SENATE DISTRICT 42
REPUBLICANS
REPRESENTING EDEN PRAIRIE AND SOUTHERN MINNETONKA

Published: December 07. 2007 12:30AM
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Whether it’s a Minnesota lawmaker’s effort to ban photo IDs at the voting booth or a columnist’s claim that eight of the 9/11 hijackers were registered voters, voting rights and registration rules continue to draw headlines nationwide.

While I don’t want to limit access, given recent immigration problems I do have serious concerns about government’s ability to make sure people casting votes are legal citizens.

For example, Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund recently claimed that the Justice Department found that eight of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 were registered to vote in the United States. (The Justice Department has not addressed his statement, nor has Fund provided a specific source.) Fund, in a Nov. 2 column, claimed that the Motor Voter Act gave these immigrants a voter registration card when they took a driver’s license test in their states.

Closer to home, St. Cloud resident Gary Gross recently wrote on these pages about Rep. Keith Ellison’s bill making the showing of identification unnecessary for one to vote. The Minneapolis lawmaker introduced legislation to ban the use of photo IDs as a requirement to vote in federal elections, stating that it “is a sacred right and a moral obligation to vote.”

Each state has its own laws regarding voting and there’s a wide variety of rules. Minnesota offers same-day registration for voters.

Minnesota had the highest voter turnout of any state for the 2004 federal elections at 78 percent. That compared to 55 percent in the rest of the nation, according to Ellison.

But that number is misleading because of same-day registration. So, for example, Anoka County had 170,686 registered voters as of 7 a.m. that day, but 174,066 voted. Statewide, 592,421 registered and voted that same day in 2004. This was almost 21 percent of those who voted.

Of course, same-day registration is convenient. You may register to vote at your polling place with your current address on a utility bill and a driver’s license. Even though you are asked if you are a U.S. citizen, there is little to be done on Election Day if one answers “yes” untruthfully. Even lacking any of one’s identification, the oath of a registered voter in a precinct is sufficient to permit you to vote.

There really is no way — particularly on Election Day — to inquire about citizenship.

And other problems might arise. A college student has the potential to vote twice, by absentee ballot at their parents’ home and by same-day voting at their college campus.

I spoke with Ellison this week and asked what constituted a legal vote. He said this was not the issue he was raising. He was not concerned about voter fraud but about voter access. Voter fraud, he said, was very rare.

However, there have been contested elections in which investigations found people improperly registered to vote.

In 1996, more than 740 noncitizens voted in a controversial California congressional race. Similarly, in 2005 the Utah legislative auditor said more than 58,000 illegal immigrants had Utah driver’s licenses and that almost 400 of them used their licenses to register to vote.

Still, Ellison contends a photo ID is unconstitutional, even if it was free. The elderly in nursing homes, people of color, low-income families and students would not vote if photo IDs were required.

“It would roll the wheels of time backward so only certain people can vote,” he said.

But what is wrong with that?

One has a moral obligation to vote in a place where one is a citizen. Not everyone living in a voting district is a citizen. Citizenship is a right conferred by birth, by parentage and by conscious choice. That choice can involve either moving to a new precinct in the same country, or by application and achievement of citizenship in a new country.

Ellison was adamant in saying only citizens should be allowed to vote, but he felt the voting laws of Minnesota were a model for the country.

The question is whether voting is a sacred right or a moral obligation to everyone, or only to those who are citizens? And if that right and obligation is limited, to whom is it restricted?

A country that cannot define who its citizens are ceases to be a country.

It is something less, a land with no identity.

I wonder whether the voice of the people, the root of democratic and representative government, is improved by easier rules for voting.
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This is the opinion of Barbara Banaian, a professional pianist who lives in the St. Cloud area. Her column is published the first Friday of the month.

A constitutional amendment introduced Monday in the Minnesota House would allow non-citizen residents to vote in local elections, 5 Eyewitness News has confirmed.

The ballot measure would read: "Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to allow local units of government to authorize permanent resident non-citizens to vote in local government elections?"

The bill (House File 1899) is sponsored by all DFLers: Rep. Phyllis Kahn, Minneapolis, Rep. Jim Davnie, Minneapolis, Rep. Carlos Mariani, St. Paul, and Rep. Frank Hornstein, Minneapolis.

More than half of 2008 voters would have to vote yes on the amendment for it to become part of the state's constitution. Illegal immigrants would not be permitted to vote under the measure.

The proposal comes after Take Action Minnesota's move to ask St. Paul city council candidates their opinions on a similar change in the city. Most legislators and the Governor have not yet expressed their opinions on this topic.

Illegal aliens are eroding the integrity of U.S. elections, and will continue to do so without tighter voting laws, several members of Congress testified at a hearing on Capitol Hill yesterday.

