During a recent 20-day period, over 1,700 voters took themselves off of the registration rolls in Florida alone. Political experts believe this is a result of media attention to the issue and promulgation of many extreme conspiracy’s leaving some uncomfortable with having their information in the public domain.
Voter fraud itself is a very complex and difficult issue to approach. The likelihood of its occurrence, however, is extremely high. The question to be answered by the President’s commission, hopefully, is to what extent has voter fraud contributed to election results in the past and exactly how does it occur.
One contributing factor to this difficulty is our country’s uniquely decentralized elections. Each state handles and counts its own elections.
In Florida alone, there are 67 counties. Each county has a local elections office, usually manned by an elected Supervisor of Elections. Some supervisors are allowed to be partisan, others not. Some counties, like Miami-Dade, have more voting sites than other counties, like Taylor. Some voting sites use electronic ballots which transmit data automatically to a counter in another location, others store it in a memory card that must be hand-delivered to the Supervisor.
