Voter Integrity

http://solutions.heritage.org/voter-integrity/

Ensuring the security and integrity of the election process is critical to maintaining our democratic republic.

The Texas Legislature should guarantee that every eligible individual can vote and that no person’s vote is negated by fraud.

Texas should require photographic identification for both absentee and in-person voting. IDs should be free to those requesting them for voting purposes.

Individuals registering to vote should be required to provide documentation of U.S. citizenship and Texas residency.

State election officials should have access to federal Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security databases to verify citizenship and the authenticity of voter registration applications.

State and federal courts should be required to notify election officials when individuals called for jury duty from voter registration rolls are excused because they are not U.S. citizens.

The Department of Defense should create voter registration offices on military installations.

As long as elections put people into positions where they can make decisions about how much the government will spend, who will receive benefits, and how the government will exercise its power, some individuals will attempt to steal them. Examples abound, from the 135 percent of the eligible voters who turned out for an 1844 election in New York to the infamous Ballot Box 13 in Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 Senate election. The 1997 Miami mayor’s race was overturned because of more than 5,000 fraudulent absentee ballots. A mayoral election in East Chicago, Indiana, in 2003 and a state senate race in Tennessee in 2005 were also overturned because of voter fraud. In 2013, four individuals in Indiana were convicted of forging signatures on the ballot petitions that qualified Barack Obama for the state’s May 2008 primary election.

As the Supreme Court of the United States recognized when it upheld the constitutionality of Indiana’s voter identification law in 2008, flagrant examples of voter fraud “have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists.” Those examples “demonstrate that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.”

Many partisan activists, liberal academics, and media elites deny that voter fraud exists or that any action is needed to protect the integrity of our election process. However, the nonpartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, found that our “electoral system cannot inspire public confidence if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud or to confirm the identity of voters.”

The right to vote in a free and fair election is the most basic civil right, one on which many of the other rights of the American people depend. Congress and the states can and should guarantee that every eligible individual is able to vote and that no one’s vote is stolen by fraud.

Recommendations
1. Require all voters to present photographic identification, issued by the federal, state, or local government, when they vote at their polling place and to send copies of such identification or their driver’s license number when submitting an absentee ballot. Any individual who does not have identification should be entitled to receive it free from state authorities. Both academic studies and election results show that identification requirements do not depress the turnout of voters, including eligible minority voters. The vast majority of voters of all parties, races, and ethnic backgrounds support such a requirement, which increases public confidence in the integrity of elections.

2. Require all individuals who register to vote to provide documentation establishing that they are U.S. citizens. States have an interest in preventing dilution of the votes of their citizens at the state level and must maintain citizen-only voting rolls for federal elections. When a state issues a driver’s license to a noncitizen who is in the country legally, the license should indicate on its face that the holder is not a U.S. citizen.

3. Require state and local election officials to verify the accuracy of new voter registration information against other available state and federal databases. Section 303 of the Help America Vote Act of 2001 (HAVA) requires states to coordinate their voter registration lists with “other agency databases” and to “verify the accuracy of the information provided on applications for voter registration.” Some election officials are not complying with this law and not verifying new voter registration information against other available databases such as Department of Motor Vehicles driver’s license records and Social Security Administration records. Only by implementing this requirement as a state law can legislators ensure that their state election officials will follow this common-sense requirement.

4. Require individuals who register by mail to vote in person the first time they vote. Section 6 of the National Voter Registration Act allows states to implement such a requirement, although it cannot apply to any voter entitled to vote by absentee ballot or other than in person under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act or the Voting Accessibility of the Elderly and Handicapped Act.

5. Require all individuals who register to vote by mail-in forms, whether mailed back to election officials or hand-delivered by the individual or third-party organizations, to comply with the applicable HAVA provision. HAVA requires persons who register to vote by mail and who have not previously voted in a federal election to provide a copy of certain identification documents when they register or the first time they vote, but some states have interpreted this to apply only to voter registration forms received through the mail and not to such forms delivered through other means.

6. Require that all third-party organizations that conduct voter registration drives put the name of their organization and the volunteer or employee handling each registration on the voter registration form, and require that all completed forms be returned to election officials within 10 days of the date the forms are executed by the voter. This would allow election officials to identify which organization and individual handled voter registration forms that are found to be incomplete or fraudulent and to ensure that completed registration forms are provided to election officials on a timely basis so that they can be properly processed before the state’s pre-election registration deadline.

7. Require all state courts to notify election officials when individuals whose names are drawn from the registration rolls are excused from jury duty because they claim they are not U.S. citizens or no longer live in the jurisdiction. This would allow local election officials to remove ineligible voters and refer them for possible prosecution. Running data comparisons between voter registration addresses and property tax rolls is also recommended to detect individuals who are registering illegally at commercial addresses or vacant lots.

8. Require that each state enter into agreements with other states, especially neighboring states, to compare voter registration lists to find voters who are registered in more than one state. Because there is no national voter registration list, it is relatively easy for individuals to register in more than one state without detection. Such agreements are critical to detecting and deterring double registration and possible double voting.