"There is a very real possibility that noncitizens have affected the outcomes of elections in the past, and will in the future," said Rep. Brian P. Bilbray, California Republican, before a House Judiciary Committee on voting irregularities and election deception.With more than 20 million foreign-born residents in the United States who are not U.S. citizens, including at least 12 million illegal aliens, the potential for noncitizen voting is a growing concern, Mr. Bilbray said.

Rep. Steve King, Iowa Republican, said illegal aliens in many states can easily acquire driver's licenses, making it easy for them to register to vote, especially states with "motor-voter" laws.

"With many states making driver's licenses available to legal noncitizens and illegal aliens, it is probable voter rolls contain large numbers of noncitizens and illegal aliens," Mr. King said.

But several Democrats said the intimidation of immigrant voters -- not the voting of illegal aliens -- is the biggest election-reform priority.

"Election intimidation and deception have become an unfortunate aspect of recent federal elections, threatening to undermine Americans' confidence in a democratic government," said Rep. John Conyers Jr., Michigan Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

"Our goal is to protect every citizen's constitutional right to vote, and to thwart any future attempts to disenfranchise eligible voters through fraud, deception and intimidation."

Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin, Maryland Democrat, accused Republicans of distributing fraudulent "official Democratic voter guides" during his 2006 re-election bid in an attempt to confuse black voters to vote for his Republican challenger.

"It is time for Congress to once again take action to stop the latest reprehensible tactics that are being used against African-American voters," Mr. Cardin said.

In response to voter-intimidation cases, Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois Democrat, earlier this year introduced the Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Act, which would impose penalties on people or groups found guilty of intimidating voters.

As for ID issues, Mr. Bilbray said the new REAL ID law, which will require states to verify proof of citizenship before issuing driver's licenses and voter identification cards, will greatly help combat fraudulent voting.

"Many people tend to think that the photo ID requirement would suppress voting, but there has never been evidence to support that assertion," Mr. Bilbray said. "Much to the contrary -- evidence shows that anti-fraud provisions increase voter turnout."

Mr. Bilbray added that more than a 100 democracies worldwide require voters to show photo IDs, including Mexico.

Earlier this month, the Bush administration delayed the start date for the REAL ID law from May 11, 2008, to Dec. 31, 2009.

Winning the Ground Game
DFLers gain lege seats in the 'burbs, courtesy, in part, of TakeAction Minnesota
by Britt Robson

Iraq may have been the first and last word on national races for the U.S. House and Senate, but it doesn't go far in explaining why DFLers won big on the state level too. As gubernatorial candidate Mike Hatch, one of the party's few election-night losers in major statewide races, noted during his concession speech, Iraq came up exactly once in his days and nights on the campaign trail. Compared to their brethren in Washington, D.C., local legislators were squeaky-clean on the ethics front. And polls taken around Election Day showed that a clear majority of Minnesota voters think that the state's economy is in good shape. So why did this voter tsunami carry so many new DFL legislators into office in St. Paul as well as Washington a week ago Tuesday? "Coattails" is no doubt part of the answer, but a top-notch grassroots organization led by members of the DFL's progressive wing likewise played a crucial role.

The linchpin of the vastly improved DFL ground game this year was an organization known as TakeAction Minnesota, which arose from last January's merger between the 12-year-old Progressive Minnesota (PM) and the 18-year-old Minnesota Alliance for Progressive Action (MAPA). Generally speaking, Progressive Minnesota had consisted of a cadre of dedicated activists who did the sweat-equity work of staffing phone banks and canvassing neighborhoods. By contrast, MAPA's clout stemmed more from bringing together like-minded organizations (many of them labor unions) to lobby at the Legislature on long-range issues.

Under the guidance of Executive Director Dan McGrath (who held the same position with PM), TakeAction Minnesota developed an ambitious electoral strategy over the spring and summer of 2006. First, they identified all the state House and Senate districts where incumbents had won by fewer than a thousand votes in the previous election. Nearly all of them, it turned out, were in the suburbs. Then they matched those districts up with the positions of prospective candidates on basic issues such as health care and education. Out of that candidate/district matching process, they targeted 15 races for last week's election. Along the way they hired and trained a dozen canvassers armed with palm pilots to go door-to-door identifying and persuading sympathetic swing voters and updating voting lists.

In response, Republicans drew a suburban line in the sand, setting up a series of "victory offices" in communities around the perimeter of the metro. In remarks celebrating the opening of the Plymouth office, Republican Party Chair Ron Carey boasted that suburban DFL legislators were merely "renting" their seats and declared the western metro to be "ground zero" in the Republican fight to retain its slim two-vote majority in the House. Longtime Republican activist and former Center for the American Experiment CEO Annette Meeks sounded a similar note to the Star Tribune, claiming that TakeAction Minnesota would "find that it's a lot more difficult to organize outside your existing base, which is the core of Minneapolis and St. Paul and some college campuses."

