A post last week on Bond Papers brought attention to the prospect of vote fraud in the upcoming municipal election in St. John's owing to the vote-by-mail system being used.
Unfortunately, city officials have apparently neglected to provide any measures to discourage, prevent, detect or otherwise eliminate vote fraud.
A story in the Sunday Telegram by Terry Roberts quotes Neil Martin, the City Clerk, as saying that city officials assume everyone will be honest and that there is no way to prevent vote fraud. Since the story isn't available online, I'll try and get a copy of it and post the story here.
Martin is quoted as saying: "We have to trust that people will do what's correct. If we assume there will be corruption, then there's not much we can do."
According to Martin, "We [city officials] are as prudent as we can be. We're ensuring the voter's list is entirely up to date. The ballot is mailed to the person on the list, that person signs and sends us back the voter declaration form, along with the ballot."
At no point did Martin indicate how city officials will ensure that the vote returned was actually cast by the person to whom it was mailed. Nor is there any indication of how the city is ensuring its voter list does not include people who are no longer qualified to vote or who have died.
The Bond Papers' contention that vote fraud was a possibility in St. John's can now be changed to vote fraud is a probability.
It's not as though vote fraud is a rare thing.
The last provincial general election included allegations of voting irregularities in the mail-in ballot system used.
As this British Broadcasting Corporation story reports, electoral fraud in the 2004 Birmingham municipal contest was of such a nature that a judicial inquiry declared the whole election invalid. The link to a BBC video news report on the BBC site describes the electoral fraud in greater detail. The entire scheme involved as few as 1, 500 votes in a municipality with a larger population than the whole of Newfoundland and Labrador. That was enough to skew the entire result, however.
Part of the concern expressed by the Birmingham investigation was that the vote envelopes were so easy to identify that one could not make them more inviting by writing "Steal Me" in bold letters across the front of the package. Ballot envelopes were reportedly taken from postal workers and from household letter boxes, brought to a couple of locations and then completed and returned.
The same situation can easily exist in St. John's, and as the city clerk admits, there were reports in 2001 of ballots laying about in hallways of apartment buildings throughout the city. No one knows where those ballots went or if they were cast. The city cannot tell if they were cast or not, even though the vote-by-mail system is touted as having produced a 10% increase in voter participation compared to the previous general election. That increase in participation coupled with the supposed cash savings to the city are the two reasons given by city officials for going to a completely mail-in vote system.
Any election may be subject to attempts at fraudulent voting. In this instance fraud is taken to mean:
- voting by someone not entitled to vote;
- submission of multiple votes by the same individual (in a one person/one vote system); or,
- removal of ballots in order to discourage voting.
Electoral systems across North America take active measures to prevent voter fraud and preventing fraud is a key part of preserving the legitimacy of the entire electoral process. In a system where the right to govern derives from attaining a majority or plurality of individual votes, voters must have confidence that the system is as free as possible from fraud.
In the State of Oregon, which successfully conducted an entire state-wide election using vote-by-mail, the state government has implemented simple mechanisms using available technology to ensure that each mail-in ballot is cast legally.
By contrast, the City of St. John's has produced an electoral system in which a city official now admits City Hall is completely unconcerned with the prospect of fraud.
Consider the numbers and the realities.
There are approximately 79, 000 eligible voters in the City of St. John's, according to Martin. Given death and the mobility of people in a growing city, it is reasonable to assume approximately 10% of the list will be changed for this election from the previous one.
For a concrete example, consider that both my elderly grandparents passed away since the last general election. The city's list may miss them out. If they receive ballots, count on them being intercepted by my parents who will ensure the ballots are destroyed or returned to City officials unopened.
Others may not be so scrupulous.
Of course, even if the City of St. John's actually has a completely accurate voter list that eliminates all dead people, they still cannot ensure that ballots will not be stolen and cast by someone other than the legitimate voter.
The City Clerk may point to the signature on the returned ballot as some proof of legitimacy. Unfortunately, he has no way of comparing signatures to ensure that the one sent back is from the correct person. That's the system Oregon uses and the one Martin dismisses as being too costly.
In Oregon, the state government funds a process of voter registration and many community organizations and political parties assist in voter registration at no cost to taxpayers. After all, it's in their interest to ensure the system works properly and such a system promotes voter involvement - supposedly one of the goals of the St. John's system. There is no reason to believe such a system couldn't work in St. John's to help ensure the voting system is free of corruption.
The City's system would work to eliminate fraud only if there was 100% participation. In that system, any duplicate ballots and signatures could be easily detected.
Here's the rub: the actual participation rate is now only 60%. City officials can still attain what the Telegram reports as their goal of 75% participation rate in this election, but the increase could be the result of people sending in ballots solely from the residents of the city who are too disinterested to bother to replace a stolen ballot.
To understand the importance of eliminating fraud, consider this: with about 79, 000 eligible voters, 10% to 15% would mean that between 7, 900 and 11, 850 ballots could be fraudulently returned, achieving the desired increase in participation albeit illegally.
Flip over to the City of St. John's website and take a look at the returns for the last election.
- Only 6, 000 more votes would have put Vince Withers in the mayor's chair.
- About the same number of votes put Gerry Colbert in the deputy mayor's chair. His rival was Sandy Gibbons.
- In Ward 1, Art Puddister won by only 1400 votes or so.
- In Ward 4, Kevin Breen took his seat with only a couple of thousand more votes than his nearest rival.
- At large, Tom Hann and Geoff Peters were only a couple of thousand votes behind either Sandy Hickman (who won the by-election) and Dorothy Wyatt.
Of course, the vote-by-mail system actually isn't about fair and legitimate elections. Its official purpose is to get a result as cheaply as possible.
According to the Telegram, the city has budgeted a little under $400, 000 for the election with the bulk of the costs being eaten up by postage.
Although polling day (the date for final receipt of ballots) is September 27th, city officials expect that upwards of 95% of the total ballots cast will be returned within 10 days of their being mailed out on September 9th.
For those who are good at math, that means the election will effectively be over a week before polling day, at the latest.
The city's election system will produce results at a lower cost than traditional forms of voting, but the question remains what the cost will be to democracy.