False alarm on voter fraud

There are few things more important to a functioning democracy than a reliable roster of people registered to vote, and then using that list to ensure that only those people actually cast ballots come Election Day.

That's why registration fraud is such serious business, and why local registrars spend so much time, effort and money protecting the rolls. If a list of voters isn't clean, an election can't be trusted.

In the past couple of years, intensive registration drives - often under the auspices of an advocacy group, and often targeting urban areas - have run afoul of registrars here and elsewhere in Virginia. Norfolk registrar Elisa Long, for example, was accused of being too vigilant in 2005 when she tossed out thousands of applications containing errors.

There have been irregularities in paperwork, and even some allegations of worse. That's a threat to the very democracy we hold dear, but so is an overreaction to the problem.

Which makes the overheated outcry from the Republican Party of Virginia's director every bit as dangerous as the "coordinated and widespread effort to commit voter fraud" he claims to have discovered.

Del. Jeff Frederick, a partisan warrior from Prince William, has called for a statewide investigation. To his credit, Attorney General Bob McDonnell wouldn't bite and said the investigations are properly handled by local prosecutors.

Frederick's clamor is suspicious for any number of reasons, not least because 147,000 new voters have registered in the first half of the year, many of them presumably young and presumably motivated by a desire to vote for Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, whose presidential campaign is actively registering people.

The RPV chairman's panic wasn't merely confined to the state of democracy in Virginia. Frederick wanted to scare people, potential registrants, as well: "People need to be aware that identity theft is an issue," he said, a fact that came as news to registrars.

Those are the people with the responsibility for ensuring that only eligible voters are in the ballot box. The recent cases in which they've detected irregularities, in fact, argue that they're doing their jobs quite well.

Frederick's fear-mongering has a very specific cause: The Republican Party of Virginia, eclipsed in a series of electoral losses, is worried by the kind of people registering to vote. The groups guilty of registering voters, Frederick said, were nothing more than "a front for leftist causes."

Ah.

In other words, it's not the potential voter fraud that rankles; it's the potential that those voters won't support Republicans. If you're not winning at the ballot box, try your chances in the registrar's office, or in court. Hardly democratic.

Frederick's performance at the press conference Monday made it clear that his goal first and foremost is to suppress voter registration that may be hurting his party's chances. Attempts to keep Americans from voting has been a tactic of party operatives for generations, although usually they are subtler and more effective than Frederick's.