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GOP trumpets rampant Philly voter fraud in a report that doesn't show it.
On Wednesday, Philadelphia unceremoniously found itself in the middle of one of the nastier fights in the country right now: that over whether states should require photo ID at polling places and whether such laws, invariably pushed by Republicans, serve their purported purpose ― to stamp out "voter fraud" ― or a far less noble purpose of suppressing likely Democratic votes.
GOP trumpets rampant Philly voter fraud in a report that doesn't show it.
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On Wednesday, Philadelphia unceremoniously found itself in the middle of one of the nastier fights in the country right now: that over whether states should require photo ID at polling places and whether such laws, invariably pushed by Republicans, serve their purported purpose ― to stamp out “voter fraud” ― or a far less noble purpose of suppressing likely Democratic votes.
That question got stickier on Wednesday, when Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt (Philadelphia elections are overseen by three independently-elected City Commissioners; Schmidt is the sole Republican) released a report alleging hundreds of cases of voting “irregularities” and “fraud.” the response from Pennsylvania Republicans was quick and unsurprising:
The report “finally confirms what leading Democrat opponents of voter photo ID and those in the mainstream media have been denying all along,” wrote State Representative Daryl Metcalfe, Majority Chairman of the House State Government Committee, and a powerful conservative force in Harrisburg.
“Philadelphia is without question one of our nation’s most infested epicenters for rampant election fraud and corruption.” Schmidt's findings “add to the ever-growing collection of indisputable evidence proving that requiring the display of valid voter photo ID at the ballot box is essential to deterring election fraud,” he contintued, adding, rather ominously, that “we must develop additional solutions that go beyond voter photo ID to stamp out corrupting influences.”
Metcalfe's point was clear: he, and his Republican cohorts in the state legislature, had been right to pass this spring a new law, of which Metcalfe was the primary sponsor, requiring photo identification to vote in Pennsylvania elections ― and Schmidt's report was proof of that.
The only problem with that is that Schmidt's report — while containing legitimate and potentially serious findings of voting problems in Philadelphia — confirms virtually nothing in Metcalfe's triumphant statement. And while the report did point to troubling instances of what might be incompetence or corruption by poll workers, the report contains precious little relating to the only problem that voter ID requirements are supposed to solve ― that of voter impersonation ― citing a single case that had been documented prior to Schmidt's investigation.
As far as the justification for photo ID goes, the report contained nothing new at all — nor did the report or Schmidt himself claim any connection between its findings and a need for photo ID. But you wouldn't know that from the press coming out of Harrisburg's GOP, which has treated it like the ultimate justification of a need for voter ID the people have been waiting for.
But that it assuredly isn't.
The purported purpose of Pennsylvania's law and others like it around the country — efforts being coordinated by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which itself receives funding from the ultra-conservative and fabulously wealthy Koch Brothers — is to eliminate the possibility of "voter fraud" at the polls. But while there are several ways voter fraud might theoretically be perpetrated, the only one that would be stopped by requiring voter ID is voter impersonation, in which someone pretends to be someone they are not to vote. That's one reason that many critics of voter ID laws believe their real purpose is simply to suppress the votes of the elderly, poor, and minorities, who various studies have shown would be disproportionately affected by ID requirements.
(Nearly 760,000 voters in Pennsylvania,or roughly 9% of all registered voters, do not have PennDOT Ids, according to data released last Tuesday by the Pennsyvlania Department of State; in Philadelphia, a heavily Demcoratic city, roughly 18% of voters have no such ID)
One small difficulty supporters of Voter ID laws have had countering this claim is that voter fraud, especially of the sort that ID requirements would stop, hasn't been shown to, well, exist as a substantial problem.
Documented cases are extremely rare. The studies showing this are many, but particularly enlightening is the case of Indiana, whose legislature recently passed a requirement for voter ID that made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court upheld the law in a 6-3 ruling ― but, as Justice John Paul Stevens notes in his majority opinion, found that the record had shown “no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history.” A 3-year-long investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice from 2003 to 2005, spurred by (mostly Republican) intimations of rampant voter fraud on a national scale, ended in charges against only five people.
When they talk about voter fraud, proponents of Voter ID laws have to dig deep indeed for examples ― or they just talk about ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, the group infamously accused in 2008 of voter fraud thanks to many examples of bogus voter registration forms submitted by ACORN workers who were being paid a commission.
The problem with this example? None of those bogus registrations was ever found to have translated into an actual vote.
The sort of voter fraud feared in these cases ― voter impersonation ― is supposedly the cause for voter ID laws, even though it is one of the least, perhaps the least, common forms of fraud ever documented.
