http://hoosieraccess.com/files/2007/09/indianapolis-voter-fraud.pdf

Of the 46 individuals involved, 21 were convicted of felonies and 25 of misdemeanors. The group included four East Chicago Police Officers, two East Chicago City Fire Department employees, two current or former City Councilmen, two Court employees, one Lake County Deputy Sheriff, three political precinct committeemen, and 15 other municipal employees. The types of illegal activity included voting in precincts other than where the individuals lived, applying and voting in another’s name, forgery, and perjury.

http://www.in.gov/attorneygeneral/press/Release.ECVoteFraud.Summary.html

We’re talking public officials who were involved in forging absentee ballots. This is not unlike what ACORN was doing in Northwest Indiana. And they’re under Federal investigation. So I would say this more than passes your giggle test.

Well, that is a bit hard to do. The issue is that we are not able to accurately measure the scale of voter fraud. It was certainly present in the 2002 Indiana 7th Congressional District race when a reporter from the Wall Street Journal was with the Julia Carson campaign while they perpetrated voter fraud. Was it enough to change the election? No one can ever really know.

How much is an acceptable level of fraud? What is being abundantly demonstrated now is that, at best, ACORN has a process that encourages canvassers to sign up non-existent people to vote. At worst, there is a MASSIVE (to the tune of thousands of attempts) to perpetrate voter fraud.

Your observation about getting voting roles cleaned up is accurate–people do get left in the system at times. But the roles are usually cleaner than that. If the person moves within the state, the voter registration IS alway removed from the original location–at least when done through the BMV. The State now maintains a database that they have been using to clean up the rolls. Marion County also did a mailing a couple of years ago to clean the rolls up. In addition, if you don’t vote in, what, 3 consecutive national elections, you automatically get dropped off the rolls. So the existence of 105% registration is still problematic.

If you have changed your address since you last registered, then your registration at your old address may be canceled if your county voter registration office is notified that you have registered at a new address

Notice the word MAY. It’s not WILL.

If the King brothers, Amos and Silas, live with their parents, John and Mary, and they each marry someone named Mary, there may be three “Mary King” voter registrations for that address. If Amos buys land in upstate New York, it’s unlikely that the election board there will waste manpower and stamps to notify Elkhart County to cancel her old registration. If Silas buys land in southern Indiana, they might notify Elkhart County - but what’s the board of elections to do? They don’t know which “Mary King” has moved.

They ask for driver’s licenses or SSNs on the voter registration form, but they don’t require them; there’s a box to check for “none”.

And if someone registers to vote, they don’t always know where they lived the last time they registered to vote. Maybe they get the address wrong. Maybe they leave the address blank. So those registrations don’t get voided, either.

Modern database techniques and proper procedures would fix this problem (and ACORN’s wagon) in a snap.

Well, maybe. What are you going to use as a unique identifier? The Internal Revenue Service has decided that they can’t demand Social Security numbers for the Amish - and Indiana has the third-largest Amish population in the country.

And I question whether it’s really a problem. Can you identify any Indiana election in the past quarter century where the result was changed due to voter fraud?

In September, the Indiana AG issued a press release indicating that 53 people were charged and 46 people were convicted of voter fraud in 2003. It’s the largest voter fraud case in state history.

But what was the fraud? Mostly, it was people voting in the wrong precincts. In some cases, people weren’t using their correct name to register and vote. Curiously missing from the press release was any mention of people voting twice.

Oh, wow.

There are a lot of people who have multiple houses, not just John McCain. There are other people who are homeless. “What is your legal residence” often is a difficult question to answer. Tax preparers are faced with a slightly tougher question when people move from one state to another; often, it is a process that takes a few months to complete, but for tax purposes, it’s considered to have occurred on one specific date. Colleges face similar problems. Is his legal address where he lives, or where his parents live? Does he pay in-state or out-of-state rates if he has an in-state driver’s license and lives in-state, but he’s a dependent on his out-of-state parent’s tax return.

With 53 people in 2003 (out of Indiana’s population of 6.3 million) being charged with a crime, with not even one single case of anyone voting twice, any assertion that there’s a “problem” doesn’t really pass the giggle test.

The system in use now is a “stone knives and bearskins” system. There’s no excuse for people to have multiple registrations just because they moved and the old registration hasn’t fallen off the roll yet. Modern database techniques and proper procedures would fix this problem (and ACORN’s wagon) in a snap.

But we are in much better shape than some of the other states that are seeing this fraud.