Michigan tea party activists fret about election fraud

A journalist who spent time with a group of tea party activists from across Southeast Michigan reports that one of the issues they expressed concern about — like so many conservative groups have over the last few years — is election fraud.

C.J. Schuman, Wayne County coordinator of the national Campaign for Liberty, urged a crowd of nearly 25 people to help protect the integrity of elections by becoming delegates, board of canvasser members and poll watchers.

“There’s a real concern in Michigan about the integrity of our elections,” she said, as Tea Party activists from Canton, Plymouth, Livonia, Westland, Farmington Hills, Northville and other communities in Wayne and Oakland counties met inside the Canton Coney Island Restaurant on Lilley south of Joy.

The invocation of election fraud has become something of a mantra on the right in recent years, particularly as part of their attacks on ACORN and their voter registration programs. But the state of Michigan has never had a problem with fraudulent voting, nor has most of the rest of the country.

Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land was sued multiple times over the last few years in federal court over efforts to purge voters from the rolls and rules that prevented the counting of legally cast votes, efforts she usually justified by claiming they were necessary to prevent voter fraud. A federal judge in one of those suits pointed out that such justifications amounted to little more than empty fear-mongering:

“The defendants also warn that allowing out-of-precinct provisional voting will increase the likelihood of voter fraud. They describe the specter of hoards of voters bussed in to foreign precincts overwhelming the capacity of local election officials, causing long poll lines, and discouraging voters from casting votes in their own precincts. The Court believes that these particular concerns are overstated. Preventing election fraud and preserving the “purity of the ballot box” certainly is a legitimate State interest. However, Michigan enjoys an election history that is relatively fraud-free. In 1997, Michigan’s attorney general stated that “as the chief law enforcement official of the State of Michigan, I am not aware of any substantial voter fraud in Michigan’s elections. I have not received complaints regarding voter fraud. Moreover, the state’s chief elections official, Secretary of State Candice Miller, confirmed the fact that Michigan does not have a voter fraud problem when she stated: ‘We have no real evidence of voter fraud in Michigan. Michigan has historically had very clean elections.’ The defendants have offered no evidence that circumstances have changed.

“[Michigan Elections] Director [Christopher] Thomas acknowledged in his testimony that he was not aware of any threat to compromise the integrity of the polls at the upcoming general election or to bus voters to the wrong precincts. Moreover, the State retains the ability to prosecute any “person [who] shall procure, aid, or counsel another person to go or come into a township, ward, or voting precinct for the purpose of voting at an election,” or who “offers to vote or attempts to vote more than once at the same election either in the same or in another voting precinct.”

The non-partisan Congressional Research Service, responding to a request from Rep. John Conyers (D-Detroit) to look at the potential for voter fraud because of ACORN’s voter registration program prior to last year’s election, looked at the evidence all over the country. That report said that a search of the data “did not identify any reported instances of individuals who were improperly registered by ACORN attempting to vote at the polls.”

This should not be a surprise, of course. Just because some minimum wage canvasser trying to get paid for doing nothing registers someone with the name Mickey Mouse doesn’t mean Mickey Mouse is actually going to show up to vote. There is a minor problem with voter registration fraud, all of it perpetrated by paid canvassers trying to scam the system. But this has nothing at all to do with actual voter fraud; no one is actually casting an illegal vote as a result of such low-level scams.