Fighting Fraud with Fraud

Should the focus be on mobilising non-voters or to stop fraud amongst those who do? The prevailing wind currently blows for the former since both parties are willing to make the mother of all messes in their attempts to tease out victory from the ranks of the new voters...they are leaving the mess to be mopped up later, safe in the knowledge that politics is not a sport...their gold medals, once won, can never be stripped from them. (This is betting without Nixon, of course, who did the political equivalent of dangling his medals in front of Autolycus, King of Thieves, shouting "Go on then, you pansy! Just try and take them! Betcha can't, you worthless bag of scum!" And before you knew it, whoops...)

So which is better? A high voter turnout or total fraud prevention?

"The unexamined belief that an ever-higher rate of voter registration is a Good Thing has met its limit in...Ohio. The U.S. Census Bureau's 2003 estimate is that in Franklin County -- Columbus -- there are approximately 815,000 people 18 or over. But 845,720 are now registered." -- George Will, Pittsburgh Trib-Review. (full article)

An interesting statistic, but hold on. "Unexamined belief?" Are the two things, then, mutually exclusive? The problem he alludes to is that efforts to stamp out fraud has a detrimental effect on voter turnout - and what the hell, eh? But it means that many of these drives to stop fraud are either so draconian as to make the final result hopelessly unrepresentative or focused entirely on preventing subsets of the other side from voting. This is fraud by another name, so maybe the mobilisation trip is simply the lesser of two evils, especially when suppressing new voters would work overwhelmingly in one party's favour.

"Ohio - the next Florida?" -- Howard Fineman, Newsweek. (full article)

All the US needs is a large and powerful body of genuinely impartial people to oversee each and every part of the election from the top down to the groundroots, and never mind the present effete system. But I suspect there isn't such a beast in these grisly times.

But why is this discussion even being had? The whole point of the election is for the entire country to elect its president. Whole sections of society cannot be wiped off the page because the shadow of potential fraud is present. And those who argue otherwise must remember that many efforts to avoid the ugly scenes of 2000 have frequently been undermined by the very people who claim to oppose fraud.

"Creating another election ripe for dispute was hardly the intent when our elected legislators passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002...Although they passed the act, Congress and the White House were slow, perhaps recklessly so, in setting up the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to implement it." -- Bill Saporito, Time. (full article)

So whatever happens, whether the Biblical flood of new voters turns out to be worth it for either party, everyone appears to agree that there is going to be one hell of a mess to clear up on November 3rd. High voter turnout and fighting fraud are not mutually exclusive concepts, but it seems that there are a significant number of people who have a vested interest in portraying them that way.