Meeks had it exactly wrong. TakeAction canvassers were finding the targeted districts to be especially fertile ground for their endorsed candidates. "Our goal was to hit 100,000 doors and have face-to-face conversations with at least 27,000 people in those competitive districts, which we have already done," McGrath said on the night before the election. "Now this isn't scientific by any means, and there are all sorts of reasons why some people probably wouldn't talk to us. But out of those 27,000 conversations we've had since the beginning of June, we've had only 142 come right out and tell us that stopping gay marriage is their number-one issue—and 81 others told us their top issue is allowing gay marriage. And we've had just 39 people tell us that stopping immigration is their number-one issue.

We knock on their door, explain we are canvassing, and ask them what their top issue is. Up and down the economic ladder, far and away the leading issues are education and health care, in that order. Some of these areas are very conservative, but even so, taxes is no better than third. And so I think those with a hard-right, social extremist message are not running on things that are most important to most folks, and our candidates who are running on those bread-and-butter education and health care issues should get a great response."

As the calendar rolled to November, the TakeAction merger in general and McGrath in particular were crucial in coordinating a massive grassroots campaign that in previous years had been too duplicative and disorganized to make the best use of resources. Christened "America Votes," this get-out-the-vote effort mobilized labor, environmental, and social justice groups in a more focused, efficient manner than in previous elections, avoiding repetitious contacts of progressive households already in their camp. As more than 5,200 volunteers fanned out over the state on Election Day, McGrath was already confident enough to declare that four of the 15 targeted contests would definitely swing in TakeAction's favor, including those involving incumbent Maria Ruud and challenger John Benson in the western suburbs that GOP Chair Carey had dubbed "ground zero."

In the end, TakeAction triumphed in 14 of their 15 targeted elections, with a lone setback in House District 53B ( White Bear Lake). Not a bad ratio for a voter drive that cost around $250,000, according to McGrath: That's about half as much as the larger "independent expenditures" some business groups ponied up for television attack ads on Hatch in the final week of the campaign.

"It is a validation of our philosophy and the work we did on the ground," McGrath contends. "People [in swing districts] are persuadable, but that still means they have to be persuaded into voting progressive. When we were able to talk to people face to face, they moved."

That said, McGrath denies that TakeAction is a de facto wing of the DFL Party. (Among their 55 endorsements this year was Julie Risser, the Green Party candidate from Senate District 41.) "We'd support any Green or Independent or Republican who would be most effective moving the issues that matter to our members. The candidates who won this year expressed those values, especially on education and health care."

The next step is translating those electoral gains into legislative policy. "We need to make sure our candidates don't govern scared. We'll remind them they were supported because people expect them to act on their number-one issues," McGrath says. "We place a priority on the grassroots because we can sustain the momentum better. It will be a very different ballgame in two years, when we have to defend some very vulnerable incumbents who won by narrow margins. One thing I can tell you that won't change: We will continue to go door to door and talk to people."
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City Pages is the Online News and Arts Weekly of the Twin Cities

WATCH FOR DFL ELECTION FRAUD
By Jared Jordal, SD42 Republican Delegate

All Republicans must be alert for and 100% intolerant of illegal activities by DFL activists at polling places in Minnetonka and Eden Prairie on Election Day.

In 2004, I voted at Scenic Heights Elementary School in Minnetonka. I was dismayed to find that a man had erected a table draped with a "MoveOn.Org" banner in the parking lot and had a thermos of hot cider and a sleeve of styrofoam cups. Presumably he would have given cider to anyone who asked and his banner was silently conveying its message. He didn't say anything to me (perhaps because he was trained not to unless a voter initiates conversation) but I thought his presence improper and probably illegal.

I notified the election judge inside who said, "oh, is he still out there? I'm not positive, but I think he has the right to be there. I mean he's not within 100 feet of the door, right?". I told the election judge that any '100-foot Rule' was almost certainly negated by the fact that the guy was staked out in the parking lot in such a way that all voters were forced to walk by him to enter the building. The election judge was sympathetic but said he was afraid to risk violating the guy's First Amendment rights since he was not completely sure of the legality or illegality of the guy being in the parking lot The election judge said that maybe the school principal would be willing to have the guy ejected because the election judge felt that he was only responsible for the room where voting was taking place and the principal had jurisdiction over the running of the school and anything happening in the parking lot. I told the election judge that--unfortunately for him -- HE was responsible for the enforcement of all Minnesota election laws at this polling place, including violations which might be happening in the parking lot.

When I went to my car after voting, I heard a (presumably DFL) voter thank him for what he was doing and commending him for doing important work out in the chilly weather. From talking to various candidates and GOP staffers at the Capitol, as well as Secretary of State personnel, I have heard that such activities as I witnessed--and far worse--were prevalent on Election Day 2004 throughout the Twin Cities.

