Messin' with ballots: no matter what Democrats now say, voter fraud is real.

ON April 15, a New York Times editorial declared that concerns about voter fraud--concerns that lay behind the Bush administration's firings of some U.S. attorneys--are a "fantasy." The Justice Department has investigated fraud allegations for five years, the Times wrote, and "has not turned up any evidence that voter fraud is actually a problem." The Bush White House was not only wrong to be worried about some prosecutors' less-than-enthusiastic pursuit of fraud allegations, the paper concluded, it was wrong to be worried at all about such a non-issue.

It was an extraordinary position for the Times, given that, two years earlier, the paper commended a group of Ohio lawyers who went to court alleging that the Bush campaign had engaged in massive voter fraud in the 2004 presidential election. The lawyers accused the Bush team of engaging in a variety of illegal acts, including a scheme in which top political strategist Karl Rove was said to have personally hacked into Ohio's electronic voting system, erasing thousands of Democratic votes. The lawyers had no evidence to support their allegations--the Times conceded that--but the paper said they had performed a "public service" by making the charges, because they had raised "concerns that many voters shared."

The Times's change of heart is by no means unique on the left. A few days before the 2004 election, Markos Moulitsas, the influential Democratic blogger/activist, warned about a "nationwide" wave of voter fraud. The day after the election, another influential Democratic blogger/activist, Josh Marshall, advised John Kerry not to concede, because "this whole contest has been too dirty, too marred with voter suppression, dirty tricks and other unspeakable antics not to press every last possibility [of challenging the results]." Lately, however, both Moulitsas and Marshall have railed repeatedly about the "bogus" issue of voter fraud.

What's going on? After all its worries about Ohio in 2004--and before that, Florida in 2000--why has the Left decided that voter fraud simply doesn't exist? The short answer is: It's useful. In 2000 and 2004, charging voter fraud was a useful way to question the legitimacy of George W. Bush's presidency. Now, in 2007, denying the existence of voter fraud is a useful way to question the legitimacy of George W. Bush's presidency. If the other guys are accused of doing it, they say, it's a scandal; if we're accused of doing it, it's a fantasy.

The only problem is, voter fraud is a problem. It was a problem when Democrats were touting it, and it's a problem now when Democrats are denying it, and it will remain a problem in the future. Three examples from recent years are enough to prove that concerns about voter fraud are not a fantasy, but a distinct reality.

* St. Louis, 2000-2001. It would be an understatement to call conditions at the polls in St. Louis chaotic during the 2000 presidential election. With voters' rolls a shambles, would-be voters crowded polling places, so much so that Democrats convinced a judge to order the polls to stay open three hours after the specified closing time. Republicans dashed to court and got another judge to order them closed after only 45 minutes' additional voting. The extension alone was not evidence of fraud, but a few months later, as the city was gearing up for a mayoral election, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch found that one in ten voters registered in St. Louis were also registered somewhere else. All those registrations made for some eye-popping totals. "The number of registered voters threatens to outnumber the voting age population," wrote Sen. Christopher Bond (R., Mo.) in a Washington Post op-ed. "A total of 247,135 St. Louis residents, dead or alive, are registered to vote compared with the city's voting-age population of 258,532. That translates to a whopping 96 percent registration rate, the envy of even Pyongyang."

Then there were the 3,000 voter-registration cards submitted by Democratic groups on the last day voters could register for the mayoral primary. A number of them turned out to be for dead people. One registered voter was a dog named Ritzy. Mayor Clarence Harmon--a Democrat--told the Associated Press that voter fraud is "widespread and insidious in the body politic." "This is a little river town that's got a very bad history of very bad election fraud," Harmon said. "If we don't straighten out this fundamental issue, what's going to happen to us?"

After the election, Bond produced a thick dossier of irregularities entitled "St. Louis Election Fraud: A Primer." He blamed many of the problems on the Clinton-era "motor voter" law, which loosened requirements for voter registration. But his proposals for reform faced determined opposition from Democratic officials led by Missouri representative William Lacy Clay. In the end, a compromise was reached, with better voting machines and registration standards. But in St. Louis, the next voting scandal is only an election away.

* South Dakota, 2002. The race between Democratic senator Tim Johnson and Republican challenger John Thune was always close, even before we learned that Johnson defeated Thune by just 524 votes. Then we learned that people were allowed to vote without identification; that out-of-state attorneys brought in by the Democratic party coached voters at the polls; and that those lawyers, in effect, engaged in illegal electioneering by setting up get-out-the-vote offices at the polls. Then there was the woman whom the state Democratic party paid $2 for each new voter she signed up on the state's Indian reservations. She made almost $13,000, much of it from suspicious signatures. She was charged with forgery, but the case fell apart when a state expert witness suggested that all the people who said their names had been signed--not one of them, not two of them, but all of them--were lying. Baffled state officials dropped the case, and it all ended in a murky mess.

* Washington State, 2004. The governor's race between Democrat Christine Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi was among the closest ever: Gregoire won by 129 votes out of 2.8 million cast. Various early counts showed Rossi winning by 261 votes, and then by 42 votes, and then, finally, the balance tipping slightly to Gregoire. A race that tight, and that important, was going to receive a lot of scrutiny, and subsequent investigations revealed lots of problems.

For example, in King County alone, officials found 1,800 more votes than people who had signed in at polling stations. They also found hundreds of provisional votes that were counted as regular votes. They also found dozens of examples of that old favorite, dead voters. After the controversy, state officials did a first-ever examination of the voting rolls and in 2006 announced that they had deleted 55,000 registrations.

That figure included 19,579 names of people who were dead and 35,445 otherwise illegal registrations. A little later, state officials purged another 848 names from the voting rolls--all were felons found to be illegally on lists of eligible voters.

St. Louis, South Dakota, and Washington State. If you want more examples, you can add the phony names that were registered to vote in Ohio, the dead who voted in Milwaukee, and a long list of election tricks in Louisiana. Not all those cases resulted in criminal prosecutions. And not all the prosecutions resulted in guilty verdicts or pleas. But each case was serious enough to warrant investigation. And each revealed significant problems in the voting systems of various states. And, of course, fraud does not have to be terribly widespread to affect elections that are decided by 524 or 129 votes.

In other words, voter fraud is a real concern. It is difficult to pursue, and difficult to prove. But it's not a fantasy. Ritzy the dog could tell you that.