Weekly Watchdog

August 16, 2012

Voter Fraud Infinitesimal: 1 out of 15 million voters

The Center for Public Integrity launched a new series of reports this week called "Who Can Vote?" The series was produced by a national investigative reporting project involving 24 students from 11 universities called News21. They set out to determine if the new voter identification requirements at the polls will disenfranchise prospective voters among minorities, college students and the elderly. Their conclusion is that new voter ID laws fix a problem that does not exist.

The students analyzed 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases since 2000. Their analysis shows that while fraud has occurred, the rate is infinitesimal, and in-person voter impersonation on Election Day, which prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider tough voter ID laws, is virtually non-existent.

In an exhaustive public records search, News21 reporters sent thousands of requests to elections officers in all 50 states, asking for every case of fraudulent activity. Analysis of the resulting election fraud database turned up 10 cases of voter impersonation. With 146 million registered voters in the United States during that time, those 10 cases represent one out of about every 15 million prospective voters.

Secretive group airs last-minute Wisconsin attack ad

Despite a torrent of negative attacks, former four-term Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson has won the Wisconsin's Republican U.S. Senate primary for the open seat of retiring incumbent Democratic Sen. Herb Kohl.

Thompson beat wealthy hedge fund manager Eric Hovde, who himself was hurt by a misleading ad in the final week of the contest. Former Rep. Mark Neumann also trailed Thompson by a wider margin. Both candidates enjoyed pockets of support among tea party activists.

Roughly $3.4 million was spent by super PACs, nonprofits and other independent groups advocating for the election or defeat of Senate candidates in the Badger State. About three-fourths was for harsh attacks, mainly focused on Thompson and Hovde, whose poll numbers surged toward the end of the race.

An anti-Hovde $650,000 attack ad paid for by the nonprofit group Americans for Job Security may have helped Thompson. Hovde called the ad "patently false" and threatened legal action. The group altered the ad, called "Says and Does," after the protest. The group is a nonprofit so the identity of who paid for it is unknown. Thompson's victory came despite being outraised by his opponents.

GOP Ads Promote Ryan as Veep Choice

Republicans wasted no time in pumping up Mitt Romney's choice as vice presidential running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., touting the GOP's new dynamic duo as "America's Comeback Team," as reported by The Center for Public Integrity's Daily Disclosure.

The Republican National Committee released a short video "Big Solutions" that exudes positivity, featuring a sunrise, uplifting music and inspiring quotes from Romney and Ryan during Saturday's surprise announcement in Virginia. A conservative nonprofit group, American Future Fund, also got in on the action, releasing "Comeback Team" which unflatteringly splices together remarks from Vice President Joe Biden.

Unions have also stepped up their spending. Workers' Voice, the super PAC of the AFL-CIO, is going on the offensive with a series of direct mail and online advertisements attacking the presumptive GOP presidential ticket of Romney and Ryan.

Meanwhile, in his weekly opinion column, health care whistle blower Wendell Potter analyzed Ryan's proposal to replace Medicare with a system in which beneficiaries would receive a set amount of money from the government every year to buy coverage from private insurers.

The Center for Public Integrity

The Center for Public Integrity is, once again, The Center for Public Integrity.

Beginning next week, you'll find us at back home at www.publicintegrity.org.

If you've been with us for some time, then you know that last spring, as part of a new business plan that included a top-to-bottom redesign of our website, we also gave ourselves a new digital address - www.iwatchnews.org.

That sounded good at the time and looked good on paper, but it never quite fit us. And, frankly, it led to some confusion about who we are - which is and always has been The Center for Public Integrity, one of the country's oldest and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organizations.

Whatever our address, you know us from the investigative work we do and impact we have. Many of our investigations not only have won some of the most prestigious awards in journalism, they have also produced concrete results:

- Just last year we helped spur the U.S. Department of Education to change rules on how colleges address sexual assault.

- Our Looting the Seas series on global overfishing has helped lower quotas for Atlantic blue fin tuna, started government investigations in Europe, and called attention to rampant over fishing of the lowly jack mackerel in the Southern Pacific.

- And just a few weeks ago Federal regulators assembled a team of lawyers and experts to figure out how to bolster coal mine dust enforcement given the systemic weakness revealed by our investigation into the resurgence of black lung.

By returning to our given name we're taking the confusion out of who we are and reaffirming our mission: To enhance democracy by revealing abuses of power, corruption and betrayal of trust by powerful public and private institutions, using the tools of investigative journalism.

Until next week,