By now I’m sure most of you have heard the story King County resident Jane Balogh, who thought she was being clever by registering her dog to vote. It was supposed to be a protest against supposedly lax voter registration standards. It’s likely going to get her a misdemeanor conviction.
Our good friend Stefan, normally a fierce proponent of throwing the book at anybody who misses a statutorily required comma on a voter registration form, excuses Balogh’s stunt as “a noble act of civil disobedience to call attention to ineffectual voter registration standards that allow real fraud to occur.”
If it weren’t for the paw print stunt, which she used to deliberately give herself away, she could have gotten away with casting the dog’s ballot.
But she didn’t. In fact, she was caught.
It’s impossible to know how many ballots from non-existent people are cast and counted…
Just like it is impossible to know when Stefan stopped beating his wife.
… but we do know there have been hundreds of illegal votes that were counted for which nobody was ever prosecuted.
Of course, by “hundreds of illegal votes,” Stefan is referring to the infamous felon voters from 2004. They weren’t prosecuted because they didn’t know they were violating the law; they properly filled out registration forms, which elections officials improperly approved, due to incomplete records. (A problem by the way, that has since been largely fixed by the statewide voter registration database, that was well in the works before the notorious 2004 election.)
So what we have here is a woman who fraudulently registered her dog, and was caught, the failure to disprove something that we have no evidence exists, and a problem that has already been solved. And for this, Stefan advocates an overhaul of voting and voter registration systems to make it much more difficult for citizens to cast ballots.
I’m not sure exactly what motivates Stefan. Lingering resentment over Dino Rossi’s incredibly disappointing (for Stefan and Dino) and narrow loss in 2004? A genuine belief that it is better to suppress a thousand legitimate votes to stop a single case of fraud? A cynical program to suppress the vote in order to benefit Republicans?
It doesn’t matter. The fact is, what Stefan and his cohorts continually fail to do is prove that there is a significant incidence of voter fraud in King County or elsewhere in the state. Yes, there is the occasional double voter, or spouse voting the ballot of a recently deceased partner (problems, by the way, also largely fixed by the statewide database) — eight such perpetrators were convicted in King County in 2005. But there is no evidence at all of widespread, endemic or chronic voter fraud.
It’s a clever rhetorical device. Stefan warns that Balogh “could have gotten away” with voter fraud, even though she didn’t. Stefan opines that “it’s impossible to know how many ballots from non-existent people are cast and counted,” while providing no evidence that any such ballots have been cast or counted at all. He constantly uses voter registration irregularities and isolated cases of prosecuted fraud to suggest the possibility that voter fraud is widespread and rampant. But all the real evidence suggests that it is not.
Stefan, the EFF and other right-wing operatives are desperate to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. The question I have is: “Why?”