Have absentee ballot, will commit fraud
The issue: The voter fraud cases in East Chicago and Schererville
NWI Times
Aug 17, 2003
nwitimes.com/news/opinion/have-absentee-ballot-will-commit-fraud/article_ff2260c6-4043-58fb-b8eb-f9a37f2df028.html
Bankston's opinion: Absentee ballots, designed to make sure people who are homebound or will be away from home on Election Day can still vote, are
Stealing votes is as American as apple pie, and we have had two great examples under judicial review in Lake County. The Lake County prosecutor's office has requested a special grand jury to be empaneled to review the issue of voter fraud.
Despite the teeth-gnashing of editorial writers and others of the professionally self-righteous stripe, nothing can be done about voter fraud unless the absentee ballot is eliminated.
It will not. Fraud using those ballots will occur.
Sure, some people might serve some time in the Crowbar Inn over the latest scandals, but the system is set up for more to occur in the future.
And they will.
At issue are two voter scandals under scrutiny by the courts in Lake County, one in East Chicago and one in Schererville.
Both involve Democratic Party primary elections. Both involve party operatives or city employees using the absentee ballot process to put a few illegal votes in their candidate's column.
In the East Chicago primary, 32-year incumbent Mayor Bob Pastrick was bested in the primary by George Pabey in votes at the polls, but won by 278 votes when the absentee ballots were counted. This week, Judge Steven King threw out 155 of those votes, so Pastrick still won, subject to appeal in higher courts.
In Schererville, Town Judge Deborah Riga won the nomination by 11 votes over Kenneth Anderson, again by a margin where absentee ballots made a difference.
The final outcome of either won't amount to a hill of beans in terms of making elections more honest in Lake County. Our election system is based on the assumption of honesty, on the part of the potential voter and those who count those votes.
Such a silly system, you might say, assuming that cheating would dominate every election. But it doesn't in most places, most of the time.
It's only when elections are close, a few votes in a county or city election, a few thousand in a state election (remember the 2000 Florida presidential election?) that these potential warts surface and make a difference.
A dirty little secret of elections in this great land is that we allow some degree of cheating in every election. Absentee ballots, designed to make sure people who are homebound or will be away from home on Election Day can still vote, are rife with potential for abuse.
These ballots are not counted until Election Day, distributed to the polling places and counted by party poll workers, sometimes the same people who solicited the illegal vote in the first place. There is no way, and often no reason in a primary election, for poll workers in the other party to challenge a suspect vote as long as the name appears on the list of registered voters for that precinct.
Voter registration, a county office with workers appointed by the county chairmen of each of the two major political parties, cannot, even if it were inclined to, ask for verification of address in people registering to vote. They cannot ask for identification. They cannot purge voter rolls easily of dead people and people who have moved.
All this means that anyone can vote in your town on Election Day as long as they have the guts to come into the polling place and sign next to a name on the polling lists.
Absentee ballots work the same way, except the fraudulent voter doesn't even have to come to the polls. He mails the signed ballot in or has a party worker deliver it before Election Day, not taking the chance, however unlikely, that a nosy reporter would recognize him as living in another city or voting in place of a dead man.
So votes are stolen. What to do? Well, not much is possible. After an election, judges are very reluctant to enter a fray unless there is a clear-cut case; otherwise they are open to the charge of thwarting the will of the voters. Think U.S. Supreme Court and Florida 2000 here.
Our voting system, designed, properly, to make it as easy as possible for honest citizens to vote, even if they are sick or out of town, will allow the dishonest to steal some. This is the price of our democracy.
Besides, in the places where this occurs most, the energy directed toward the pursuit of fraudulent votes is taken as a sign of the desire to win. If you steal more votes than the other guy, the thinking goes, you deserve to win.
And, you know, that make some perverse kind of sense.
Pat Bankston is a professor at Indiana University School in Gary. He can be reached at patbankston@comcast.net or in care of The Times.
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