The most charitable view of the election process in most of the U.S. is that it is embarrassing. A more realistic if heretical view is that it is criminal. I lean toward the latter: It’s a criminal enterprise seasoned with a dollop of stupidity and laziness.
I’m not some hopeless romantic that thinks it will all be OK if we just go back to paper ballots on Election Day; Tammany Hall and the Richard Daley Machine did election fraud really well without Dominion Machines and mailed-in ballots.
Alaska is no saintly example of elections. The first political story I recall when I first arrived here in 1974 was about bags of ballots turning up in the trunk of an Alaska State Trooper car days after the election was supposed to be over.
There was more than a whiff or corruption and vote fraud in much of rural Alaska and several political personalities tied to rural/Western Alaska got a new federal address in the 1980’s. The Wally Hickel-Jay Hammond primary in 1978 was so tainted that the Alaska Supreme Court went so far as to say there was fraud, though they wouldn’t say the word, preferring the vague word malconduct. The court set a rule that it wouldn’t upset the outcome of an election unless whatever malconduct was done had substantially affected the outcome of the election, and the judges reserved to themselves the power to make that determination.
Interestingly, the Alaska Supreme Court has found something that might be malconduct in several elections, it has never found enough malconduct to throw out an election.
Get-out-the-vote campaigns and voter fraud are only one step removed from each other; you use the same techniques and data for the one as the other. The only difference is a GOTV program gets out real people who are honestly entitled to vote. A fraud program only cares about getting a ballot with a registered name on it into a ballot box. Voter fraud the old-fashioned way took a lot of organization and a lot of labor. Fast forward to the world of universal registration, unsolicited mail ballots, long early voting periods, and any-reason absentee ballots, and it is child’s play to commit fraud, especially in rural Alaska.
The dumbest thing, among many dumb things, that Alaska has ever done politically is passing the automatic Permanent Fund dividend application automatic voter registration. Everyone who knows anything about State government knows that the Permanent Fund Division has almost no application security; if you can fill it out and mail it, you get a Permanent Fund dividend and you’re almost certainly then made into a registered voter. Thus, we have over 604,000 registered voters in a state with 732,000 declared residents.
Permanent Fund dividend application fraud largely relies on fraudsters getting ratted out by jealous friends and neighbors who envy their new big screen.
With the universal registration and unsolicited mail ballots, all a fraud operation needs is a name and address and those are easy to get. Drop boxes just make it easier; there is risk to the mule to bring a few hundred fraudulent ballots into a polling location; some honest election worker might notice. If you have the name of a putatively registered voter all it takes is a little phone work to determine if they’re still at the registered address and only a little more to determine if they’re in the district or the state.
The fraudster is relatively safe if the person named merely no longer lives at the registered address; it is unlikely there will be any investigation of such fraudulently cast votes. If the named person is no longer in the district, fill out the ballot and put it in the mail or a drop box; do a few hundred of those and you’re doing your part to “save democracy,” as the Democrats like to say.
Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.
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