Pasted below is the text of Minn. Stat. 211B.11 which outlines prohibited conduct at polling places. Every Republican should very carefully read this section of Minnesota law. I believe that a strong case can be made that the DFL activist whom I encountered in the parking lot at my polling place in 2004 was committing a crime.

Note the provisions that no activist activity can occur within 100 feet of the BUILDING in which the polling place is located (not just the room which is the actual polling place). Note also the clincher that all such activity is illegal "ANYWHERE ON THE PUBLIC PROPERTY ON WHICH A POLLING PLACE IS SITUATED." I take that passage at its plain meaning to say that if a polling place is located on public property (such as a school) then no activist activity is allowed ANYWHERE on the school property -- including the parking lot -- and that this prohibition would obviously trump the '100-foot Rule', which is only applicable for polling places located at churches and other private property sites.

Every Republican should be vigilant at the polling places of SD42 for violations of this statutory provision, as occurred in 2004. We should not violate Minnesota's election laws or permit the DFL to do so. Do not assume that the election judges will know the provisions of the law or be willing to enforce it. Election judges usually mean well, try their best, and are performing valuable and thankless public service, but they also might not want to cause a ruckus and their training might not go into the depth necessary to prevent subtle but illegal activities outside the building and in the parking lot.

Do not tolerate ANY illegality by the DFL in our senate district; far too much is at stake and the election might be way too close to do so. Even the DFL activists may not be aware that they are violating the law and they might be emboldened or assume their activities are legal based on the fact that they were not ejected from the parking lots of polling places in 2004. If any Republican witnesses a legitimate and flagrant violation of this statutory provision, bring it to the attention of the election judge, Secretary of State's Office, or other authority promptly.

Fight hard and fight fair. Spread the message of this email.

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211B.11 Election day prohibitions. Subdivision 1. Soliciting near polling places.
A person may not display campaign material, post signs, ask, solicit, or in any manner try to induce or persuade a voter within a polling place or within 100 feet of the building in which a polling place is situated, or anywhere on the public property on which a polling place is situated, on primary or election day to vote for or refrain from voting for a candidate or ballot question. A person may not provide political badges, political buttons, or other political insignia to be worn at or about the polling place on the day of a primary or election. A political badge, political button, or other political insignia may not be worn at or about the polling place on primary or election day. This section applies to areas established by the county auditor or municipal clerk for absentee voting as provided in chapter 203B. The secretary of state, county auditor, municipal clerk, or school district clerk may provide stickers which contain the words "I VOTED" and nothing more. Election judges may offer a sticker of this type to each voter who has signed the polling place roster. Subd. 2. Repealed, 1997 c 147 s 79 Subd. 3. Transportation of voters to polling place; penalty. A person transporting a voter to or from the polling place may not ask, solicit, or in any manner try to induce or persuade a voter on primary or election day to vote or refrain from voting for a candidate or ballot question. Subd. 4. Penalty. Violation of this section is a petty misdemeanor.

Valley's dead cast their votes
Statewide database of registered voters has potential for errors and fraud

By John Ferro, Poughkeepsie Journal

Steven T. Vermilye was a home inspector and general contractor who grew up in Westchester County, went to college in Texas and settled in New Paltz in 1971.

David S. Stairs was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and came to the mid-Hudson Valley in 1927, where as a 16-year-old he pounded hot rivets into the New York Central Railroad at Croton-Harmon and then spent 45 years working his way up through Texaco's research center in Glenham.

Betty L. Johnson came from a small town in Virginia and moved to Beacon when she was 17, raised eight children while boxing duct tape at Tuck Tape and working in the kitchen at the Castle Point veterans hospital.

The three mid-Hudson Valley residents had little in common during their lives, but share one thing now: They all have records of casting a vote after they had died.

Names still remain on rolls

The new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.

The Journal's analysis is the first to examine the potential for errors and fraud in New York's three-month-old database. It matched names, dates of birth and ZIP codes in the state's database of 11.7 million voter registration records against the same information in the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File," a database of 77 million records of deaths dating to 1937.

The state database was current as of Oct. 4, the master death index through the second quarter of 2006.

The same process has been used to identify deceased registrants in other states, but is not yet being used in New York.

The numbers do not indicate how much fraud is the result of dead voters in New York, only the potential for it. Typically, records of votes by the dead are the result of bookkeeping errors and do not result in the casting of extra ballots. The Journal did not find any fraud in the local matches it investigated.

"Of course we are concerned about people voting if they are dead," George Stanton, chief information officer for the state Board of Elections, said in an e-mail response.

Stanton said an updated version of the voter list is under development.

"Any tool that will help us maintain a more accurate voter list will be considered for use," Stanton said.

