The second edition of this book came out in 2008, four years before John Fund co-authored another work on voting fraud, “Who’s Counting?” People who have had the pleasure of reading the more recent book and are thinking about reading its predecessor will be glad to know that “Stealing Elections” is not simply an earlier edition of “Who’s Counting”. It covers some of the cases and sometimes simply lifts sentences from the earlier book. The well-argued recommendations for reform are also pretty much the same, depressingly so, since it shows how little reform there was in Obama’s first term in office. However, there is a lot of the history of voting fraud covered in this book that is omitted from “Who’s Counting”. While some of Fund’s anecdotes have little relevance to current issues, they are often fascinating in themselves. For example (p.171) we learn that “James Harrison, a biographer of [the writer] Edgar Allan Poe, speculates that when Poe died in 1849 he was a victim of ruthless vote-fraud toughs who kidnapped him and left him drunk and near death on a Baltimore street.” So voting fraud was already a serious problem in America in the first half of the 19th century.
“Stealing Elections” gives a much fuller treatment of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) than “Who’s Counting” does. On p.61, Fund writes: “Should Obama become president, look for ACORN to have a vastly more ambitious legislative agenda, and for Obama to be responsive.” This is not actually how it turned out. In September 2009, ACORN was the victim of a sting operation that caught their operatives on video advising a couple on how to engage in tax evasion, human smuggling and child prostitution. This led to the Congress to temporarily prohibit funding of ACORN, legislation that Obama signed into law on October 1. ACORN itself shut down in April 2010.
Fund notes that ACORN received a huge boost from the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which “mandated that banks doing business in a city had to invest some of their capita in poorer neighborhoods. The CRA allowed community groups to file complaints about violations of the act that could delay or even kill bank mergers” and encouraged the banks to invest in ACORN and other community groups to avoid denied or delayed applications. In the early 1990s it founded the ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC).
Among ACORN’s activities was voter registration, which frequently crossed the line into voting fraud, at least 54 ACORN employees having been convicted of voter fraud or related activities. “In 1994, the … AHC … was given a $1.1 million grant by AmeriCorps, the federal volunteer agency. In applying for the grant, the housing group claimed it was completely separate from ACORN. But the inspector general for AmeriCorps found just a year later that ‘AHC used AmeriCorps grant funds to benefit ACORN either directly or indirectly.’ She found several instances of cost shifting from ACORN’s political lobbying group to the housing entity, and also found several instances of steering recipients of housing counseling into ACORN memberships. The grant was quickly terminated.” So it seems that under President Clinton money that was intended for housing might well have been siphoned off to ACORN, including its voter registration and voter fraud activities.
Fund notes that Barack Obama “was recruited by ACORN to run a successful voter registration drive for the ACORN affiliate Project Vote. He took time off from his law firm to run the project, which registered 135,000 new voters and was considered integral to the victory of Carol Moseley Braun as the first back senator from Illinois while at the same time it claimed to conduct only ‘non-partisan’ activities.” As ACORN’s attorney he sued to force Republican Governor Jim Edgar, a Republican, to implement the ‘Motor Voter’ law in Illinois… In the summer of 2008, he was a major supporter of a Democratic housing bill that would provide $200 million to community groups counseling homeowners who face foreclosure. Critics pointed out that much of the money would be destined for ACORN and the Liberal Hispanic group La Raza.”
So at least until he was confirmed as the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, Obama had always been a stout supporter of an organization with a reputation for voter fraud and had worked for it himself.
One criticism Fund’s book is open to is it seems to take restrictions on voting in more than one state or on election activities by felons for granted, without any discussion if they make sense. On p.85 Fund claims that voter ID will make voting in more than one state impossible. This issue has recently gained prominence when it emerged that Tiffany Trump, one of President Trump’s daughters, is registered both in New York State, her primary residence, and in Pennsylvania, where she has been a student. There would not seem to be any case for allowing a student to vote in two states, but there might well be a case for allowing a student to be registered in both places, with the choice of where she would vote being made depending on her obligations. For people with a primary residence in one state and a secondary residence in another (like Donald Trump himself), surely there is a case for the citizen to be allowed to vote for local or state officials in more than one state, while only having one vote for president.
Fund has frequent anecdotes about felons illegally voting but no numbers on the number of people categorized as felons or whether they are increasing over time. But for at least some groups in American society, the share of the population who are or have been incarcerated has gone up dramatically in recent decades. A study showed just this pattern for both white and black high school dropouts between 1979 and 2009. Should Americans be comfortable with the possibility of a growing share of its population being disenfranchised on the basis of having been incarcerated at some time during their lives? Fund never bothers to ask this question.
On p.164-5, Fund decries the use of felons being used by America Coming Together (ACT) in St. Louis, Missouri to register voters. No-one would condone the use of thugs to intimidate potential voters, but it is questionable whether one should exclude all ex-convicts from this kind of work. It would look, on the face of it, to be the kind of job that would be useful to get some young ex-convicts back in the labour force.
