Vote Fraud! It's real -- but not the way the Republicans expected.

Whoopsy daisy! While there are all these stories going down about the new statutes various states are enacting the try to stamp out supposed voting fraud (see the Republican National Lawyers' website about voter fraud -- but be sure to read the little headlines carefully, because they are not scaring up much news about the sort of voter fraud these statutes are designed for).


Voter fraud involving individual voters seems to be pretty ephemeral and rare (just 10 cases in the last 12 years, nationwide).

Surprise!

There was vote fraud going on right here in my Massachusetts backyard.

Yup.

It's true. (Another story from local station WGBH) with more detail.

But this vote fraud shoe is on the other foot. An employee in the town clerk's office for the little town of East Longmeadow appears to have changed hundreds of residents' voter registrations from Democrat to Republican, without their request or any notice to them. Then, he issued forged ballots in these folks' names, trying to throw the Republican primary in his own favor.

This story link does not explain, but the whole sorry mess came out when the excellent staff for this clerk's opponent did some investigation after the primary ran. They were surprised at the outcome (though she did not lose, it was closer than expected). So they did some careful exploring, and found enough suspicious stuff to call in the Secretary of State. There were die-hard Democrats, members of the local party apparatus, whose voter registration was switched to Republican. When the individual voters were contacted, they had certainly not requested a switch and knew nothing about, and had not voted in the Republican primary.

Meantime, here is a helpful database about voter fraud put up and maintained by a large group of independent reporters, who have tried to verify the thousands of reports of voter fraud, and only found 10 that were actual, verifiable fraud by voters. They also include lots more great info, tracking cases, and allowing you to sort by type of fraud, or search by name.

Gary Trudeau, in his Doonesbury comic, has been riding this voter fraud/vote suppression activity hard, lampooning it and drawing devastating parallels to the Jim Crow laws we thought we had left behind with his character Jimmy Crow

.
Cartoon courtesy of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury at Slate.com

DrawCongress.org - What Non-partisan Congressional Redistricting Looks Like

Tip of the OOTJ hat to colleague Kent McKeever at Columbia. He passes along news of Columbia Law Professor Nathaniel Persily, who teaches a class in "Redistricting and Gerrymandering." His class project just came out with a website, DrawCongress.org. The students are working on an Internet depository of non-partisan maps of possible Congressional redistricting lines for every state in the Union. Prof. Persily says, and asks for feedback:

This website and associated project have three goals.

First, the project seeks to educate both the students involved and the general public about the redistricting process. We hope that the maps and redistricting plans contained there depict what is possible in the current round of redistricting and what nonpartisan plans might look like.

Second, we hope that these plans serve as a benchmark against which incumbent-drawn plans can be assessed. While not passing judgment on the plans states adopt this redistricting cycle, we hope that the plans contained there illustrate alternative paths not taken and, therefore, both the promise and potential pitfalls of nonpartisan redistricting.

Finally, for those states that fail to craft redistricting plans, this website provides ready-made legally defensible congressional plans.

Thus far, we have plans up for Virginia, New Jersey, Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Arkansas. Each posted plan includes a statewide map, individual district maps, plan statistics and reports, and a block equivalency file that can be downloaded and placed into any mapping program.

Take a look and tell me what you think......

Nathaniel Persily
Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law and
Political Science
Columbia Law School
Jerome Greene Hall
435 West 116th Street
New York, NY 10027
(917) 570-3223
nate@persily.com

I went and looked at the site. For various states, you get more than one offered redistricting plan. They are offered with notations, like
"Least Change,"
"Goo Goo" (which stands for Good Government, oddly, "that attempts to draw compact districts based on political subdivision lines, such as counties and cities," or
"Max Com" for maximum competition, creating as many districts as possible evenly split between parties,
"PR, for proportional representation, and
"Portfolio, which is a catch-all category for "a plan that attempts to harmonize two or more of the principles described above or that adheres to principles insufficiently captured by the previous categories."

The name of the student, or other author of the plan is attached to each map, which you can reach by first clicking on a "pushpin" in the U.S. map to choose a state. So far, there are only a few states finished. I can only imagine the work that goes into one of these maps. There is an explanation of the software used on the homepage, and a credit for the source of the political data, to the Harvard Election Data Archive. Cool project. Now, we'll have to see if ANY state uses it!

The image decorating this blog post is the 1812 political cartoon of the original Gerrymander, named for Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, who was attempting to re-draw voting districts to favor his own Democratic-Republican Party candidates over the Federalist party. There is some controversy over where the word first was used, but it is a portmanteau word conflating Governor Gerry's last name with "salamander," which some observers said the new district resembled. This was not the last time (and probably not the first) such shenanigans occurred trying to benefit one party over another by drawing voting district lines!