The Hidden Costs of Clean Election Reform

1. When Good Reforms Go Bad

1 1 When Good Reforms Go Bad Poll fraud and error take a variety of forms. Ineligible voters can register illegally. Eligible voters can register in more than one locale. Spurious voters can impersonate registered ones, often those who died recently or are out of town. Campaign operatives can intimidate voters, buy their votes, or commandeer polling stations. Poll workers can stuff ballot boxes or miscount votes. Election officials can doctor or incompetently maintain the voter registry. Canvassers can intentionally pad or shave vote totals or make inadvertent tallying mistakes. Such forms of fraud and error afflict many post-World War II quasi and emerging democracies. In some places, instances of fraud and error have been sporadic. In other places, the scale has been large to massive. More than 150 people were killed in India during the 1989 parliamentary elections; much of the blood was spilled by armed partisans who raided polling stations in order to stuff ballot boxes, a widespread practice known locally as “booth capturing.” The incidence of fraud in Nigeria’s 1999 presidential election was, according to the country’s main election watchdog organization, “great enough to completely distort the election result” (Transition Monitoring Group 1999). In Thailand, 30 percent of household heads surveyed nationwide said that they were offered money during the 1996 general election (Pasuk et al. 2000). In Venezuela, election results in four and then five of twenty states were declared void in the 1992 and 1995 national elections, respectively, as a result of alleged vote rigging. Poll fraud and error vex established democracies as well. In Australia, some fifteen thousand multiple votes (more than one vote cast per name on the 2 The Hidden Costs of Clean Election Reform voters’ roll) were recorded in the 1993 election (McGrath 1996, 7). In the 1983 municipal elections in France,more than twenty-five hundred appeals were filed to overturn the results of individual races; among the most common charges were ballot box stuffing, the falsification of election returns, and the fraudulent use of voters’ cards (Maligner 1986, 7–20). In the United States, absentee ballot fraud was wide enough in scope to alter the outcome of the 1993 state senate election in Philadelphia and the Miami mayoral election of 1997. Georgia had more than fifteen thousand dead people on its voter rolls in 2000, while New York had as many as seventy-seven thousand in 2006.1 Many quasi, emerging, and established democracies find themselves, as a result,under domestic and/or international pressure to make polling more honest , accurate, and protective of individual freedom. In response, many governments have put in place reforms to reduce poll fraud and error, what we might call “clean” election reforms. The number of clean election reforms implemented since the early 1990s is large. Here is a small sampling: Nigeria,Zambia, Lesotho, Malawi, Mexico, and Bangladesh computerized their voter registers. Israel, Italy, and the states of Florida and Kentucky undertook extraordinary registry purges. Senegal, Bolivia, South Africa, and the Philippines adopted new procedures to verify voter eligibility. Ghana, Mali, Malawi, Mauritania, Yemen, Macedonia, Guyana, Mexico, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic introduced new forms of voter identification, while Indiana, Arizona, and South Dakota, among other states, tightened voter identification requirements. Brazil, Belgium, India, Germany, Quebec, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Paraguay, parts of Australia, and many jurisdictions in the United States began using electronic voting machines. Poland, Kyrgyzstan, Venezuela, and Mozambique switched to computerized vote counting or tabulation.2 Mexico, Thailand, and the Philippines mounted voter education drives to discourage vote selling, while Taiwanese prosecutors cracked down hard on vote buyers. It is often assumed that such reforms will enhance the quality of elections. The reality, however, is that sometimes this is not the case. The history of clean 1. “Even Death Can’t Stop Some Voters,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, November 6, 2000; “Deceased Residents on Statewide Voter List,” Poughkeepsie Journal, October 29, 2006. 2. Election experts distinguish vote “counting”(adding up individual votes) from vote “tabulation” (calculating vote totals based on polling station or polling center vote counts). Thus while Venezuela computerized both counting and tabulation, Kyrgyzstan continued to hand-count votes and computerized only tabulation. For most discussions in this book, it would have added unnecessary clutter to repeatedly make the distinction between counting and tabulation. Consequently,in the remainder of the book, I use “counting” in its broad, everyday sense to encompass both counting and tabulation—unless the context indicates otherwise...