Vote Suppression Prevention in the Information Age
By NicFriday, May 2nd, 2008 at 11:07 am
Threat Level on Wired.com (cite) reports that a nonpartisan group in Durham, NC by the name of “Women’s Voices, Women Vote” has used a voice recording to telephone numerous black voters throughout North Carolina and remind them to register to vote. While normally this would be considered of net benefit to society, they fail to mention that the deadline for registration was almost a month ago, and many of the phone calls were to citizens who have already registered to vote. With such a contentious presidential primary season coming up, it seems as though this may be an attempt to confuse and intimidate black voters into not showing up to the North Carolina primary. While a bill submitted by Illinois representative Rahm Emanuel in 2007 would make such misdirection obviously a crime, of utmost concern here is the extent of damage that may be caused by such fraud. To see the exact extent to which fraud can quickly change the face of an election, look no further than the allegations of fraud against Swift Boat Veterans For Truth in 2004 (cite).
While voter intimidation has always been a serious crime in the United States, only with the advent of recent communications technology has the need for prevention begun to outstrip the need for enforcement. Whereas in previous decades, the criminality of voter suppression was enough to keep most politicians and their surrogates from intimidating voters, in recent years it has now become possible for one person to suppress a large number of votes before being caught, allowing them to get their candidate elected and then “take a fall.” Thus, rather than only being concerned with voter suppression detection and prosecution, it may be wise to look into voter suppression prevention as well.
Much of this would depend upon the medium through which the suppression is being communicated, however, there may be some bundle solutions. One might be to require that any political organization registered with the government provide a degree of transparency about their actions, such as agreeing to be wiretapped. This would help to focus the fraud prevention efforts of the FEC, giving them time to catch such things as the voter registration phone calls soon after they begin.
Another possibility would be to create a committee for the sole purpose of electoral fraud detection (separate from the FEC). While this is a very cost-ineffective option, allowing a committee the ability to aggressively detect and block certain specific behaviors without a court order could dramatically decrease the amount of damage those behaviors could do.
One final way would be to dramatically increase the penalty for election fraud, so that it would be more of a deterrent to individuals who may be prepared to take a fall for their candidate. In particular, there should be no situation in which intentional voter fraud could be found a misdemeanor.
By increasing the penalty for election fraud, creating a committee not within the FEC but with the power to detect and block certain fraudulent behaviors upon seeing them, and requiring that political organizations commit to having their communications with the outside world revealed and scrutinized before things go public, it may be possible to create a fraud prevention scheme that will work in the information age.