Vote fraud alert: One out of five registered Ohio voters is bogus

Vote fraud is no big deal, right? It hardly ever happens. It’s so rare that it’s not even worth discussing. Anyone who claims to take the integrity of our ballots seriously is cynically exploiting phantom fears for the purpose of suppressing the Democrat-loving minority vote.

To keep that silly narrative alive, it’s important not to read the Sunday edition of the Columbus Dispatch, in which readers were informed that “more than one out of every five registered Ohio voters is probably ineligible to vote.”

Furthermore, “in two counties, the number of registered voters actually exceeds the voting age population: Northwestern Ohio’s Wood County shows 109 registered voters for every 100 eligible, while in Lawrence County along the Ohio River it’s a mere 104 registered per 100 eligible.”

31 more counties report over 90 percent voter registration, which is a good 20 percent higher than the national average. The Buckeye State sure is civic-minded! Well, except that 1.6 million of the 7.8 million registered voters in the state haven’t voted in at least four years. So I guess they were civic minded, once upon a time. Never fear – I’m sure plenty of those “inactive” voters will reactivate themselves just in time for Barack Obama’s re-election.

You might think these astonishing statistics indicate a crisis-level voter registration problem requiring immediate attention, particularly since this is 2012, not 1912, and modern technology gives us extremely potent tools for accurately managing massive amounts of data. But Attorney General Eric Holder disagrees. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted sent Holder a letter back in February, warning that “common sense says that the odds of voter fraud increase the longer these ineligible voters are allowed to populate our rolls… I simply cannot accept that.” Husted said existing federal regulations “limit Ohio’s ability to remove ineligible names, thereby increasing the chance for voter fraud.”

No one from the Justice Department ever responded. Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, which called Ohio’s voter registration train wreck to Husted’s attention, is now suing him for failing to take action, beyond issuing a “directive” to remove ineligible voters that Judicial Watch describes as “all bark and no bite,” since there is no evidence that anything was actually done.

Judicial Watch has already filed a similar lawsuit against the State of Indiana, and says other states with disturbing levels of ineligible registered voters include Mississippi, Iowa, Missouri, Texas, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Florida, Alabama, California, and Colorado. Florida’s struggle to clean up its rolls, in the face of active hostility from Eric Holder’s Justice Department, has already made headlines.

Nationwide, the Pew Center for the States estimates about 24 million ineligible voter registrations, including “more than 1.8 million dead people listed as voters; about 2.75 million with voter registrations in more than one state; and about 12 million voter records with incorrect addresses, meaning either the voters moved or errors in the information make it unlikely any mailings can reach them.”

The National Voter Registration Act includes provisions “to ensure that accurate and current voter registration rolls are maintained,” but somehow that part of the NVRA doesn’t seem to count. It’s painfully obvious that we don’t have accurate and current voter registration – not even by the standards of the early Twentieth Century, let alone the early Twenty-First – but the only parts of the NVRA we ever hear cited are the passages that can be used as roadblocks against cleaning up the rolls, or keeping fraudsters away from the polls.

Without solid voter identification laws, every one of these phony registered voters presents an opportunity for fraud – and of course, Eric Holder is dedicated, above almost every other consideration, to blocking voter ID laws. And vote fraud on this scale is not a mess that can be cleaned up after the election. If a candidate wins a tough swing state like Ohio by, let us say, 5000 votes, and it is later discovered that 6000 false votes were cast in the election, the Presidency is not going to be taken away and given to the defrauded opponent. It’s not even like one of those sports scores that picks up an asterisk due to questionable circumstances. It won’t matter at all… except as another data point to be erased from the public mind, when vote fraud defenders crank up the machinery of fear and ignorance for the 2014 midterms and 2016 presidential campaign. And no one on the Left will express a single moment’s remorse for the legal voters who were disenfranchised by stolen ballots. They won’t have names and faces; no one will be paraded through media interviews to complain about the theft of his or her vote in a historic election.

Vote fraud must be prevented, not investigated after the fact. There is absolutely no logical reason for a computerized society to tolerate thousands of ineligible voters on its rolls. The state of Ohio is not a third-world banana republic. At least, it’s not supposed to be one. The sacrifice of national pride, and even self-respect, required to meekly accept counties with 110 percent voter registration is astonishing.

"Call the supposed voter and ask if they voted? If the answer is no, you have your answer. If the answer is that they are dead, you have your answer. If they say yes, you have your answer. In data analytics it’s called filtering and validating.">/p>

This is a path to a solution Bshaw. I note that you didn't ask the voter how he or she voted. You understand the problem. There needs to be a consensus that a lack of verifiability guarantees the end of freedom. Most people have other concerns in their lives, and are not computer system designers. They see an industrial-sized box in a precinct and assume their votes are counted. The precinct workers, who now mostly function as ushers, makes it appear that data are being collected. Decades ago, and today in a number countries, including Israel and Spain, those precinct workers, known to many in their communities, would gather after the polls closed to count the ballots, with a representative of each of the major parties present. The ballots were locked then locked and guarded until being transported to a secure vault. But the initial count became the reported count unless there a recount was required. Acquire the count immediately to minimize the chance that corruption during transport would not be detected.

It sounds like you know more about statistical methods than I. My area involved guaranteed message transport and error detection and correction. Our voting systems wouldn't satisfy FDA requirements if votes were numbers generated by analytical instrument. Our voting systems are mostly farcical project cludges, probably designed by local AGs so that they can claim to have developed voting mechanisms for their states, justifying their two hundred thousand dollar salaries with generous retirement packages.

There are so many gaps in the chain of custody of votes that without a thorough analysis, it is not possible to know where counts are corrupted. It is simply a fact that an audit trail is impossible. To assume that political opportunists didn't take advantage of that uncertainty is foolish. With more votes counted than registered voters in many precincts in Ohio and Colorado, we know that some of the corruption was crude, since were I to manipulate votes I'd make the reported numbers as plausible as possible, knowing the pundits will explain how it could have happened. But it would be similiarly foolhardy to presume that there wasn't much more sophisticated manipulation of the ridiculously vulnerable transport systems, which have proved to be easy prey to amature hackers, good hackers being too busy and careful to report their success in accessing a number of the machines used for voting.

We also have no idea what becomes of voting data once it is sent to an official collating location. Votes were once counted by Voter News Service in New York, a remarkable betrayal of voter trust if they had known. Few know today. Transparency is not a hallmark of the current administration. Just as the federal reserve should be audited, an audit of our secret central vote counting process might reveal much about what voting is really about. My guess is that the invention of plausible counts occurs within states, which may account for the significant gains in states that already have Republican governors.

Perhaps a random sampling via phone calls of some number of precincts would dampen the open corruption, but local precinct counts are the only way to protect the secrecy of our voting system while minimizing the cheating due to corruption of the data. Union members could be identified through calls to their homes, and might be reluctant to reveal having voted against someone or some measure important to union officials (not forgetting that you did not suggest voters to reveal their selections, but realizing that those selections can so easily be altered makes the question an important one). We know that every telephony switch can be legally and secretly monitored by at least the FBI (since about 2001) meaning hostile government agencies may provide identities to their friends in the SEIU; paper ballots protect our all-important secret ballots. It isn't clear whether calls to voters would be legal, though a request for a re-vote might satisfy the courts.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.