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O_E

Yes, it is uncannily high, suspiciously so. My guess is that they probably pull a "St. Louis" where they have a boiler room full of good little commies with a phone book who fill out voter registration cards and sign them.

I would bet that an inspection of voter registration cards would turn up remarkably similar handwriting on many of them and that further investigation of those similar would show that the people at that residence have no memory of registering.

Remember that we have motor-voter here in PA...that figure might correspond to the number of people of voting age that have lisences. Now, if that percentage is actually voting, I smell a rat...

98.6% is too high even for the percentage of adults with driver's licences. Several percent don't drive, never have, and then there are all the dwi's and habitual speeders whose licences have been revoked. I'd be surprised if the percentage of adults with licences was 90%, especially in an urban area like Philadelphia where you can get around pretty well without a car.

You might mention that in crime ridden Philadelphia you've got roughly 20% of the minorities are ineligle to vote due to crimes they committed. The stat you're referring to in your argument was PRECINCT based, where in towns that are 90% black they had voter turnouts of 110%. The avg. turnout is probably more like 40%. Research by precinct and you'll easily prove your point.

Indexing.

After you point this out to him, kick him in the ass for being stupid enough to be a liberal.

I've got no reason to defend the crooks who run the Philadelphia voting process, but if my memory serves me I believe there was a legitimate explanation for this. The entire government in Philadelphia is so backward and fouled up that the actual voter registration figures are hopelessly outdated. If 10,000 people cast votes in a district that only has 9,000 registered voters, the problem is not with the 10,000 votes but with the 9,000 registered voters.

The City of Durham NC has more registered voters than residents of voting age! Yet nothing is being done to clean up the voter rolls.

It's easy to have excessive voters on the rolls in PA. Due to Motor Voter, they no longer purge the rolls of inactive voters on a frequent basis. I inquired at our precinct on Tuesday when I found my father-in-law was still registered to vote here despite moving to TN in '93. They told me that they used to remove the names of voters who failed to vote in 2 consecutive elections (including primaries). Now they are required to wait until a voter has missed two consecutive presidential elections and drop him before the 3rd election. A 12 year lag in purging inactive voters permits a lot of "voting" by people who are dead or have moved away. It also keeps their registrations active . . .

It's a mess, and very vulnerable to fraud of various types.

• VAP data statewide PA
• Voter Reg. data

1. You are correct, and the statistics are correct, that there are NO official reports of 99 or 100% turnout in precincts in Philly (or elsewhere) in precincts with more than a handful of voters. 99% for Gore -- YES. 99% of voters voted -- NO. This started with a report by Wanniski, picked up by John Lott, and it just isn't so.

2. Quite a number of places have registration near or above 100% of voting-age adults. Some of them are quite rural areas. Usually it is a result of a failure to purge the voting lists as people move in and out, and the deadwood piles up. Motor voter has exacerbated this problem.

It makes fraud easier, but it doesn't prove that fraud is occurring.

I have seen cases where a county cleans up its lists, registration drops to 80% of VAP, and then climbs again as the years pass without purging. In most states, if you compare voting to # of voting age adults, you get a more consistent set of numbers than comparing voting to registered voters. It depends on whether purging is done centrally for a whole state, or locally at the whim of the county officials.

There is an article by John Lott which goes into this as well as another one by a judge in Houston, I believe. I think they appeared at WSJ online.

Guess your just going to have to vote for your father-in-law!!!

If 10,000 people cast votes in a district that only has 9,000 registered voters, the problem is not with the 10,000 votes but with the 9,000 registered voters.

If we assume the problem is not purging the voter rolls, shouldn't this be just the opposite? There should be many people registered that won't vote, because they moved or died.

That's correct, except that people who move from one district to another may still show up as "registered" in their old district and "not registered" in the new one. Any district with a very high voter turnout is probably one that has more voters moving in than moving out or dying.

Your post brings us to the key question: "How do you vote in a District if you are not registered there?"

It is hard to see how there can be more votes than registered voters if you have to register to vote.

Motor voter is undoubtedly part of the explanation, especially as it is VERY efficient at registering ineligible voters. A couple of years ago, a foreign student (friend of a friend of mine) at a college in suburban Philadelphia was surprised to received a voter registration card in the mail. She hadn't applied for one, since she knew she was ineligible as a non-citizen. She ferreted out the cause: she had applied for a driver's license, and checked no on the motor-voter registration section -- but apparently that is ignored by the lawless political operatives, who promptly registered her anyway.

Unfortunately, I don't see any way to solve this problem, unless conservatives and libertarians can get comfortable with biometric IDs and databases. There is simply no other way to effectively control voter registration and voting. "Motor voter" laws obviously need to be ditched as well, but those who are bent on violating our election laws will cull names from drivers' license databases anyway. Until people are turned away at the voting booth unless they can provide biometric proof that they are who they say they are, all sorts of election fraud will continue unabated.

I was a reporter for the Philadelphia Bulletin in 1960. My first assignment for that newspaper was being part of an investigative team to do a story exposing vote fraud. We were extremely successful. We found several hundred voters living in a banana warehouse where the temperature was kept at 40 degrees. Of course the dead were resurrected on each Election Day. I remember one man convicted of murder who was doing life at Graterford. He never missed voting in either the primaries or general for years. Joe Hersh was the chief magistrate in the city. He was a Democrat who lived in a small row house. The were some 40 other registered voters sharing the premises. Trust me when I tell you and your friend that things are much worse now. By the way, the story turned out to be a long series which was considered for a Pulitzer and which did win the National Headliners Award.