McFreedom

The basic storyline goes something like this: "In the important battleground state of [Florida|Ohio|Michigan|New Mexico], Democratic advocacy group [The New Voter Project|Public Interest Research Group|Project Vote|Some Other Shadowy Group] has been hiring [felons|naive activists|cynical activists] to register voters to vote [without id|absentee]. Local officals are deluged with applications, [all in the same handwriting|from dead people|all on the same street with the street mispelled the same way|from people already registered to vote]. While the local officials are concerned about the situation (unless they're in Chicago), [corrupt|incompetant] state officials plan to do nothing. Clearly, the Democrats are planning massive voter fraud to steal the election!"

Guess what guys? The Democratic party is not planning on casting [10,000|100,000|1,000,000,000] nonexistant votes to swing the election (ill-advised cracks by Ms. Heinz Kerry notwithstanding).

When I was much, much younger, I had a job (for all of two days) literally selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. Kirbys, to be exact. I didn't have a vacuum cleaner - what I did was, I knocked on your door and offered you a free rug cleaning. If you accepted, I took down your name, address and phone number. I got paid a (small) bounty for every name and phone number I turned in, and a real salesman called them later to arrange their demonstation of Kirby rug-cleaning technology.

My first day, I trudged through the Savannah, GA August heat in uncomfortable shoes and a tie, knocking on doors. I'd done some small number of houses - maybe thirty - and basically no one had been at home, and those who'd been at home hadn't been interested. I came back to the office for lunch to discover the other fellow who'd been doing this for at least a few months putting the finishing touches on stack of filled out cards.

I, of course, wondered what his secret was. He explained to me that he'd drive out to his assigned neighborhood, write down the address ranges on the streets - and spend the rest of the day in the air conditioned office, filling out the cards from the phonebook, asking for a free cleaning for people he'd never talked to. I wasn't comfortable doing that (and hated the job already anyway), so I quit.

But I have little doubt that what's happened here is that these organizations have hired people of dubious moral character, and put a lot of pressure on them to "get out the vote" - either monetary or peer. And these people have figured out, much like my coworker so many years ago, that it's a heck of a lot easier to just copy this stuff out of the phonebook than it is to actually pound shoe leather on pavement talking to them. And you get paid the same whether the people actually vote, or not, so, what the heck? And who would ever know? There's no auditing of this stuff - you just turn in a bunch of bogus paperwork, some poor schmoe gets a request for proof of ID for a registration he never filed - which he'll no doubt throw away - and who'll ever be the wiser?

This will, in the end, have two main results: A bunch of people who never really registered to vote simply won't vote in November. No one else will vote in their stead, either - it'll just be a dead issue. And a small number of idiots who didn't realize what "under penalty of perjury" meant are going to go to jail. Because unlike in the selling of Kirbys, there are actually laws around this stuff.

But don't lose sleep over "voter fraud" from this. The only fraud going on here is the plain-old kind, and the victims are actually those Democratic advocacy groups who are paying people to collect registrations and actually just getting the phonebook one card at a time.