Balance between voter rights, fraud way out of whack

Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel and the U.S. Justice Department are bickering over Handel’s efforts to keep noncitizens out of the voting booth.

Last week, the feds ruled that Handel’s approach unfairly affects minority voters and discourages their participation. Handel returned fire, accusing the Justice Department of opening the door for “activist organizations such as ACORN to register noncitizens to vote.”

Rhetoric aside, the conflict is deeper and more important than a battle between agencies. At root, it’s a conflict between two widely supported principles:

1.) Every U.S. citizen has the constitutional right to vote and to have that vote counted.

2.) Allowing noncitizens to vote illegally dilutes the value of ballots cast by citizens.

In a perfect world, those principles should not conflict. But under Handel’s approach, they do. As a side effect of her plan to keep noncitizens from voting, it is undeniable that a number of U.S. citizens have had their votes invalidated for no reason.

Is that trade-off acceptable? Maybe. For most people, it’s a question of balance. If illegal voting by noncitizens occurs often enough to threaten the legitimacy of elections —- particularly if it was being organized for that purpose, as some believe —- then it absolutely would be justified, even necessary, to introduce safeguards to protect the sanctity of the ballot, even if those safeguards risk barring a few legitimate voters as well.

However, Handel’s program doesn’t come close to hitting that balance. By every indication, the number of noncitizens attempting to vote in Georgia is so small as to be almost nonexistent. Handel’s office can document just one case in the entire state.

According to Deputy Secretary of State Rob Simms, the state is also investigating more than 30 other possible instances of noncitizen voting in last fall’s election. However, he refused to offer even the most general information about those cases. Given that no charges have been filed in the seven months since November, it’s hard to know how seriously to take them.

On the other hand, the evidence is overwhelming that the program set up by Handel has discouraged the casting and counting of hundreds and even thousands of legitimate votes.

Under the system, names on state voting lists are compared against data compiled by the state Department of Driver Services, including citizenship status. But because DDS data are often outdated or incorrectly entered —- the drivers licensing system was not designed for determining citizenship —- thousands of legal voters have been tagged as potential noncitizens.

By last fall, the system had identified 4,700 possible noncitizens on state voting rolls. Those 4,700 registered voters were told that if they wanted to vote, they had to take the additional step of going to their county seat to prove their citizenship.

Two thousand registered voters did make that extra effort; 2,700 did not. However, 600 of those 2,700 later showed up on Election Day and were told to cast a “challenge ballot.” To ensure their vote counted, they were told to return with evidence of citizenship within 48 hours.

Of that 600, 370 did take the extra step to make sure their ballot was counted; 230 did not, and their votes were discarded.

Those 230 were almost certainly legitimate voters who just didn’t bother. It is a federal crime —- punishable by deportation, among other things —- to vote as a noncitizen. So it is hard to believe that 230 noncitizens would risk deportation by daring to try to vote even after they had been officially notified that their legal status was in question.

In addition, if the secretary of state’s office truly believed that those 230 were illegal voters, it would be investigating and prosecuting them. The political bonanza of busting such a large-scale attempt at illegal voting would be enormous. Tellingly, it has made no attempt to do so.

The same is true of the 2,100 Georgians who had registered to vote but who didn’t take the time to clear the additional barrier of proving citizenship.

If state officials truly believed that a significant number of those 2,100 were illegal voters, they would be duty-bound to investigate and prosecute. They are not doing so.

So, casting the state’s policy in the best possible light, Handel’s approach may have found as many as 30 illegal voters. But that is far outweighed by the invalidation of hundreds of legal votes cast by U.S. citizens, and by the fact that thousands of additional citizens were effectively discouraged from voting by additional obstacles put in their way.

Jay Bookman, an Opinion columnist, writes Tuesday and Friday.