Luke Ford

When Republicans talk about voter fraud, they are rarely talking about voter fraud. Instead, they are usually using rhetoric to push for making voting more difficult under the theory that lower turnout elections favor Republicans.

Read The_Politics_of_Voter_Fraud and Voter fraud resources.

Lorraine C. Minnite wrote in her 2010 book:

* Federal monitoring of elections has been around since the Reconstruction period, but most often it has been directed toward defending the constitutionally protected voting rights of minority groups at the polls. What is significant about the Bush Justice Department initiative is the interpreting of voting rights as protection from corruption of the electoral process through voter fraud, despite a lack of evidence that voter fraud deserves the same level of scrutiny as racial discrimination in voting. This new understanding of voting rights is in keeping with an evolving pattern of conservative thinking and political strategy: conservatives are victimized by the liberal agenda, whites suffer discrimination more than blacks, and the rich unfairly get less from government than the poor.

* I show that for the vast majority of Americans committing an act of voter fraud—forging a voter registration card, stealing an identity to vote more than once, or knowingly voting illegally—is even more irrational than the individual act of voting. What would an individual voter on their own get out of committing an election crime? The incentives to cast an illegal ballot need to be pretty high to risk a felony conviction and five years in jail. This logic holds even for undocumented immigrants—the new blacks in America. Take the most likely scenario painted by those who fear a surge of illegal immigrant voters. Why would an undocumented immigrant who may have obtained a fake Social Security number in order to be paid for the low-wage labor he or she provides a U.S. employer come out from the shadows to cast a ballot that could deport that individual forever? The data revealed in the pages that follow are consistent with a logic that works against the fear that individual voters are corrupting elections. The best facts we can gather to assess the magnitude of the alleged problem of voter fraud show that, although millions of people cast ballots every year, almost no one knowingly and willfully casts an illegal vote in the United States today.

* Why is the specter of voter fraud recurrently conjured in U.S. electoral politics? My second major goal in this book is to explore why these allegations are made when the facts do not support them, and why they succeed in influencing electoral rules.

* The United States has a fragmented, inefficient, inequitable, complicated, and overly complex electoral process run on election day essentially by an army of volunteers. It is practically designed to produce irregularities in administration: the numbers of voters signing the poll book do not exactly match the numbers of ballots cast because of the unexpected crush of citizens who wanted to vote and the fact that a poll worker’s bathroom break was not covered; confused voters go here and there trying to cast
their ballots in their precinct, the one they voted in eight years ago, only to find their wanderings recorded as double votes; absentee ballots do not reach their rightful destination in time, causing anxious voters to show up at the polls where they are again recorded as voting twice; John Smith Sr. on line number twelve in the poll book signs for John Smith Jr. on line thirteen and violá—another voter is ensnared in a fraud; voter registration applications go unacknowledged so voters send in duplicates and triplicates, sometimes adding a middle initial or a new last name. The list of mix-ups, misunderstandings and mistakes goes on and on. Yet the multitude of alternative explanations for any one irregularity are ignored by the media, which gets a story of fraud faxed to them in a press release by a political party and wants to avoid the gigantic public yawn sure to follow a report of simple bureaucratic failure. The press is attracted to the potential scandal, corruption, or a brewing political fight, and reporters avert their eyes from the more reasonable but boring explanation. In so doing, they become part of a party-driven campaign strategy to keep down the vote.

* Contrast the incentives to the individual voter to commit fraud to those which appear to motivate baseless voter fraud allegations on the part of a political opponent. Who stands to gain the most? Committing voter fraud is a crime, falsely accusing someone of it is not.

A second example of influential voter fraud claims that collapse when scrutinized is the 2005 report of a now-defunct nonprofit organization called the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR) created by Republican Party operatives that same year. On March 15, 2005, Robert Ney (R-Ohio), chairman of the U.S. House Administration Committee, held a field hearing in Ohio on election administration and balloting problems during the Ohio 2004 election. Mark F. “Thor” Hearne, II testified that voting problems in Ohio were the result of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) paying people with crack cocaine to get them to register to vote.

