Plus ça change

"This represents, by the way, the most important continuing relevance of political parties," writes Jack of TigerHawk in a riveting rebuttal to PowerLine's Hindrocket's fear that electoral fraud is "a grave and growing threat to our democracy":

Florida 2000 and Washington 2004 are better explained as statistical anamolies inherent in democratic elections.

To my way of looking at things, this is what democracy, writ broadly, is all about. Since I believe it is inevitable that a country with thousands of elections every year will have a few for which the difference between the two candidates is less than the margin of error, I also do not have a problem if certain elections have to be ground through the election bureaucracy, courts and legislature before they can conclude. The important lesson for the parties is that they have to make the long term investment to win local and state offices in order to have leverage in these "margin of error" disputes.

Elections, like all processes, have structural rates of error . . . If the difference between the two leading candidates in any given race is smaller than the irreducible margin of error, you are going to have to resort to some mechanism other than the endless counting and recounting of votes to resolve the dispute. Those mechanisms include bureaucratic, legislative and judicial decisions.

Jack's theory -- original and elegant in its simplicity -- re perceived fraud in dual voter registrations between New York and Florida in 2000 and between New York and New Jersey in 2004:

It is the product of the intersection of rules that promote access to the franchise, the great mobility of Americans, and the great incompetence of America's local bureaucrats. My mother moved from Princeton to Fluvanna County, Virginia more than six years ago, and she is still on the rolls in Princeton! I know, because I see her name there every time I go to vote. Is this what has transpired between Florida and New York? Almost certainly. The migration from New York to Florida is, shall we say, legendary, as is the well-documented tendency of the ethnic groups involved in this migration to vote Democratic. This isn't fraud, it is the way things are.

There isn't more fraud, but we are seeing more of the error that has always been there. In a closely divided country that new transparency may stoke the passion of activists, but it does not mean that there is a rising likelihood of fraud. On the contrary, it probably reduces the risk of fraud.

An eye-opener.  'Hope InstaPundit picks up this one.

Comments

[Walter E. Wallis]

If your mother registered to vote at her new address, the registrar should have notified the registrar at her old address to purge her name there. Like they say, it is harder to rent a videotape than to register multiple times. People need to go to jail for illegal registration or voting.

[Sissy Willis]

Oh. I wish readers would read more carefully. My mother left this vale of tears years ago. Please go back and get your facts right before you deign to criticize, sir.

[Jack]

Well. All my mother did was move to Virginia, leaving her life in New Jersey far behind (indeed, she just sort of high-tailed it out of here, but that's another story entirely). Being a good citizen, when she got to Virginia she registered to vote.

I am, by the way, quite certain the Walter Wallis is incorrect about the state of the law. All the elections in this country are state elections. Even the Presidential election is actually 50 different state elections! Accordingly, one state does not care what you do in another state. Virginia does not care if you leave behind a registration in New Jersey, and it certainly isn't going to spend any of its taxpayers money to notify the original states of its new immigrants.

This is obviously quite different from voting twice in the same state in the same election, which Virginia would have every reason to police.

The only government with skin in this particular game is the federal government, and I doubt very much (without, in this case, knowing that actual law) that the federal election law deals with the multiple registrations issue. If it does, I have never read that it does. Federal election law deals with access to the ballot box (the Voting Rights Act) and it may, conceivably, ban a person from actually voting in multiple states in the same presidential election.

But Mr. Wallis skipped over my central point, which is that this is not fraud, it is probably by design (insofar as states do not back track new registrations to delete the old in other jurisdictions) and at worst error. It only becomes fraud if the multiple-state registrant does so on purpose with intent of voting twice. Of the 48,000 voters found to have registered in both Florida and New York, I bet virtually all of them are retired people who moved from New York to Florida in recent years. That these people vote disproportionately Democratic is not in the least surprising. That these retirees are going to the trouble to fly en masse from Florida to New York on election day or even order up absentee ballots from New York, all so they can ensure the continued supremecy of the Democratic Party in New York, strikes me as highly unlikely. Therefore, this example of double registration among Florida snow birds is not, I submit, evidence of the proposition for which Power Line cited it.

Thanks for the link! Sorry I didn't jump in sooner over here, but I had a bad day yesterday....