WHETHER or not Barack Obama wins election tomorrow, his campaign has exposed some gaping weaknesses in the electoral process – and some even more serious problems with today’s mass media. The question is whether the political establishment will be willing to do anything about them.
On the electoral side, we’ve seen allegations of massive voter fraud, often backed up by actual arrests and investigations. The FBI has opened an investigation into the Obama-friendly group ACORN, which has been associated with fraudulent registrations and other misconduct in many jurisdictions.
In Indiana, CNN noted, of 5,000 registrations turned in, the first 2,000 turned out to be fraudulent. In Kansas City, officials found hundreds of bogus registrations. CNN also reported on the case of Clifton Mitchell, an ex-ACORN worker who served time in prison for voter fraud.
In Pennsylvania, ACORN worker Jemar Barksdale was arrested for voter fraud involving fake registrations. Meanwhile, the state of Ohio turned up 200,000 questionable voter registrations, but Ohio officials went to court to avoid having to respond. In Michigan, an ACORN worker has been charged with forgery. ACORN activists even tried to register Mickey Mouse to vote in Florida.
Indianapolis, meanwhile – along with some counties in Alabama and Mississippi – turned out to have more registrants than actual live voters. And in Connecticut, a group of journalism students discovered 8,500 dead people still on the rolls, people whose identities could be used to cast fraudulent ballots.
As The Post reported, ACORN also managed to register a 7-year-old girl to vote in Bridgeport, while in Nevada ACORN filed registrations in the names of Dallas Cowboys and had its offices raided by Nevada authorities. In Florida, more than 30,000 ineligible felons were registered to vote.
But it’s not just voters who are questionable. While the vote-fraud stories were running, the Obama campaign – after Obama broke a promise to stick with public financing – was setting fund-raising records and bragging about its grass-roots donations. It turned out to have a system for credit-card processing that could hardly have been better suited to enabling financial fraud.
Unlike other campaigns, Oba ma’s staff disabled the “Ad dress Verification System” that checks credit-card numbers against addresses to ensure their validity. The result was that people could make multiple donations under different names using the same card, in violation of reporting requirements and donation limits.
And there was nothing to stop foreign nationals from donating directly to the Obama campaign. As Scott Johnson noted in this newspaper, “No presidential campaign has ever before received such a gargantuan sum of money from unidentified contributors.”
An investigation by National Journal reporter Neil Munro found that the McCain campaign Web site didn’t allow anonymous donations, while the Obama Web site did.
Although there has been some coverage here and there, the response of the national press corps to these rather shocking developments has been a collective yawn. Even some Democrats are noticing. On Obama’s broken promise on public financing, former Sen. Bob Kerrey observed, “There’s a liberal bias. There’s a preference for Obama and it’s getting underreported as a result.”
Likewise, the voter-fraud sto ries are being downplayed or even spun as unimportant: A recent article in Slate was headlined “Stolen Elections: As American as Apple Pie.” (I don’t recall them taking that attitude in 2000.) And if it were the NRA, instead of ACORN, registering Mickey Mouse to vote, I suspect the reaction would be different. This election has really served to demonstrate the importance of a free, independent and honest press and how unfortunate it is that we don’t have one.
Of course, if the press weren’t in the tank for Obama, it might still face intimidation. The Obama campaign threatened the licenses of TV stations that ran an NRA ad that truthfully stated Obama’s record of supporting gun control. Obama-supporting prosecutors and sheriffs in Missouri formed a “truth squad” and – until challenged – threatened punishment against those telling “lies” about Obama. Reporters from newspapers endorsing McCain – including this one – were even booted from Obama’s campaign plane.
And Joe Wurzelbacher, better known as “Joe the Plumber,” experienced a different form of thuggishness, as his rise to prominence led to illegal background checks on state computer systems in Ohio. Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, authorized checks into his background that may have violated state law. (According to OpenSecrets.org and press reports, Jones-Kelley is an Obama donor.)
Information on Wurzelbacher was also accessed from the office of the Ohio attorney general and the Toledo Police Department.
Perhaps it’s unfair to attribute all the misconduct of Obama supporters to the Obama campaign, and it’s probably over the top to compare Obama to Hugo Chavez and warn of a “Caracas on the Potomac,” as the Washington Examiner’s Mark Tapscott did last week. But this sort of behavior does raise questions about Obama’s character and is sure to leave a bad taste.
The tragedy is that Obama would probably have done just as well – and perhaps better – if his campaign had lived up to his early claims of nice-guy nonpartisanship, instead of looking more like a dirty Chicago Machine effort. Now, if Obama wins, he’ll have to deal with a lot more resentment and suspicion. And the rest of us will have to try to push for reforms to make such abuses more difficult.
Weaknesses in the financial system that weren’t ad dressed because they benefited insiders led to the current economic crisis. It’s now clear that our political system suffers from similar weaknesses. Just as no-doc loans and dubious financial controls led to the subprime crisis – but weren’t addressed because they were making participants rich – so, too, may no-doc voting and dubious financial controls lead to a political crisis that, quite possibly, will make the financial crisis look mild. But will the political players have the backbone to address the problems before a crisis appears? So far, it looks doubtful.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and hosts “Washington Watch” on PJTV.com.