Stacy McCain has a great post up about the “bizarre statistical improbabilities” of Obama winning over 99% of the vote in some districts that also have over 100% turnout.
We can complain about voter fraud and sound like a bunch of conspiracy theorists and/or sore losers, or we can prove voter fraud and thwart it in the future.
Let’s talk about thwarting voter fraud. Indiana has one of those nifty photo-ID laws (which also helps the poor, in that the state gives free photo IDs to those who cannot afford them). Work to get one in your state. Remember, we swept state legislatures and governorships in 2010, and continued to pick up governorships in 2012. We have friendly legislatures and friendly executive offices.
If you aren’t able to get “show ID to vote” laws passed, why not try to lobby for the low-tech, tried-and-true purple finger approach? Sure, it won’t eliminate absentee voter fraud, but people will have to work a lot harder to commit voter fraud if they can only vote once on Election Day.
Troops, those are your marching orders. Get it done in your states.
Now, the tedium of proving voter fraud. What you need to do is prove that people who voted do not actually exist, do not live in the district, or are otherwise ineligible to vote (e.g. are not citizens). Given that over one hundred million people cast ballots in the last election, we need to narrow down a search and to get a, er, um, army of Davids to work through the data. Voter registration (name and address) is public information, as is the number of times a person has voted and in which elections. Now, if I were trying to steal an election, I wouldn’t bother as much with non-swing states, nor with getting people to the polls for primaries and municipal elections. I wouldn’t bother with small suburban areas where everyone knows everyone else.
So here’s how to do it: we (yes, dear commenters, want to join in the fun?) get voter lists from counties, pick off people who are registered Democrats and only voted in the general election, not the primary election. Then we look at their addresses: does each and every address actually exist? Is it a residence, or did people register with the address of the local Kroger? Do you have far too many people all registered at the same address, given the size of the residence? (With this thing called the internet, the USPS site, and Mapquest’s satellite function, we can make short work of this.) Now for the voters themselves: did anyone dead vote? If you’re feeling particularly ambitious and have the shoe leather to do so, you can mosey around the district, knock on doors, and ask if the voter lives there.
At the end of it all, you have a spreadsheet showing a lot of legitimate, low-turnout voters. But you also have a whole pile of people who registered at non-existent addresses, at businesses, who died before the election, or who do not live where they claim they live. (Proving that non-citizens voted is a nightmare.)
Just a thought. Sounds more productive than sitting around and complaining.
Update: (DaTechGuy) I second Roxeanne’s post