Sen. Elizabeth Dole, who is engaged in a tight and nasty fight to defend her seat against Democratic challenger Kay Hagan, told Republican supporters last night at a campaign stop in High Point that lawyers for the party have been closely monitoring early voting to ensure against fraud by college students and others.
“The General Assembly, of course, passed same-day registration,” she said. “So this is going to have to be watched very carefully, in terms of people not being brought in from California and other places who are in school, especially around this area.” She added, “The legal teams are certainly in action on this.”
Recent public opinion polls show Hagan leading Dole, while the two presidential candidates remain in a statistical dead heat. More than 88,000 people had cast early votes in Guilford County, as of last night, and registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans at the polls last Saturday by a ratio of 2.6 to 1, according to local election officials, who confirmed that college students have turned out in significant numbers to vote.
Dole’s remark at the High Point Republican Party campaign office was prompted by an interruption from Guilford County Sheriff BJ Barnes, who leaned over her shoulder during her speech and said, “Say something about protecting our ballot boxes, because that’s going to be a big issue for all of us.”
As sheriff, Barnes is one of the most prominent and powerful Republicans in elective office in Guilford County, where the county commission and board of elections are controlled by Democrats. Barnes said with both political parties mobilizing teams of lawyers across battleground states such as North Carolina, he anticipates that the outcome of the presidential contest will be unknown at the end of Election Day on Nov. 4.
“I don’t think we’re going to know who won this race on Tuesday night,” he said. “This is one of the target states. The things that have occurred with false registration, especially if this is a close race, I think you’re going to see this race being contested. I know that Obama has a cadre of lawyers, and I assume that McCain does too.”
A Guilford County Jail inmate in Barnes’ custody, Rodney Vereen, was charged with voter registration fraud on Oct. 22 after attempting to register under an alias during a drive by the League of Women Voters. The disclosure prompted the Guilford County Board of Elections to review roughly 59 voter registration forms listing addresses at the Guilford County Jail in Greensboro and the county prison farm. Deputy Election Director Charlie Collicutt said the board of elections had already flagged six applications from active felons ineligible to register and vote after cross-referencing a list provided by the NC Department of Corrections and conducting offender searches on the department website.
Dole spokesman Dan McLagan echoed the senator’s concerns about the potential for voter fraud in this election.
“Clearly, we’ve seen in other states people being registered against their own will: Mickey Mouse and the Dallas Cowboys, for instance,” he said. “When you can show up with a utility bill, register to vote and cast your ballot, it is a system begging for fraud.
“It’s not just people from out of state,” McLagan said. “Someone from in state could use this to vote multiple times, as we’ve seen in other states, with ACORN registering people using utility bills.”
Voter registration applications in North Carolina request a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. Voters who leave that information out are contacted by election officials and asked to complete their applications. State law allows them to vote by provisional ballot if their application remains incomplete, but the votes are not counted until election officials verify eligibility, typically by cross-referencing driver’s license numbers with a Division of Motor Vehicles database or checking the last four digits of Social Security numbers with an official list.
McLagan dismissed the state’s procedure of verifying registrations with driver’s license and Social Security numbers as insufficient to deter fraud.
“Identity theft,” he said. “Someone else’s Social Security number is fairly easy to obtain online, [by] rifling through people’s mail — any number of ways.”
Barnes also questioned whether the verification process is sufficient to prevent ineligible voters from casting their ballots, citing the contested 2004 Guilford County Commission election between Democrat John Parks and Republican Trudy Wade, which was ultimately decided in Parks’ favor after the courts ruled that provisional ballots should be counted.
“Trudy Wade paid for an investigator to go look at those provisional ballots,” he said. “Provisional ballots, as you know, are cast by people who are not on the rolls. Provisional ballots made the difference in that race. In some cases, the houses didn’t exist, the registrants didn’t exist.”
Don Wright, general counsel for the NC Board of Elections, bristled at the Dole campaign’s suggestion that the state’s election system is vulnerable to fraud.
“To the best of my knowledge, nobody from the Republican Party or the Dole campaign ever discussed any concern about voter fraud with the state board of elections,” he said. “The provisions as to providing a driver’s license number or a Social Security number come from [the Help America Vote Act], which was passed by Congress and signed by President Bush in 2002. The type of documents that can be presented to prove residence also come from HAVA.”
Bob Hall, executive director of the non-partisan election watchdog organization Democracy North Carolina, questioned whether Dole understands North Carolina law. He noted that a student from out of state who attends college in Guilford County may legally register and vote in North Carolina.
He added that “having people come before a government official and swear under penalty of a felony that they are who they say they are and that they live at the address they say they do” provides a significant safeguard to the integrity of the election system. Citing the controversy surrounding the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, Hall said the number of illegitimate applications the organization turned has turned in to election officials was relatively small, and “there’s no evidence that anyone voted.”
“It sounds like a desperate lashing around, looking for a bogeyman,” Hall said of the Dole campaign. “She needs to present evidence for such a significant charge. It does sound like an attempt just to question the voting process with no real basis.”
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