65% of the vote and was sworn in as mayor.

Abuses such as those in East Chicago can occur because many states allow political parties to collect absentee-ballot applications, and several even let them collect the completed ballots. Most states even let campaign workers assist voters in filling out the ballots if they ask for help.

Read the whole thing. There are quite a number of instances of fraud enumerated. So for those who claim there is no widespread evidence of fraud, here's the proof that there is. Fund points out that this mess that has come to pass may well mean that we will not know who won the election for weeks. Think about what a disaster for this country that will be. There is a need to clean this mess up. It is too late to do it this year, but we had better think about how to fix this before the 2008 elections. Stuff like this undermines trust in the system to no end.

The Problem With Polls

Michael Barone has a column up over at Real Clear Politics that points out the difficulties of polls and polling. It also points out some weird anomalies this year that are highly unusual - to the point of straining belief.

In 2004, the electorate that went to the polls or voted absentee was, according to the adjusted NEP exit poll, 37 percent Democratic and 37 percent Republican. In party identification, it was the most Republican electorate since George Gallup conducted his first random sample poll in October 1935.

But most recent national polls show Democrats with an advantage in party identification in the vicinity of 5 percent to 12 percent. Party identification usually changes slowly. Historically, voters have switched from candidates of one party to candidates of the other more readily than they have changed their party identification.

Over time, big changes in party ID can and do occur. When I started in the polling business, in 1974, national party identification was almost 50 percent Democratic and not much more than 25 percent Republican.

Since then, Democratic party ID has fallen, particularly in the South, where many voters who considered themselves Democrats found themselves voting Republican for president and, increasingly in the 1980s and 1990s, for other offices, as well.

Republican party ID has increased. But that's a process that took decades. If you could go back in history and conduct polls, I don't think you'd find any, and certainly not many, two-year periods when the balance in party identification shifted from even to having one party 12 percent ahead of the other.

There is quite a lot more, so go over and read it. Myself and quite a few others have repeatedly pointed out what we see as badly skewed samples in a lot of the polls. Barone correctly points out that massive shifts normally take quite a few years, not less than two. So who's right?

We'll know in eight days or so, won't we?

Declining Trust

Sebastian Mallaby has a column up in the Washington Post that bemoans the declining trust Americans have in politics and business. He doesn't actually say how to regain that trust, just shakes his head.

You see this most viciously in politics. In the mid-term campaigns, nobody has time for trust. The name of the game is to hold opponents accountable by attacking their records — for failings real or imagined. If the Democrats capture one or both chambers, it will be largely because they promise to hold the president accountable.

This reflects a shift somewhere around 2003 or 2004. In the 1990s, after academics and pundits began talking about trust, the nation did actually become more trusting. The share of Americans saying they trust government "most of the time" or "just about always" rose from 21 percent in 1994 to 56 percent in 2002. Equally, elections became less abrasively focused on accountability. In 2000, according to John Geer of Vanderbilt University, a relatively low 40 percent of the messages in presidential TV spots were negative, down from 47 percent four years earlier.

But some time after the Iraq invasion, these trends reversed. In 2004 the share of Americans saying they trusted government fell to 47 percent, and this month a CBS News-New York Times poll put it at a rock-bottom 28 percent. Meanwhile Geer's measures show that in the 2004 election negative messages jumped to 50 percent of the total, and he guesses that this year's congressional races are the most negative in history.

There's been a similar change in corporate America. In the late 1990s, the new thing for corporate managers was to trust ordinary employees. Company hierarchies were flattened so that people in the middle could demonstrate initiative rather than suffocating under bureaucratic controls. In 1999, the Harvard Business Review reported that 30,000 articles on trusting and empowering middle managers had appeared in the business press over the previous four years.

That paradigm ended in 2002 with Enron, WorldCom and dozens of lesser corporate scandals. Suddenly nobody wanted to trust managers; they wanted to audit them. Instead of the era of management empowerment, we entered the era of mandatory online ethics training. Meanwhile private-equity firms are raising record sums to take over companies on the premise that incumbent managers need to be kicked rather than trusted.

Interestingly, although Mallaby doesn't point it out, the 2003-2004 time frame he sees coincides with Nancy Pelosi's admitted strategy to go after the president. Not that this is the only thing that has been going on to erode trust.

I tend to see things like this as pendulum issues. Many things swing from one extreme to another. Politics and business are only two of the things that do this all the time. So in one way, Mallaby is correct, there has been a swing of these pendulums. I think the genius of America is that it has always managed to get these pendulum swings under control and find a middle ground.

Fingers Ready

The Washington Post reports that there are people already lining up to point fingers if the Republicans lose next Tuesday. They plan on pointing at Karl Rove. Now it really has already started, yesterday's op-ed in the WaPo by Dick Armey was finger pointing at Rove and his perceived tactics.

If the Republicans were to lose control of at least one chamber, those in the party who have long seen Rove's approach as polarizing would feel emboldened. At the same time, a new panel co-chaired by the man who exemplifies the GOP establishment, former secretary of state James A. Baker III, is preparing to chart a new course on the Iraq war — which polls suggest is the single largest reason for the Republicans' current travails.

"The architect may find his engineering plans were faulty," said one former senior official of past GOP administrations, who has watched the current one with increasing dismay. "Turning out the base this year may not be a winning or a governing strategy. America seems to be looking forward to making things work together, rather than dividing people across the board."

Rove is dismissive of the idea that the Republicans will lose the 15 House seats or six Senate seats required to cede control to the Democrats. On Tuesday, when the White House hosted radio talk show hosts from around the country, Rove did at least 13 interviews. He was on the phone with Washington association executives with what one called "happy talk" about voter-turnout metrics, polling data and campaign funding.

"I look at the individual races as clear-eyed as I can every single day, knowing what we are doing and knowing that we have the capacity to move the resources in if we need to do more," Rove said in a brief telephone interview from the road last week. "Incumbents are hard to defeat. Our candidates by and large have significantly more resources than they have. And we have succeeded in making these races choices between two local candidates."

An object of fascination on both the left and right, Rove at age 55 counts as one of the most celebrated and notorious figures in modern presidential history. Inside the White House, he is a revered figure, known as something of a jokester who will show up at senior staff meetings bearing snacks and promising a coup if Bolten is absent. Ed Rogers, a prominent GOP lobbyist, calls him "the glue" that holds the White House together.

There have been so many cartoonish portraits of many of the administration officials, it is difficult to separate the myth from the reality. Rove has obviously been able to win elections. There is no doubt whatever that the Democrats are trying to copy his success at the moment for all their whining about "wedge issues". The Democrats are desperately trying to drive wedges into the Republican/Conservative coalition this year. So if imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, that should tell you something about how Rove is regarded even in opposition circles.

Rove still seems confident that the Republicans will hold both houses. I have posted any number of items which indicate that I am pretty sure the conventional wisdom is wrong - again - this year. We'll know in just over a week, won't we? One thing to keep in mind about the conventional wisdom. Remember all the breathless reports that Rove was about to be indicted? Think about that.