Chuck Samuelson, Executive Director of Minnesota’s American Civil Liberties Union today announced a $1,000 “bet” for proof of a case of voter fraud that the Voter ID Amendment would have prevented in Minnesota’s elections from 2002 through March 30th of this year. The clock’s ticking.
Samuelson pointed out that the recent convictions for voter fraud resulted from ineligible people voting, not what he terms, “voter impersonation.”
Maybe Mr. Samuelson would have benefitted from reading the bill, which does require a voter’s eligibility to be verified before casting a ballot. Both the 21st Century Voter ID bill and the constitutional amendment now being debated in the legislature would have prevented hundreds of illegal votes cast by ineligible felons in recent elections.
The devil’s in the details, though. The ACLU will only pay out for indictments, charges or convictions of voter fraud by “voter impersonation.”
“There is no voter impersonation fraud in Minnesota, and we’re willing to bet on it,” said Samuelson.
If a fraudulent voter registered or voted under an assumed identity (whether someone else’s or one invented from whole cloth), the crime can be detected, but prosecution after the fact is impossible when all investigators have to go on is a false name, and not so much as a photo to connect to the true identity of the fraudulent voter. Even so, the ACLU has hedged their bet. They’ll only pay out for the first instance brought to them and the window to find it is only 6 weeks before the deal’s off the table.
What is known is that according to data obtained from the secretary of state’s office, after the 2008 election, over 6,000 Election Day Registrants were flagged for challenge after they voted because they provided names and/or addresses that could not be verified. After the 2010 election, 399 such cases were referred to county attorneys around the state for criminal investigations.
Voting by use of a false identity can be detected after the fact, but identifying the perpetrator is impossible.
The $1,000 bounty is a not-too-slick publicity stunt that’s apt to backfire. During the press conference announcing the gimmick, Channel 5’s Tom Hauser pointed out that in 1997, KSTP reporters uncovered several instances of voters using false identities to vote and some were even convicted. Good thing the ACLU set the cutoff at 2002, or Hauser could have swiped the stack of one thousand one dollar bills right off the podium and put an end to that bet on the spot.
Their point that voter fraud by fictitious identity doesn’t occur was rather undermined.
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This will be interesting. It will be a very small amount of money handed out to the true believers.
What? The ACLU isn’t broke already from handing out all those checks?
An observer of the right-wing phenomenon must explain the paradox of followers who would escape from freedom even as they incessantly invoke the word freedom as if it were a mantra. But freedom so defined does not mean ordinary civil liberties like the prohibition of illegal government search and seizure, the right of due process, or the right not to be tortured. The hard right has never protested the de facto abrogation of much of the Bill of Rights during the last decade. In the right-wing id, freedom is the emotional release that a hostile and psychologically repressed person feels when he is finally able to lash out at the objects of his resentment. Freedom is his prerogative to rid himself of people who are different, or who unsettle him. Freedom is merging into a like-minded herd. Right-wing alchemy transforms freedom into authoritarianism.