…Within six months of bursting on the scene, the ACVR Legislative Fund released a self-commissioned report, titled “Voter Fraud, Intimidation and Suppression in the 2004 Presidential Election,” that professed to be “the most comprehensive and authoritative review of the facts surrounding allegations of vote fraud, intimidation and suppression made during the 2004 presidential election.” Analysis of its many claims, however, shows it to be little more than a pile of poorly scrutinized newspaper articles sensationalizing election election shenanigans allegedly instigated in all but two instances by Democrats, who were accused of far more voter intimidation and suppression than Republicans. In other words, it is a piece of political propaganda produced by Republican Party operatives who veiled their work as civil rights advocacy. The report identified five “hot spots” for voter fraud. Four of these were cities with substantial black populations (Philadelphia, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cleveland), plus Seattle, which rounded out a roster of key Republican swing states—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, Ohio and Washington—in the 2006 election. …among the more than one hundred cases cited of alleged voter fraud implicating nearly 300,000 potentially fraudulent votes in the 2004 election cycle, only about 185 votes could be confirmed as possibly tainted by fraud. Over the course of its brief two-year life, the ACVR achieved remarkable influence, promoting the idea that U.S. elections are riddled with voter fraud.

…spurious voter fraud allegations by media figures such as John Fund and “nonprofit” front groups for political parties such as the ACVR confuse the public debate about fraud. It is not uncommon for politicians and partisans to hurl accusations of “fraud!” at one another when elections are close. The accusations make great copy for journalists who sometimes purposefully, but also unwittingly, contribute to the confusion when they fail to address the allegations with any skepticism. They simply repeat and sometimes sensationalize the accusations, most of which turn out to be false (as documented here), instead of investigating and clarifying the issues for their readers.

…Election administration is intricate and arcane, and voter fraud has multiple meanings. Considered abstractly, the term is tied to competing notions of the proper exercise of the suffrage and the meaning of the right to vote. Fraud could be anything that corrodes the operation of elections.

* The best definition of voter fraud is the legal one, as a crime. It is not that “mere emotion of the mind” that sees fraud lurking behind an unusually high number of absentee ballots or a bus parked near a polling place with out-of-state license plates. As McCrary states, “there must be a fraudulent transaction.” But what kind of crime is fraud? Voter fraud, because it distorts the operation of “free and fair elections” violates a core constitutional commitment, and therefore, it is a political crime, an intolerable violation of Democratic norms.

Defining voter fraud as a crime, however, immediately runs into difficulties. The first problem is that, as a crime, voter fraud is not precisely defined in law, even though there is an abundance of law at the federal and state levels that criminalize behavior we call voter fraud.50 In fact, there is no single accepted legal definition of voter fraud because we have fifty state electoral systems and fifty state criminal codes governing the administration of elections, plus a federal code that applies in national elections—there is no uniform standard.51 This legal incoherence contributes to popular misunderstandings.

* Individual voters on their own are not capable of stealing elections, whereas election, party, and campaign officials are in a position to rig or manipulate electoral outcomes by virtue of their organizational capacity and their access to the machinery of the electoral process, two resources voters do not have.

* because voter fraud in the United States is a crime in both federal and state law, a legalistic definition is best because it gives us a means of measuring fraud. Whatever else voter or election fraud is—myth, legend, historical reality, or cross-national phenomenon of developing nations and mature democracies alike—it is also a crime in the United States, and the legal framework provides our best opportunity for grounding a definition of fraud in something we can observe.

* James Madison Porter (1793-1862): “one of the leading characteristics of distinction between the two great and leading political parties of this country, when we had parties formed on principle, was the fact that the federal party was for restraining the right of suffrage . . . while the democratic party was for giving the largest extent to the exercise of the right of suffrage.”

* Within the constitutional framework for regulating the electoral process, the states vary widely in how they administer elections. For example, they differ in who they disenfranchise among those lacking constitutional protections (i.e., noncitizens, misdemeants, felons, and ex-felons); in the number of days an individual must be registered prior to an election in order to be allowed to vote in that election; in the way in which voters cast ballots, diverging on matters related to absentee and mail-in balloting; in how long the polls are kept open; in the manner in which votes are validated; and in who counts the ballots, who challenges ballots, who contests elections, and who decides the outcome of such disputes.

* In the United States, private groups can and do get involved in campaigns to register citizens to vote, acting as intermediaries between voters and the state bureaucracies responsible for maintaining the lists. When such groups register people who are already registered to vote, when they fail to ensure that the forms they collect in their drives are filled out completely or accurately, or when they file forms in the wrong jurisdiction, they may add to the burden of local registrars to compile and verify accurate lists of eligible voters. The inefficiency is the price we pay for a personal registration system.

* The lack of an affirmative right to vote in the Constitution and the delegation of authority to the states to determine voter qualifications and oversee election administration are peculiar features unique to U.S. democracy among democracies of the world.

