Omahan tests voting system, obtains two Election Day ballots

WASHINGTON — Omaha business owner Joel Alperson knew he was taking a risk when he showed up at his polling place twice on Election Day and obtained two ballots, even though he cast just one.

The 54-year-old says he undertook the exercise to demonstrate vulnerabilities in the voting system and the potential for fraud.

Nebraska election officials characterized his experience as an anomaly, saying cases of voter fraud remain rare.

But his story offers a peek into the arguments that will surround renewed debate over whether to require the state’s voters to show identification when they go to the polls.

Alperson’s plan started to form when he noticed during the 2008 election that he was listed twice on the voter rolls. One listing included his middle initial while the other didn’t, but both listed his correct address.

The dual listing added fuel to his longstanding worries about the potential for voter fraud, so he decided to test the system.

He stopped by his polling place, Skutt High School, shortly before 9 a.m. on Nov. 6 and voted. He said he went back late in the afternoon, walked up to the same poll worker and asked for a ballot under the other listing.

The woman didn’t recognize him from earlier in the day, he said, but she did notice the two names with identical addresses. She asked if this was a case of a father and son sharing the same name.

Cousins, he told her, and received the second ballot.

He stepped back into the voting booth but decided to walk out with the ballot so he would have proof of what happened.

“I don’t think I could have made it any more obvious that I was doing this, and yet even under those circumstances I was able to go and get two ballots,” Alperson told The World-Herald. “It left me to wonder — had I been registered five times, how many times could I have shown up before somebody would have said, ‘Wait a minute, this guy is pulling something?’”

Election commission records confirm Alperson was on the voter rolls twice, and the official log from the polling place shows Alperson came in twice and received ballots at 8:41 a.m. and at 5:21 p.m. He said he signed the book both times, although election officials said their records show only one signature.

Alperson, while acknowledging the lack of clarity about how often voter fraud takes place, said his experience demonstrates that the door is open for it. Hotly contested elections will only increase the temptation for people to experiment, he said, and requiring IDs is an easy fix.

State Sen. Charlie Janssen of Fremont is taking another stab at just such a requirement, re-introducing legislation last week that would require Nebraska voters to show a government-issued ID when they go to the polls.

Opponents of Legislative Bill 381 will be assembling the same coalition that defeated last year’s bill, said Adam Morfeld, director of Nebraskans for Civic Reform.

“What are we protecting?” he said. “There’s no problem that this bill would solve. … The only person that doesn’t seem to acknowledge that is Sen. Janssen.”

The bill would throw up real barriers to voting for the poor, the disabled, seniors and students, Morfeld said.

After all, students frequently move in and out of dorms, so their IDs are almost never valid, and many elderly people stop updating their licenses because they don’t drive anymore, he said.

Janssen pointed to a 2012 report by the Pew Charitable Trusts that found 24 million U.S. voter registrations, or 1 out of 8, are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate. That report also found 1.8 million dead people listed as voters and 2.75 million people registered in more than one state.

“When you make it that easy, I think your head’s buried in the sand if you think it’s not happening,” Janssen said.

Janssen questioned how those who insist fraud isn’t occurring could possibly know. Of course election officials would downplay the possibility of voter fraud, he said, because anything else would reflect badly on them.

“It’s their job to ensure the integrity of the elections,” Janssen said.

In Alperson’s case, Nebraska and Douglas County election officials said the duplicate listings resulted from his submitting a new registration in 2004 and writing his birth year as 1968 instead of 1958 (although he correctly listed his age). The duplicate registrations were not flagged, in part, because of the different birth years, they said.

Deputy Nebraska Secretary of State for Elections Neal Erickson said that duplicates do sometimes get into the system when there are errors in the data entry — when they are “fat fingered” — but that officials conduct regular checks to weed them out.

Douglas County Election Commissioner Dave Phipps called duplicates rare and said it was “the first time in almost 10 years that I’ve been here that we’ve ever seen anything like that.”

Officially, his office is neutral on voter ID proposals.

With an ID requirement, Phipps said, you’ll have poll workers making individual judgments that determine whether someone gets to exercise the right to vote. For example, what if someone’s driver’s license address is different from their voter registration?

It also could mean higher costs and longer waits in line for all who vote.

“Poll workers have enough stuff to do, and that’s just one more thing to try to process,” he said.

Proponents of voter ID laws cite a 1984 grand jury report in New York that found evidence of concerted voter fraud operations, including the creation of fictitious voters and the impersonation of dead people and other voters. The report found, in some cases, participation by election officials.

Opponents say that the tactics used in those cases would be tougher to pull off today and that there’s little evidence of their continued use.

A recent nationwide analysis by an investigative journalism project at Arizona State University found that the rate of voter fraud in the U.S. since 2000 was tiny and that cases of voter impersonation in that period were “virtually non-existent.”

Of 2,068 reported cases of alleged election fraud nationwide since 2000, only 10 involved voter impersonation and none of the 10 occurred in Nebraska or Iowa.

The project assembled a database that showed two alleged voter fraud cases in Nebraska since 2000. In one case, a man being paid by an organization to register voters pleaded guilty to creating fictitious registrations. The other involved a felon who tried to register before it was allowed. That case was dismissed.

The database showed 49 alleged cases of voter fraud in Iowa, including instances when felons tried to vote.

Michael McDonald, associate professor of government at George Mason University, said that occasional opportunities for voter fraud exist but that most people realize the potential penalties they would face and don’t want to risk it.

“To do this in sort of a systematic way, for people to steal elections on a large scale, this isn’t going to happen,’ he said. “If this was sort of a widespread problem, someone would have detected it.”

Voting more than once in the same election is a felony. Alperson said he never cast that second ballot.

Still, unauthorized removal of a ballot from the polling room is a misdemeanor.

It remains to be seen whether Alperson will face charges.

He said he considered the possibility of legal consequences. But, to him, the case for voter ID is strong, particularly given how many less important acts require showing identification.

“I thought this was worth whatever — I’m guessing — minimal risk was involved to try and make a point,” he said.

World-Herald staff writer Roseann Moring contributed to this report.

Contact the writer: 202-630-4823, [email protected]