9.21 Myths about Fraud

Tara Ross, a lobbyist against the National Popular Vote Compact who works closely with Save Our States, made the following comment about fraud under the current state-by-state winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes:

“Fraud is minimized because it is hard to predict where stolen votes will matter.”[424]

Contrary to what Ross asserts, there is no difficulty in determining where stolen votes will matter. Voters matter, and they only matter, in closely divided battleground states.

The battleground states are well-known to anyone who follows politics.

In the spring of 2008, both major political parties acknowledged that there would be 14 battleground states (involving only 166 of the nation’s 538 electoral votes) in the 2008 presidential election.[425]

Two years before the 2012 presidential election, a televised debate on C-SPAN among candidates for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee focused on the question of how the party would conduct the 2012 presidential campaign in the 14 states that were expected to decide the election.[426]

In June 2012, the New York Times reported that the 2012 presidential campaign was effectively being conducted in nine battleground states (Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Nevada, and New Hampshire).[427]

In a July 2012 article describing his “3-2-1 strategy,” Karl Rove identified the six states that would probably decide the 2012 election.[428]

In October 2000, the New York Times reported the following about Florida:

“The parties and the presidential candidates are concentrating their campaigns in Florida in these last, tense days before the election on the cities and towns along Interstate 4.

“The nearly three million voters who live more or less along the maddeningly overcrowded, 100-mile-long highway that bisects the state from Daytona Beach on the Atlantic Coast to the Tampa Bay on the Gulf of Mexico are the swing voters in this, the largest of the swing states.

“They may be getting more attention these days than any other voters in the country as the candidates compete for Florida’s 25 electoral votes.

“‘This state is the key to this election,’ Vice President Al Gore declared at a rally in Orlando earlier this month, ‘and Central Florida is the key to this state.’”[429] [Emphasis added]

Under the current state-by-state winner-take-all system, those who wish to cheat know exactly where they need to go in order to potentially sway the national outcome. In 2000, for example, a significant number of electoral votes were determined by a small handful of popular votes:

• Florida—537 popular votes
• Iowa—4,144 popular votes
• New Hampshire—7,211 popular votes
• New Mexico—366 popular votes
• Oregon—6,765 popular votes
• Wisconsin—5,708 popular votes.

If the 2000 election had been conducted on a nationwide basis, it would have been necessary to overturn a margin of 543,816.

It is far easier to fraudulently manipulate 537 votes in Florida (and thereby flip the outcome nationally), and do so without being detected, than to overturn a margin of 543,816.

Footnotes

The 2012 Republican National Platform stated that electing the President by a national popular vote would be:

“a guarantee of corruption as every ballot box in every state would become a chance to steal the presidency.”[430]

Under the current state-by-state winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes of electing the President, every vote in every ballot box matters inside every closely divided battleground state and therefore today represents “a chance to steal the presidency.”

Executing electoral fraud without detection requires a situation in which a very small number of people can have a very large impact. Under the current state-by-state winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes, there is a huge payoff for fraud and mischief, because a small number of popular votes in a closely divided battleground state can flip a substantial bloc of electoral votes.

Under the current state-by-state winner-take-all system, those who wish to cheat know exactly where they need to go in order to potentially sway the national outcome (namely the battleground states).

In 2004, President George W. Bush had a nationwide lead of 3,012,179 popular votes. However, if 59,152 Bush voters in Ohio had shifted to Senator John Kerry, Kerry would have carried Ohio and thus become President. It would be far easier for potential fraudsters to manufacture 59,152 votes in Ohio than to manufacture 3,012,179 votes (51 times more votes) nationwide. Moreover, it would be far more difficult to conceal fraud involving three million votes.

The outcome of a presidential election is less likely to be affected by fraud with a single large nationwide pool of votes than under the current state-by-state winner-take-all system where microscopic margins in one, two, or three states frequently decide the presidency.

As former Congressman and presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (R–Colorado) wrote:

“The issue of voter fraud … won’t entirely go away with the National Popular Vote plan, but it is harder to mobilize massive voter fraud on the national level without getting caught, than it is to do so in a few key states. Voter fraud is already a problem. The National Popular Vote makes it a smaller one.”[431]

U.S. Senator Birch Bayh (D–Indiana) summed up the concerns about possible fraud in a 1979 Senate speech:

“Fraud is an ever-present possibility in the Electoral College system, even if it rarely has become a proven reality. With the electoral college, relatively few irregular votes can reap a healthy reward in the form of a bloc of electoral votes, because of the unit rule or winner-take-all rule. Under the present system, fraudulent popular votes are much more likely to have a great impact by swinging enough blocs of electoral votes to reverse the election. A like number of fraudulent popular votes under direct election would likely have little effect on the national vote totals.

“I have said repeatedly in previous debates that there is no way in which anyone would want to excuse fraud. We have to do everything we can to find it, to punish those who participate in it; but one of the things we can do to limit fraud is to limit the benefits to be gained by fraud.

“Under a direct popular vote system, one fraudulent vote wins one vote in the return. In the electoral college system, one fraudulent vote could mean 45 electoral votes, 28 electoral votes.

“So, the incentive to participate in ‘a little bit of fraud,’ if I may use that phrase advisedly, can have the impact of turning a whole electoral bloc, a whole State operating under the unit rule. Therefore, so the incentive to participate in fraud is significantly greater than it would be under the direct popular vote system.”[432] [Emphasis added]

Footnotes