Did City Commissioner Schmidt's report change that? Hardly.
Schmidt's report, titled “Voting Irregularities in Philadelphia County, 2012 Election,” began with the admittedly surprising revelation by him and fellow City Commissioner Stephanie Singer, a Democratic, of 779 cases in which the machine count at a Philadelphia polling place didn't match a count of the number of signatures entered in the poll logs, which voters sign when they vote. It's this number from which the assertion of “hundreds” of irregularities comes.
Schmidt and his team took a sample of the most problematic divisions in the city and attempted to discover what accounted for the discrepancy. In the process, Schmidt says, his team uncovered seven distinct “types of voting irregularities,” ranging from voters having voted in the wrong party's primary to the very serious charge, so central to the debate over Voter ID, of “voter impersonation.”
But anyone looking for proof that Philadelphia is, as Rep. Metcalfe put it, “one of our nation's most infested epicenters for rampant election fraud” won't find it here ― especially when you get down to numbers.
Schmidt's report does not, in fact, contain any breakdown of how many or what proportion of the nearly 800 “over-votes” examined might be attributed to which of the seven types of irregularities he mentions.
In an interview, Schmidt told City Paper that his report was “a qualitative and not a quantitative analysis,” and was focused on citing examples rather than presenting raw numbers; those numbers, he said, are not a representative sample and reporting them would have been irresponsible.
Responsible or not, it creates a problem for the reader: The report begins by citing "hundreds" of cases of irregularity or fraud but gives no numerical accounting of what caused them, even within in the specific divisions sampled and examined.
Some, Schmidt has acknowledged (without saying, even roughly, how many), were likely the result of multiple divisions being located at the same polling place. Others were the result of people voting in the wrong primary. Both errors could possibly constitute intentional fraud, but could also be attributed to simple human error. Of the 14 divisions in which machines recorded more votes than poll books recorded signatures ― the cases of “over-voting” ― how many were cases of votes getting innocently crossed between adjacent divisions? The report doesn't say, and neither, after several conversations, does Schmidt.
The breakdown gets even trickier when it comes to the four more sinister types of “irregularity” listed in the report ― voting by non-registered individuals, individuals voting more than once, voting by non-U.S. Citizens, and voter impersonation.
Examples — and they are examples, not statistics — of each range from few to none: Schmidt cites one case in the 2012 primary of someone voting twice; and one case, which had already been reported, of what appears to be voter impersonation. Then there are the non-U.S. Citizen votes: over a period of 10 years, seven such votes were cast.
His finding that poll officials have let people vote using “voter slips,” a kind of unofficial provisional ballot, without having the voter certified by the Board of Elections first, for example, is indeed surprising and suggests at least the possibility of corruption ― but turns out to account for a maximum of 150 “over-votes” out of nearly 800, only 23 of which were cast by non-registered voters.
That number, 23, is the single largest citation of improper voting in the entire report ― and a problem that should have been prevented by current voting rules, with or without photo ID requirements.
Of the various irregularities cited in the report — and of the "hundreds" of irregularities mentioned in its introduction — in fact, only one instance would have been affected by a photo ID requirement.
In an interview, Schmidt asserts that “one case is one case too many,” a refrain often used by proponents of voter ID requirements (Schmidt himself declined to take a position on voter ID in a recent interview, saying his job was simply to enforce existing laws; on the campaign trail he was vague on the issue, saying he opposed Pennsylvania's proposed voter ID law "as it was written" because it was an unfunded mandate).
As to the political context in which his report is being cited — like Metcalfe's issued statement — Schmidt says, "It would be appropriat to compare quotes like that with those who say there isn't 'any' voter fraud in Philadelphia," pointing specifically to a recent column by the Philadelphia Inquirer's Annette John Hall, who wrote: "There is no fraud."
City Commissioner Stephanie Singer, Schmidt's Democratic counterpart and chairwoman of the City Commissioners, sees things a little differently. At worst, she says, Schmidt's report found an instance of fraud preventable by a photo ID requirement representing 0.001 percent ― or about one millionth ― of the registered Philadelphia voting population at that time, she said in a press release. “Compare that to the 17 percent of Philadelphians being threatened by the voter ID law today.”
But so little of this debate, as Rep. Metcalfe, now intimating a need for “solutions that go beyond voter ID,” has made clear, is about numbers. It's about perception. And when it comes to perception ― say the perception, unsubstantiated by this report, that fraud runs rampant in Philadelphia or that requiring voter ID would stop it ― well, numbers just get in the way.
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