The Vote Fraud Fraud, Pt. IV: Prosecutorial Hype

The Times has a great followup article today to yesterday’s great article on the federal Election Assistance Commission’s decision to baselessly exaggerate the magnitude of fraud by individual voters. Today’s article looks at changes in the Justice Department’s standards for prosecuting voter fraud, and at the nature of the defendant’s those changes have pulled in:

Previously, charges were generally brought just against conspiracies to corrupt the election process, not against individual offenders, Craig Donsanto, head of the elections crimes branch, told a panel investigating voter fraud last year. For deterrence, Mr. Donsanto said, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales authorized prosecutors to pursue criminal charges against individuals.

Prosecutions of individuals for casting one unauthorized vote at a time really don’t make a lot of sense in terms of use of resources; it’s incredibly unlikely that any such vote is going to affect the outcome of an election, and given that there’s no benefit to the voter from casting an unauthorized vote, odds are there was no bad intent. And this very much seems to be the case when we look at the people who’ve been prosecuted under this new policy:

Ms. Prude’s path to jail began after she attended a Democratic rally in Milwaukee featuring the Rev. Al Sharpton in late 2004. Along with hundreds of others, she marched to City Hall and registered to vote. Soon after, she sent in an absentee ballot.

Four years earlier, though, Ms. Prude had been convicted of trying to cash a counterfeit county government check worth $1,254. She was placed on six years’ probation.

Ms. Prude said she believed that she was permitted to vote because she was not in jail or on parole, she testified in court. Told by her probation officer that she could not vote, she said she immediately called City Hall to rescind her vote, a step she was told was not necessary.

“I made a big mistake, like I said, and I truly apologize for it,” Ms. Prude said during her trial in 2005. That vote, though, resulted in a felony conviction and sent her to jail for violating probation.

While there have been a couple of prosecutions that would have been proper under the old guidelines, for vote buying in local races, most prosecutions for voter fraud in the 2002-2005 period were against individuals like Ms Prude. Now, this is obviously an attempt to hype up the issue for publicity, rather than to preserve the integrity of the electoral process; individual errors, resulting in a vote here and a vote there that should not have been case, have no effect at all on the outcome of elections. If Ms. Prude is the caliber of wrongdoer this sort of politicized drive to uncover voter fraud is turning up, then our current level of security preventing individuals from voting improperly is working very, very well.

Any serious discussion of a solution to a voter fraud ‘problem’ has to be accompanied by some sort of ballpark figures on how many improper votes it’s expected to prevent, compared to how many legitimate votes it’s likely to discourage. Where that analysis is absent, or where, as usual, any reasonable estimate of the number of legitimate voters discouraged is several orders of magnitude greater than the number of illegitimate votes prevented by the suggested safeguard, the person advocating it is not thinking seriously about voter fraud, and the proposed measure is presumptively a terrible, terrible, idea.

(Everyone should go read publius and Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings on this, here, here and here.) (Also at Unfogged.)