Among the Journal's findings:

• The Journal identified dead people on the voter rolls in all 62 counties and people in as many as 45 counties who had votes recorded after they had died.

• One address in the Bronx was listed as the home for as many as 191 registered voters who had died. The address is 5901 Palisade Ave., site of the Hebrew Home for the Aged.

• Democrats who cast votes after they died outnumbered Republicans by more than a 4-to-1 margin. The reason: Most of them came from Democrat-dominated New York City, where higher population produced more matches.

Anomaly is not unknown

Tales of votes being cast from the grave are part of elections lore. Last year, at least two dead voters were counted in a Tennessee state senate race that was decided by fewer than 20 votes.

As a result of that and other irregularities, seven poll workers were fired, an entire precinct was dissolved and the election results were voided by the state Senate, forcing the removal of the presumed winner. Three elections workers were indicted for faking the votes.

In 1997, a judge declared a Miami mayoral election invalid because of widespread fraud, including dead voters.

In one of the more notorious examples, inspectors estimated as many as 1 in 10 ballots cast in Chicago during the 1982 Illinois gubernatorial election were fraudulent for various reasons, including votes by the dead.

In one reported case, a dead man's signature was clearly spelled out on voting records even though he could only mark an "X" because he had no fingers or thumbs.

In most cases, instances of dead voters can be attributed to database mismatches and clerical errors. For instance, the Social Security Administration admits there are people in its master death index who are not dead.

They include Wappingers Falls resident Hilde Stafford, an 85-year-old native of Germany. The master index lists her date of death as June 15, 1997.

"I'm still alive," she said. "I still vote."

State and federal laws require dead voters to be purged from the rolls, but that requires a tricky balance of commitment and restraint. Failing to do so enhances the opportunity for fraud — the case of one person pretending to be another.

Balancing act

"The only reason it's a potential problem is that elections are very contentious," said David Gamache, Dutchess County's Republican elections commissioner. "And there is a reason why the election law takes up almost 500 pages. If there is a way to cheat people, people are going to look at it and see if it is viable and whether or not they should do it."

Removing dead voters also can save boards of elections the cost of sending unnecessary mail-checks and absentee ballots. But overzealous matching can result in legitimate voters being removed.

"It's almost damned if you do, damned if you don't," said Doug Chapin, director of the nonpartisan Election Reform Information Project in Washington. The nonprofit clearinghouse was formed in 2001 with a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts to track election reform developments around the country.

Other states have used the death index to supplement data collected by their health departments.

This year, officials in Washington state used health department records and the death index to remove 19,579 deceased people in the first four months after its statewide database was created. The effort there was underscored by the results of the 2004 gubernatorial election, in which Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire won by 129 votes after two recounts of the more than 2.8 million ballots cast.

Federal mandate

States are creating statewide databases to comply with the Help America Vote Act, the federal legislation that was sparked by the controversy surrounding the 2000 presidential election. The deadline for compliance was Jan. 1.

In March, the U.S. Department of Justice sued New York over its failure to meet that deadline. In response to a court-approved settlement, the state completed a preliminary version of its database in time for the 2006 fall elections. The database merged each of the 62 county files into one. It is updated daily with changes sent in batches by the counties. The final version will allow county officials to log in and make changes directly to the database.

New York has not decided whether it will use the Social Security Administration's database to search for dead voters, according to Stanton, the manager of data processing services for the state board.

Stanton said one concern is the state, by law, can only ask for the last four digits of an applicant's Social Security number.

"Nobody wants to remove someone from the voter rolls who may not be dead," Stanton said. "I got one of those calls once."

For now, the responsibility of removing dead voters falls on county boards of elections. Each month, counties receive a list of recent deaths from the state Health Department and cross-check that information against their rolls. In August, 21 people were removed by Dutchess County's board this way.

System isn't foolproof

That system does not always account for all deaths.

"You are going to miss people that went across the border, who may have gone hunting or fishing someplace" and then died, said Steve Excell, Washington's assistant secretary of state.

In Washington, 5,006 of the nearly 19,579 deceased residents it identified — more than one in four — would not have been removed from the rolls if the state had not matched their information against the master death index, officials said.

Having deceased residents on the rolls can create records of a vote that never took place. The Journal investigated seven local cases identified in its computerized analysis. Each one was either a database mismatch or an accounting error. The Journal found no examples of fraud.

Stairs, the Glasgow native from Beacon, died June 11, 1998 at the age of 87. Computer records indicate he had voted in the 2002 general election.

After examining poll books, Dutchess County elections officials determined the computer record was the product of an accounting error. A poll worker had filled a line in the poll books that is used to denote the order in which each person voted. For instance, when the 25th person in a district arrives, the poll worker writes the number "25" next to that person's signature.

