Beyond the Dome

As a senator, Barack Obama has taken a dim view of measures Republicans have proposed to fight voter fraud. When Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — now the Senate minority leader — tried to amend an immigration bill in 2006 to require all voters to show photo IDs at the polls, Obama argued that “you are statistically more likely to get killed by lightning than to find a fraudulent vote in a federal election.”

Now that the election is just three weeks away, Obama and John McCain seem headed on a collision course over the voter fraud issue that could lead to some nasty challenges on election day and beyond.

McCain’s campaign is raising questions about the community organizing group ACORN, which is under investigation in some states after registration forms linked to the group have been discovered with duplicate or false names. The campaign is getting a lot of help from the Republican National Committee, which e-mails a “Vote Fraud Alert” every few hours with some new development on the group.

At a press conference today, former Sens. John Danforth and Warren Rudman, the co-chairs of McCain’s “Honest and Open Election Committee,” raised the possibility that the ACORN controversy could lead to legal challenges if Republicans suspect the group’s efforts have led to invalid votes being cast on election day. (ACORN officials say they’ve caught a lot of the problems themselves and warned election officials about them, but they’re required to turn in the registration forms anyway.)

“We do believe that this is a potential nightmare,” Danforth said. When the election is over, he said, “we hope that it will come to an end and not go on and on and on with challenges and court fights, not just in one state but in a variety of states, so-called battleground states where people will feel that — that the — the result is — is open to dispute.”

Danforth and Rudman have invited the Obama campaign to work with them to prevent such problems, but the Obama team, judging from its own conference call later in the day, is having none of it.

“This is just the start of what is going to be a very deliberate and cynical attempt to try and, you know, create confusion, to challenge people inappropriately,” Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said on the conference call.

It’s not hard to see why the Obama team would react that way. Obama has always been suspicious of Republicans’ concerns about voter fraud, and independent experts say real election fraud has been rare to non-existent in recent years (as opposed to registration fraud, which is more common). And at a time when the Democrats are the hands-down winners of the competition to register new voters, any Republican challenges based on voter fraud would strike them as “transparent,” as Plouffe put it.

Bob Bauer, the campaign’s general counsel, noted that the reason McCain’s allies know about the fake registrations at all is that they’re being caught. Rudman, however, said there’s no way to guarantee that nothing is falling between the cracks. “We’re not saying that the system doesn’t work in some places. It does,” said Rudman. “But when you have a large number of people registered who ought not to be registered, the risk of having people vote who are unqualified to vote legally exponentially goes up.”

As for Danforth and Rudman’s invitation for the two campaigns to work together, Bauer — not to put too fine a point on it — blew them off. “We’re really not concerned at the moment that we need their help with anything,” he said. “We need them to stop the suppressive activity.”

It’s always possible, of course, that a lopsided victory would bring the election to a fast and decisive end. But if it’s close at all, especially in the battleground states, the stage is now set for post-election challenges that could get ugly very quickly.