* [Voters] confront an array of different rules depending on where they live. The more rules and restrictions, the more stumbling blocks voters face when trying to cast legal ballots… The more complex the rules regulating voter registration and voting, the more likely voters and election clerks will make mistakes,50 and mistakes—or what I generically refer to as irregularities—are the manna of voter fraud allegations.

* Compared to voting in person, official scrutiny of the marking and casting of ballots is relaxed. To commit fraud when voting by mail, a voter must commit perjury and or forgery, and because the U.S. Postal Service is usually involved, absentee ballot fraud can result in the commission of a federal felony.

* The scholarly study of U.S. elections and voter turnout assumes the official tallies are an accurate picture of what Walter Dean Burnham calls “the American voting universe.”8 The vast field of U.S. electoral behavior is built on an almost religious faith that the count is free not only of fraud but also of (nonfraudulent) irregularities large enough to put the results in question.9 There is little academic research on the scale of fraud or the extent of irregularities in the count either today or in the past.

* the dearth of literature on election fraud and election administration means the question of fraud will remain open for sometime to come. What work has been done provides little guidance for how we should evaluate it today.

* When I began my inquiry into the question of election fraud in 2001, there had been no new empirical research published on the subject for almost two decades.

* The debate over fraud in the nineteenth century remains unresolved.33 Even the definitions of fraud remain disputed, and a systematic survey of the empirical evidence is daunting because much of whatever evidence there once was probably no longer exists. Some scholars took up the call for more empirical research on fraud,34 but none attempted a systematic survey of the primary evidence. Most of this work confirms Burnham’s claims that voter fraud in the nineteenth century was marginal and episodic, sometimes flagrant, but not endemic to U.S. elections, as Converse and others have asserted.35 The most comprehensive review of the literature on U.S. electoral corruption concluded that “there are reasons to doubt the reliability and accuracy of many generalizations which have been made about vote fraud in American politics,” namely the indiscriminate lumping of a variety of forms of corrupt practices together under the name of “vote fraud” and the characterization of hard-driving political tactics to mobilize the votes of “undesirables”—techniques that were then or are now unscrupulous or illegal—as “fraud.”36 The vast gap in this understanding of the character of electoral democracy in the past remains. This is regrettable because knowledge of the nineteenth century would be useful in shedding light on the contemporary hysteria over voter fraud.

* The Dornan-Sanchez electoral dispute fits squarely what Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter call “politics by other means”—the use of legal strategies and the courts, revelation, prosecution and investigation, and the media to win elections. According to Ginsberg and Shefter, “During the political struggles of the past decades, politicians sought to undermine the institution associated with their foes, disgrace one another on national television, force their competitors to resign from office, and, in a number of cases, send their opponents to prison. Remarkably, one tactic that has not been
so widely used is the mobilization of the electorate.”

* The evidence of voter fraud since Oregon adopted vote-by-mail, however, is practically non existent.

* It is not uncommon for a person’s signature to change over time, and many of the ballot signature-match problems appearing in the Oregon data indicate this to be the case.

* Early critics of vote-by-mail warned of the dangers of voter impersonation inherent in procedures that permit voters to fill out their ballots beyond the watchful eyes of election officials. Their fears appear to be unwarranted. Instead of ballot thievery and willful attempts to steal voters’ identities or impersonate eligible voters, the data actually reveal how balloting procedures and the voting process itself shape the kinds of violations that can mar the process. Vote-by-mail systems work best with voters who are literate and are able to follow written instructions—much more so than traditional polling place systems. Thus, vote-by-mail systems are bound to experience some problems with voters who are not literate or who do not pay enough attention to the rules on how to fill out and sign a ballot. Therefore, we should expect a larger number of ballot signature problems in voting systems that require voters to sign their ballots before mailing them in than in systems in which the mode of voting takes some other form. According to Oregon election officials, verifying the signatures of every ballot before that ballot is opened and counted helps prevent fraud better than most procedures used in polling place elections.

* Thus, unlike the calculus of illegal voting, which suggests that the benefits of committing voter fraud for the rational voter will be largely abstract or emotional (because the costs and the infinitesimal probability of affecting electoral outcomes wipe out any instrumental benefits to be gained by committing this crime), the benefits to a partisan interest group of alleging voter fraud where none exists are quite likely to be positive and instrumental.

* Marginalized Americans—racial minorities, immigrants, and lower-income groups—are strongly identified with the Democratic Party.

* Republicans once manipulated white distaste of blacks by tarring Democrats as being concerned mainly with “black” issues such as affirmative action, welfare, and liberal criminal justice policies. But the success of the Republican Party (with help from some Democrats) in reducing the salience of these issues by eliminating the programs and reversing the policies that supported the Great Society agenda has weakened the effectiveness of the electoral strategy that brought them to power in the first place. Racial peace inside the Democratic Party has created new challenges for the Republican Party as well.

