[FoRK] Newsroom score: American Taliban

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On Aug 29, 2012, at 9:56 AM, "Stephen D. Williams" <sdw at lig.net> wrote:
> Is there also a conspiracy by local government not to report this voter fraud to the Federal government?
> Recent stories have cited 86 or 26 verified cases of voter fraud, nationally, in the last 6 or so years.  Were they all in Garden Grove?  If not, what's wrong with the local election board that has prevented them from reporting these problems?  Where are links to proof that this has happened?


I think you are taking a bit of a naive view of the reality.

I know someone that does transaction analysis at one of the major banks for the purposes of detecting irregularities such as money laundering. To do that job, they look at pretty much the entire ebb and flow of money throughout the country. While the bank only cares about irregularities it has some liability for, they detect a much broader range of crimes in the analysis. The most pervasive crime detected is securities fraud, but most people probably do not find that surprising. The second most pervasive crime, on the other hand, is very surprising to many people: judicial bribery. 

If we were to go by "verified cases" of judicial bribery as evidence, we would conclude that it is very rare. The people who could verify cases to your satisfaction have no significant incentive to do so and there is rarely a smoking gun that the victims of the crime can point to. In fact, most of the victims have no idea that it even occurred. Furthermore, on what basis could someone in the government responsible for investigating judicial corruption run the kind of privacy-violating fishing expeditions that the banks do? As far as the government is concerned, there is no evidence of widespread corruption in the judiciary even though they know they would find it if they actually looked. 

Voter fraud likely falls into a similar category. It is "rare" because it is institutionally implausible for the people who could verify it to look for it. Like with judicial bribery, there is an enormous amount of resistance to putting into place the kinds of policies that would make it possible for the government to officially verify its existence. 


There are many things that, as far as the government is concerned, do not exist because the government goes to great lengths to not look for them. 
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