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If you believe Kootenai County Clerk Dan English, there is little or no “wholesale fraud” going on in Kootenai County elections.  English would have you believe he runs such a tight election operation that it would have been next to impossible for someone to fraudulently change the outcome of the November 3, 2009, Coeur d’Alene city election.  If so, he’s naive or deceptive.  Neither trait is desirable in the county’s chief elections officer.  To get an idea of what is possible, I suggest you download and print this diagram.  Then, read on.  

On November 3, 2009, the City of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, held an election for mayor and three city council positions.  The City contracted with the Kootenai County Clerk Dan English’s office for the administration of that election.  The outcome of the election was the incumbent for City Council Seat number 2 received 5 more votes than the challenger out of 6,325 votes cast.   In the election for City Council Seat number 6 with 6,263 votes cast, the incumbent received 29 more votes than the challenger.  The City of Coeur d’Alene has 28 precincts with a total of 26,880 registered voters.  There were a total of 7,386 ballots cast in the City election.

Meeting all requirements prescribed by Idaho Code, a qualified elector filed an election contest to challenge the City election.   The election has raised many valid questions about the quality and integrity of the City election administered by the County Clerk.  Two particular questions raised by the election contest are, “Could qualified electors have been impersonated by illegal voters at polling places?”  and if so, “Could the number of illegal votes cast by illegal voters have changed the outcome of the election for one or more candidates?”  The answer to both questions is an unqualified “Yes.”

The process of elector impersonation begins with gathering and analyzing public information to determine which registered voters actually vote and which ones do not.

Previous election records include poll books.  Without going into tedious but extremely important detail, suffice it to say that poll books reveal who votes, in which elections they tend to vote, and by what method (personal visit to polling place or absentee) they vote.  More importantly, they reveal who is lawfully registered to vote but does not usually vote in certain elections.  For example, a voting pattern analysis may reveal that some people  vote in every national election but never vote in City elections.

“NIXIE” is a term used by the US Postal Service for undeliverable mail.  Campaign managers obtain previous election records with names and addresses of qualified electors.  From those records they extract names and addresses of prospective electors they want to “target” for mailings and phone calls for an upcoming election.  Weeks before an election, mailings go out to targeted electors at their last known voter registration address.  If those mailings are undeliverable, a yellow NIXIE label is affixed by the NIXIE clerk and the mailing is returned to the sender.  That NIXIE return tells a campaign that elector John Doe may no longer live at his registration address.  In other words, if elector John Doe has moved and left no forwarding address, there is also a chance he has not re-registered to vote from his new address.  He may still be registered to vote from an address he has vacated.  A NIXIE return is not conclusive, but in conjunction with poll books, it helps narrow the list of voters who may be unlikely to vote in an upcoming election.

To encourage voting in Idaho elections, Secretary of State Ben Ysursa has put up the IdahoVotes.gov website.  The best way to see the information it reveals is to go to the site and walk through it using your own name if you are registered to vote in Idaho.  Click here to get started.  In Step 1, click on the “Am I Registered?” button.  Then select the county where you live, and enter your last name.   Then click on the “Next” button with your mouse.  When the list appears, you should see your name and voter registration address.  Click on the “Select” button by your name.  The next screen that comes up will tell you the precinct, legislative district, and congressional district in which your address is located.  It will tell you the type of elections in which you can vote as well as the name and address of your polling place.  It will also tell you in which upcoming elections you are eligible to vote.  Here’s the kicker:  It also provides all your information to anyone else, too — maybe to someone who will impersonate you at your polling place.

Fairly straightforward analysis of polling records, NIXIE mail returns, and the Secretary of State’s website information identifies who is registered to vote.  It also identifies pretty clearly who may be less likely to vote in a particular upcoming election.  Voters who are registered but are less likely to vote in a particular election are more likely targets for impersonation.

There is one more  step, confirmation.  A candidate can hire telephone pollsters to contact possible non-voting electors and determine their intent to vote in an upcoming election.  So if a pollster called elector John Doe a few days before the Coeur d’Alene City election and determined that John Doe had no interest whatsoever in voting in that election, the pollster can be pretty sure that valid elector John Doe can be impersonated.

When the impersonator shows up to vote at John Doe’s precinct, he will know John Doe’s name and address.  He will not be asked for identification to verify his identity.  Idaho does not yet demand to see positive photo identification unless an applicant is registering at the polling place just prior to voting.  Even then, Kootenai County’s polling place workers would not likely spot a passable counterfeit identification and a counterfeit proof of address.  They receive no significant training to spot counterfeit identification.  As an interesting side note, Idaho is so indifferent to elector identification that the state has no standards for signature comparison. Election officials are not given any systematic formal training in signature comparison.

But Coeur d’Alene is not New York or even Spokane.  Aren’t polling place workers likely to know many of the people voting at their precinct?  Aren’t they likely to spot an impostor?  Not according to County Clerk Dan English in his letter to the editor cited earlier. In English’s own words, “For one thing, we have so many new people that it’s rare for poll workers to know everyone at their polling sites these days.”

You might well ask, wouldn’t it take as many impersonators to pretend to be the same number of qualified electors?  No.  One impersonator can represent one qualified elector at each voting precinct polling place.  For example, Coeur d’Alene has 27 precincts (not counting precinct 0073 which is for absentee ballots).  If an impersonator limits himself to 20 precincts, one impersonator can account for 20 illegal votes.  If there are 5 impersonators, each voting illegally at 20 precinct polling places, then 5 impersonators would account for 100 illegal votes.   All the impersonator has to do is keep straight which qualified elector he needs to impersonate at each polling place.

It is very clear that in Kootenai County, safeguards that should have protected the integrity of every valid elector’s vote were not followed in the November 3, 2009, Coeur d’Alene city election.   The actions or failures to act by Secretary of State Ben Ysursa and Kootenai County Clerk Dan English effectively neutralized far too many legal votes cast by lawfully registered voters.  Both of these officials, either in person or through their surrogates, have been involved in trying to conceal the evidence of election administration failures from the voters of Kootenai County.  Both Ysursa and English need to be replaced.  In their blind zeal to streamline election processes, they have carelessly failed to perform their fundamental duty to the voters:  Protect the integrity of every vote.