In Stairs' case, the poll worker had assigned a counter number to him in place of another voter on the same page in the poll book who showed up to vote. When the poll books were scanned into the database, Stairs' record was updated to show he had voted. But no one signed the poll book in Stairs' name, no absentee ballot was received and no vote in his name was counted toward any election results.

"He would have had a laugh over that," his son, David Stairs, said.

Johnson, the Beacon woman, died June 22, 2003, of heart failure. She was 59. Her record indicates she voted in the 2004 general election. The reason: When her daughter, Betty J. Johnson, arrived to vote that day, she signed in her mother's space. In what appears to be a case of mistaken identity, no one noticed the two different signatures and the younger Johnson said she had no idea she had signed for her mother.

"They're still sending my mother's mail," Johnson said.

Boards of elections use mail checks as one way to verify the status of registered voters. If a card is returned by the postal service, the voter is flagged as inactive. That method does not work if the card is not returned — if family members are living at the same address and still collecting their deceased parents' mail, for instance.

Ballot was misrecorded

In Ulster County, Vermilye, the general contractor from New Paltz, voted for the last time in his life in 2000. Vermilye had a malignant brain tumor and needed a wheelchair to get around. He asked his daughter, Lydia Weiss, to take him to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Senate primary.

"Something like that with a wheelchair and a 200-plus pound man who was immobilized was no easy endeavor," Weiss said. "He lived five miles away, and the whole thing took maybe an hour and half. The whole reason we went and made such an effort is he thought it was going to be his last. He knew that Hillary had the primary in the bag, but wanted her to have one more vote on her side."

Vermilye lived long enough to cast one more vote, by absentee ballot, in the November general election. He died June 19, 2001, at the age of 54.

So it came as some surprise to his daughter that the Ulster County Board of Elections had a record of him voting in the 2004 general election.

Again, there was no fraud. Ulster officials found an absentee ballot cast by Vermilye's son, Jamie, had mistakenly been added to his father's record.

"I was willing to assume it was a clerical error," Weiss said. "I am so proud to be from New York, and not a state like Florida or Ohio. But it is discouraging to see even a state [such as New York] — that hasn't been revealed to have problems that have made it onto the national radar — is rife with problems of its own."

REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The Don't Show Me State
The liberal assault on voter ID laws

People in the good state of Missouri need photo identification to cash a check, board a plane or apply for food stamps. But the state Supreme Court has ruled that a photo ID requirement to vote is too great a burden on the elderly and the poor. Go figure.

Public polls consistently show that an overwhelming majority of Americans -- regardless of age, race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status -- favor voter ID laws. And nearly half of the nation's states have passed them. Yet a string of recent court decisions has blocked their implementation in some places, thus siding with Democrats and liberal special interest groups who would rather turn a blind eye to voter fraud.

A Georgia judge ruled a voter ID law unconstitutional in September. Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked enforcement of a similar law in Arizona, only to be unanimously reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday. (While the Supremes didn't decide on the merits, their willingness to let the ID requirement be enforced in next month's election suggests some encouraging deference to state officials who want to protect the integrity of the ballot.) Also this month, a Seventh Circuit appeals panel heard arguments in a case concerning Indiana's voter ID requirements. And the Michigan Supreme Court will consider a voter ID challenge in November.

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Missouri 's dispute shows what's at stake and why the laws are under attack. The state passed its new voting requirements in May in response to problems at the polls in 2000 and 2004, and the IDs were made available at no charge. The law was to be implemented over a two-year period, and people who lacked proper identification would be permitted to cast a provisional vote next month.

Despite these good faith efforts to ensure legitimate ballot access, however, opponents charge that photo ID requirements are overly burdensome and tantamount to a poll tax. The Missouri Democratic Party, which challenged the law, said that while the ID itself is free, the underlying documents--such as a birth certificate--required to obtain the necessary identification cost money. And state judges were sympathetic to the argument.

In a 6-1 decision striking down the law as a violation of the state constitution, the Missouri Supreme Court said that requiring the "between 3 and 4 percent of Missourians who lack the requisite photo ID" to obtain one for voting purposes "creates a heavy burden on the fundamental right to vote." How so? "Specific Missouri voters testified that to acquire the requisite photo ID, at the very least they will have to incur the costs associated with birth certificates, which in Missouri costs $15."

In his dissenting opinion, Judge Stephen Limbaugh Jr. took issue with the fact that the majority opinion actually played down the existence of vote fraud. "Although the majority agrees that there is some evidence of voter fraud at the voter registration stage, they discount that evidence as if it had no connection with fraud at the polling place," wrote Judge Limbaugh. "But why else does voter registration fraud occur if not to vote persons fraudulently registered?"

