How Voter Fraud Works

Dave Brockington at Lawyers, Guns and Money gets to the real question nobody ever asks:

... they never question just why in hell somebody would fraudulently vote.  As a student of voter behavior in general with a sub specialty in turnout, I can list at length how the costs associated with voting far outweigh whatever tangible benefits one might accrue.  One has to navigate registration, polling locations, the hours the poling location is open, let alone being in possession of both the internal and external efficacy such that you’re confident in your decision, and that decision will make one iota of difference.  As one who studies and teaches this, it’s amazing to me that so many do vote to begin with.

Why bother to do it twice?  If one is unemployed and has nothing to do with their day, perhaps $20, $50, $100 will get me onto a bus from Chicago (and we all know what type of person lives in Chicago) for a day out up to Wisconsin.  Then you have to ask, for whom is it worth to spend that much money.  The sheer number of fraudulent votes necessary to tip an election such as the Wisconsin recall is not one here, another there, a busload up yonder.  It would have taken 171,106 votes added to the Democratic tally to swing it — to a recount.  Best add another 50,000 to ensure a recount doesn’t happen, as we wouldn’t want this fraud coming to light.  That’s 220,000 voters.  At $20 per fraudulent voter, “labor” costs alone are $4,400,000.  If it costs $100 for a person to give up their day, break the law, and experience both Wisconsin and the interstates, a cool $22,000,000 is required to replace a Republican with a Democrat in Wisconsin.

Then there’s transport.  It would require 2,445 sorties of a Blue Bird All American school bus to transport our wave of nefarious democracy from Chicago to Wisconsin, if packed to their capacity of 90.  I have no idea what it costs to rent, fuel, and provide a driver for one of these, but this cost is not insubstantial.  And don’t forget lunch; in the classic tradition of GOTV, we should feed our anti-democratic legions.

Let’s review.  We need a population of 220,000 people willing to give up their day, knowingly commit a crime, for some modest financial remuneration.  We require the infrastructure to transport them.  And food.

Basically, we need a hell of a lot of money to pull this off.

 It's not that in-person voter fraud is vanishingly rare; it's that it's Just. Fucking. Impossible.

And yet this utter fantasy, as ridiculous as pigs flying, is the solemnly-accepted excuse for disenfranching millions of American citizens.

And the insidious part is that, as Brockington says, we'll never know what actual effect massive voter suppression has on the election.