The mediamatters.org website posted a takedown of Fund’s book on October 31, by Nicole Casta, “John Fund’s book on voter fraud is a fraud”. Costa seems to be aggrieved that most, although absolutely not all, of the instances of voter fraud in the book relate to Democrats. Without really seriously challenging Fund’s basic argument that voter fraud is a serious problem she has attempted to destroy his credibility by challenging some of the book’s claims. I will discuss some of these.
The claim on p.28 that "[E]very single recount of the votes in Florida determined that George W. Bush had won the state's twenty-five electoral votes and therefore the presidency" appears to have been removed from the 2008 edition of the book. A National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study did look at nine alternative scenarios for doing a recount, adding uncertified votes to each scenario depending on whether there was majority (two out of three coders) or unanimous consent that an uncertified ballot was valid. As the authors point out there was absolutely no time to wade through all 175 thousand ballots at the time, so none of these scenarios could have been carried out in practice. Casta states that Gore came out ahead in at least four of these recount scenarios. There were two published counts by the NORC, based on majority (two out of three coders) or unanimous (all three coders) consensus verifying the result. The majority counts found Gore winning in six of the scenarios, the unanimous counts in five. The Bush victory margin declines to 493 votes based on majority and 323 votes based on unanimous consensus when the NORC counted the ballots based on the official scenario. This is maybe why Casta says that Gore comes out ahead in at least four scenarios. In the Palm Beach Scenario, Gore’s margin is less than the 44 vote deterioration in the Bush victory margin between the official results and the NORC recount for a majority consensus. In all five scenarios for unanimous consensus where Gore comes out ahead, his victory margin is less than the decline in the victory margin between the official result and the NORC recount.
The most pertinent result, which Costa doesn’t mention at all, is that under scenario 8, the recount that Gore requested but the Supreme Court halted, Bush would still have won, by 225 votes based on majority consensus and 212 votes based on unanimity. So the liberal narrative that the Supreme Court robbed Gore of a presidential election he would have won if they had not halted the recount is just what they would call fake news.
Costa repeats Fund’s claim that the Palm Beach Post found "no more than 108 'law-abiding' citizens of all races who 'were purged from the voter rolls as suspected criminals, only to be cleared after the election", which seems to have switched from p.32 in the 2004 edition to p.101 in the 2008 edition. Here she seems on sound ground in complaining: “In making this claim, Fund selectively quoted from a May 27, 2001, article in the Palm Beach Post. While the article did state that "[a]t least 108 law-abiding people were purged from the voter rolls as suspected criminals, only to be cleared after the election," it also stated that an additional 996 people who had been convicted of crimes in other states but were now eligible to vote were also cut from the rolls.
However, while she does not deny Fund’s charge that Bush may have suffered a net loss of up to 8,000 votes in Florida’s western panhandle, on a different time zone from the rest of the state, due to the imbecilic mistake of all TV networks, including FOX, in declaring Florida polls closed when they were still open for another hour in the panhandle. So if there had been no voter suppression of any kind, it seems likely that Bush’s margin would have been greater, rather than disappearing.
Costa strongly disagrees with Fund’s contention that Bush may have been robbed of as many as 15,000 votes by tampering with the ballots. A Democratic operative would only have had to punch a hole through a stack of ballots in the Gore column, producing no change in the ballots marked for Gore but producing overvotes for ballots marked for Bush. Costa’s somewhat feeble response is that Gore lost more votes statewide than Bush due to overvotes. This ignores the fact that in the other 14 counties with Votomatic punch card systems there were less than 2.1% errors due to overvotes as compared to 4.1% in Palm Beach County. Fund’s estimate of 15,000 suppressed votes seems like a highball estimate though, as it assumes a true error rate of less than 0.9%; if one assumed instead that the error rate was the same as for other counties then the number of suppressed votes for Bush would still be almost 9,500, many times Bush’s official victory margin after the Florida recount.
Not having a copy I don’t know what Fund alleged about voting fraud in the South Dakota senate race in 2002 in the 2004 edition of the book. In the 2008 edition, it is mentioned on p.20. He does not claim that it changed the result of the race. However, there can be no doubt, pace Cosa, that there was fraud. Fund writes: “Maka Duta [the Dakota name of Democratic campaign worker Becky Red Earth-Villeda]…admitted duplicating signatures on both registration forms and applications for absentee ballots. But she asked for understanding: ‘If I erred in doing so,…I erred on the side of angels.’ In other words, doing the devil’s work of forging voter signatures is somehow understandable given her angelic goal of increasing voter turnout.”
My delusional nephew, Mark Baldwin, when he tried to imagine a scenario involving non-citizens engaged in voter fraud, imagined a gaggle of Canadian tourists visiting the US in November 2016, and all voting for Trump. So, as a Canadian, I was intrigued to see (p.125), that in Wisconsin “ Investigators ‘discovered that the Election Commission certified Absentee Ballots that were submitted by voters using addresses that were not legal residences,’ including several who actually lived in Canada”. So these are Canadians who may well be voting illegally in one US swing state. However it seems more likely they were students rather than tourists, and they probably didn’t all vote for Trump.
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