That's a good question. And both the majority ruling and the political left duck it. They'd rather equate a $15 nominal fee for a birth certificate with a poll tax, which is as ridiculous as the paternalistic view that senior and minority voters are incapable of meeting simple self-identification requirements that they manage to meet in other contexts every day.

Showing ID is an incidental cost of voting, like having to buy a postage stamp for an absentee ballot, or feed the parking meter when you go to the polling booth. Poll taxes, by contrast, required a person to pay a fee every time he voted and were adopted for racially discriminatory purposes.

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But there's a reason that Democrat partisans are more interested in raising the specter of Jim Crow than in protecting the integrity of the voting process. And here's a clue: While the Missouri Supreme Court was preparing its decision earlier this month, the Kansas City Star and St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran front-page stories about the thousands of fraudulent voter registrations submitted by Acorn, a national left-wing group financed in part by organized labor.

According to the Star, Acorn's voter registration drive generated some 35,000 applications, "but thousands of them appear to be duplicates or contain dubious data." The report went on to note that "[n]ear the top of the fishy list would be a man named Mark who apparently registered seven times over a three-day period using his mother's home address and phone number." Mom told the paper he hadn't lived there in six years.

Acorn and its affiliates have been among the most active and vocal opponents of voter ID laws in Missouri and nationwide. Now we know why.

Questions abound in voter push
ACORN’s registration drive in the KC area generates 35,000 applications, but thousands of them appear to be duplicates or contain dubious data.

By RICK MONTGOMERY
The Kansas City Star

A group seeking a boost in Missouri’s minimum wage said Wednesday it helped 35,000 Kansas City area residents register to vote next month.

However, at least a few thousand “questionable” applicants are clogging the verification system and probably won’t be added to voter rolls for the November balloting, election officials said.

Near the top of the fishy list would be a man named Mark who apparently registered seven times over a three-day period using his mother’s home address and phone number. She told The Star that Mark hadn’t lived there in six years.

Sharon Turner Buie, Kansas City’s Democratic director of elections, said about 3,000 of the 16,000 applications examined so far bore discrepancies, including suspicious signatures, applicants being too young, and birth dates and Social Security numbers not jibing with state databases.

The new applications were collected in a massive registration drive organized by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN.

Wednesday was the final day for Missourians to submit applications to vote Nov. 7.

ACORN leaders said they were excited by the number of applications — which, if all are valid, would increase the number of registered Kansas City voters by nearly 20 percent.

Brian Mellor, the national group’s election counsel, said several factors could lead to bad forms, including illegible handwriting and typos in Social Security numbers.

A check of several questionable applications at the Kansas City election office turned up a variety of puzzles: four forms with identical data except for an applicant’s middle name; three other forms with identical data except for an applicant’s place of birth.

If it’s not fraudulent, submitting sloppy or duplicate applications “is dangerous” because it slows the verification process, said Kansas City election director Ray James, a Republican.

“We’re hearing from many, many innocent people who registered at their libraries and haven’t gotten their notices from us yet,” he said.

He said an attorney for the election board was reviewing the matter for prosecution.

Not only did ACORN recruit volunteers to register people, it also paid more than 40 workers to collect applications — always a concern to election officials. Missouri law prohibits those workers from being paid on a quota basis.

ACORN said it paid only an hourly wage, about $8, to avoid encouraging phony forms. And it says it consults with election officials and has internal checks in an effort to cut down on duplications and fraud.

In St. Louis, elections officials called nearly 1,500 of the 15,000 registration cards collected by ACORN “potentially fraudulent,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

500 new voters might not exist
State activists might be charged over questionable registrations
Robert Vitale and Mark Niquette, THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Workers paid by a liberal group to register voters in Franklin County have turned in more than 500 forms with nonexistent addresses and potentially fake signatures, elections officials said yesterday.

Board of Elections Director Matthew Damschroder said he has forwarded the cards to county authorities for possible criminal charges.

Elections workers verifying new-voter forms discovered signatures with the same handwriting, addresses that were for vacant lots and incorrect information for voters who already were registered, Damschroder said. One card had the name of an East Side man who’s dead.

All the questionable cards were turned in by workers for Ohio ACORN, a group that’s also paying people to gather signatures for a proposed November ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage.

Katy Gall, the group’s head organizer, said ACORN is cooperating with the investigation and already has fired some of its paid circulators.

"We are interested in seeing people who are gaming the system prosecuted," she said.

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, faced similar problems in 2004 during a drive that added 189,000 new voters to Ohio’s rolls. Prosecutors were unable to trace the originators of some falsified forms, but one ACORN worker was indicted by a Franklin County grand jury.

State law now requires people paid for registering voters to add their own names to the forms. James Lee, a spokesman for Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, said the new provisions make it easier to investigate problems.

Lee said Blackwell’s office also has had inquiries recently about potential voter-registration fraud in Cuyahoga and Summit counties.

