2000 Voter Fraud A Decidedly Nonpartisan Offense

If it were up to the District of Columbia government, I'd be a registered D.C. voter. That sounds reasonable, except for this: I'm a Canadian citizen. Nevertheless, when I moved into the district and signed up for a D.C. driver's license, I was invited under the Clinton administration's "motor voter" law to register to vote. To get the license, I needed to produce proof of residencyÊ--Êin my case, the deed to my house. To get the vote, I wasn't asked for anything at all. If I had not told the registrar myself of my ineligibility, the permanent Democratic majority in the nation's capital would have been shaved by one.

Keep that story in mind as Democratic lawyers argue that absentee ballots in Seminole County should be discarded because Republican officials filled in incomplete information by hand on their registered voters' ballot applications. (The Democrats had done the same thing by preprinting their voters' applications and then sending the application to the voters for them to mail in.)

According to the Miami Herald, at least 445 disqualified felons cast ballots in Palm Beach County. An unknown but substantial number of non-citizens appear to have voted in Miami-Dade: The "motor voter" law that nearly enfranchised me seems to have succeeded in enfranching many hundreds of thousands of other non-naturalized aliens nationwide.

In 1996, Vice President Al Gore oversaw a hasty naturalization program that added 1 million aliens to the voter rolls before their criminal records could be checked. After the election, it turned out that at least 18,000 of them had been convicted of crimes that made them ineligible for citizenship.

Voting by non-naturalized citizens appears to occur most often in California: In 1996 in Orange County, Democrat Loretta Sanchez upset Republican Bob Dornan in a congressional race in which activist Hispanic organizations conducted registration drives among non-citizens. But other kinds of fraud occur nationwide. In northeastern cities, candidates pay "walking around" money to precinct leaders to distribute to potential supporters. In St. Louis only this year, municipal Democrats kept the polls open longer than permitted by state law, helping the Democratic ticket to rack up the votes it needed to offset Republican majorities in the rest of the state. And of course the last Miami mayoral election was overturned in the courts because absentee ballot fraud corrupted the results.

Now of course it's possible that some of these improperly registered people vote Republican. But the vast preponderance support the Democrats: In fact, 80 percent of the 445 vote-casting Palm Beach County felons were registered as Democrats.

For the last month, Gore supporters have complained that the antiquated voting machinery in the country's most strongly Democratic counties and cities may have cost their man the election. Quite possibly that's true. But it's also true that this same antiquated machinery -- and the lax procedures that govern the use of that machineryÊ--Êaids the voter fraud that in years past Democratic candidates have exploited.

This election proves that America needs new voting machines. But the country also needs a new voting ethic, one more intolerant of fraud, chicanery and illegality. It should not be regarded as a civil rights offense -- as it now is -- for voting officials to demand identification and proof of citizenship at the polling place. Vote-buying should not be shrugged off as some romantic legacy of the 19th century: It should be investigated and prosecuted. Local officials who refuse to cooperate with state programs to purge the voter rolls of ineligible votersÊ--Êas the Palm Beach County Democrats refusedÊ--Êshould be liable for prosecution.

In the meantime, every Democrat who appears on the cable chat shows to express shock about the infractions of Seminole County should be asked to explain how he managed to contain his outrage about voter fraud in years past.

Nobody has alleged any fraud in Seminole. Nobody has alleged that the people who voted were ineligible to vote or that they were paid to vote or that they did not cast their ballots themselves. Compared with the Democratic counties of FloridaÊ--Êand the nationÊ--ÊSeminole looks as clean as Switzerland.