In its six Ohio offices, ACORN has about 50 circulators who are paid between $8 and $11 an hour, Gall said. The group has eight circulators in Columbus.

Gall complained that the state’s election-law changes make it harder for groups to catch problems because circulators must submit forms directly to elections offices in person or by mail.

In 2004, ACORN began running its own checks on voter forms before submitting them to the Franklin County Board of Elections.

Lee, however, said internal checks are still possible.

It’s a felony in Ohio to submit voter-registration forms with false information. The penalty is up to 18 months in jail.

Damschroder said he doesn’t think the fake forms were submitted by people intending to cast fake ballots in November.

"I think it’s just somebody out there trying to make a fast buck," he said.

ACORN is helping lead the coalition that collected more than 765,000 signatures to put the minimum-wage issue on the Nov. 7 ballot, but Gall said the group has no concerns about the signatures its circulators obtained.

Franklin County elections workers will verify those collected locally, Damschroder said.

Voter ID requirement a waste of time
By: Marjory Gherity

The voter ID requirement is a waste of time. It will cost more than it is worth, it will not stop illegal voters but could pose a problem for some legal voters, and it does not address the most serious threat to the integrity of our election system.

Last September, the General Accountability Office reported on the problems related to electronic voting systems. The major problem noted by the GAO was that hackers have easy access to electronic voting systems because of seriously inadequate security standards. Some systems can be hacked and votes can be altered with no indication that hacking has taken place. Some touch screen systems can be hacked and altered to show one vote, but record another. Some systems have reported more votes than there were voters. Others have simply lost thousands of votes. Election results can also be hacked and altered when they are electronically transmitted from local precincts to central locations.

Minnesota purchased new voting machines last year, but most voters will continue to use optic scanners, which, unlike touch-screen systems, do provide a paper trail. However, they operate from memory cards that, if not properly secured, can be altered to falsify election results and leave no evidence of tampering and, therefore, no reason to request a recount of the paper trail. As for a recount on a touch-screen machine – forget it. The software that records and counts the votes is not available for public scrutiny because of trade-secret protections.

Over two-thirds of the country now votes on electronic voting systems which have not been exhaustively tested for reliability and security because this country has no mandatory standards for the development and testing of electronic voting machines.

The money we save by not implementing a voter ID card requirement would be much better spent on paper ballots until our electronic voting systems can be more like ATMs, which are secure and reliable and provide transaction receipts and accurate totals.

Supports Ruud's vote
By: Peggy Kvam

Thank you to Rep. Maria Ruud for standing up for citizens' right to vote.

Minnesota is proud of its high voter turnout and excellent voter service with at-the-poll registration, absentee ballots and ease of voting. There are many protections in place in our voting system. Rather than showing an ID, registered voters sign the roster as their oath of eligibility to vote. The election judge or authorized challenger has available a formal challenge process for eligibility concerns. The voter roster is updated every presidential election cycle, so if you are an infrequent voter you must register again. Registration requires specific photo ID and address verification. Because of these protections, voter fraud in Minnesota is extremely rare.

As an election judge and member of the League of Women Voters, I disapprove of the Voter ID proposal because it will disenfranchise many eligible voters including the elderly, as well as needlessly add expense and delay to the voting process.
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Peggy Kvam is an Eden Prairie resident and serves on the board of the League of Women Voters.

Election Safeguards
By: Al Bode

How important is the accuracy of our elections?

Recently the Minnesota House of Representatives passed a bill requiring voters to show a picture ID when voting. The bill even promises free ID cards for the poor and exempts residents living in nursing homes.

Does that seem too burdensome? I need photo identification to write a check. I need photo identification to buy a drink. I need photo identification to get on an airplane. Doesn’t it make sense that voting would too?

Well, Rep Maria Ruud voted against this measure. Why would anyone want our voting process to not use commonly accepted verification methods?
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Al Bode is an Eden Prairie resident and current Vice Chair of the SD42 Republican Party

Questions Ruud's Vote
By: Sarah Halvorson

I am an 18-year resident of Eden Prairie and a life-long resident of Minnesota. Recently I learned that our Minnesota House of Representatives passed a bill requiring voters to show a driver's license (or other picture identification) when they vote.

Upon learning this, I had two serious concerns.

First, why hasn't proof of identification been a requirement to vote in Minnesota? It only makes logical sense in light of the abundant evidence of fraudulent voting both in the United States and elsewhere.

Second, why did my state legislator, Maria Ruud, vote against this requirement? Is there anything for which Ruud believes one should have to identify themselves?

Perhaps Ruud would like to enlighten her constituents as to why she believes people should be permitted to walk into one of our local polling places and demand to vote without even showing they are a U.S. citizen.
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Sarah Halvorson is an Eden Prairie resident