In search of a new electoral strategy to keep them in power, Republicans operatives resorted to tapping into cultural myths about voter fraud. Invoking fraud, this new Southern strategy plays on both the historical memory of Southern Democratic Party corruption after the Civil War and also on big-city political machine vote stealing. If the blogosphere is any indication, the reddest base of the Republican Party has been energized by the tarring of Democrats as cheaters and the association of Democrats with a racialized crime-prone underclass.

* We live by myths. They challenge the explanatory power of facts and are a convenient, even comforting replacement for a lack of knowledge about how the real world works. Stories about who we are, where we come from, and why we do what we do structure everyday life in hidden ways. Claude Lévi-Strauss writes that we create myths to make sense of the random and chaotic data of life and nature.8 He argues all myths have an elementary structure of binary opposition and are extensions of the nature of human intelligence that forces the data of life into dualisms resolved only by the emergence of new contradictions. “We are split creatures literally by nature,” writes Wendy Doniger, summarizing Lévi-Strauss’s view, “and we organize data like a simple digital machine. Our common sense is binary; the simplest and most efficient way to process experience seems to be by dividing it in half, and then to divide the halves in half, reformulating every question so that there are only two possible answers to it, yes or no.”9 Myths find unity in opposing dualities. If Lévi-Strauss is correct, they are powerful because they give meaning to human beings in ways that mirror the workings of the human mind.

Americans, like all people always, make myths about themselves, and one of the more powerful of these is the myth of American democracy. Following Lévi-Strauss, we can break that myth down into its opposing elements, its competing celebratory and cautionary narratives. One glorifies U.S. origins, individual freedoms, and “our most fundamental right, the right to vote.”10 U.S. exceptionalism extols the Constitution as a work of genius that ushered on to the historical stage a new age of freedom and equality. Indeed, in its telling and ritual retelling, the celebratory story takes on the luster of divine right. This is a purity myth like those that prop up the idea of a city on a hill or a chosen people or white supremacy.

Its binary opposite is a myth of pollution, of the corrosion and corruption that comes from without and threatens the chosen people’s democracy. Our democracy is pure and therefore sacred precisely because it self-consciously excludes the impure, those lacking in qualities deemed necessary to the enjoyment of the privilege of citizenship, of being an American.

* Even though it is no longer acceptable to voice the view that certain people among one’s fellow citizens do not deserve to vote, many ordinary Americans do in fact share this idea and can take comfort from the fact that some elites do, too. For example, disdain for the inept lower classes was evident in a well-publicized comment by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, blurted out during oral argument in the Bush v. Gore case that determined the winner of the 2000 presidential election. The justices asked respondent’s lawyers what the standard should be for identifying the intent of Florida voters who failed to completely punch out their ballot chads. O’Connor quickly became exasperated. As one of the lawyers laboring below her gaze began an explanation of the painstaking process involved in accurately counting ballots, O’Connor cut him off and griped, “Well, why isn’t the standard the one that voters are instructed to follow, for goodness sakes? I mean, it couldn’t be clearer.”12 In other words, “it couldn’t be clearer” that inept voters with their dimpled and hanging chads do not deserve to have their votes counted, even where state law provides for it.13 The incredulity that a ballot not properly marked for reading by a machine could possibly be a legal vote is echoed in Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s concurring opinion, which called unreasonable the Florida Supreme Court finding that state law required machines to be capable of correctly counting votes.14

And here we have another example: the comments of Sue Burmeister, the Georgia legislator who sponsored the controversial Georgia photo identification legislation in 2005 (HB 244) remind us again of the sentiment that to protect the integrity of the ballot some people should not be encouraged to cast one. In this example, however, it is not just ineptitude that disqualifies, it is the reputed criminal tendencies of blacks. According to a leaked U.S. Justice Department Voting Section staff memorandum objecting to the bill’s new restrictive identification requirement,15 Representative Burmeister told Justice Department officials that the attacks of September 11 caused her to reflect on how easily the terrorists had obtained IDs once inside the United States. She said that she was aware of vote buying in Georgia and had read John Fund’s book, Stealing Elections, which argues elections are easily and routinely stolen in the United States through vote-buying schemes (see chap. 1). According to the memo, Burmeister said “that if there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud. She said that when black voters in her black precincts are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls.”

* the spurious vote fraud allegation is a virtually cost-free tactic that carries the potential for a very large payoff to the party group making the charge. This explains in part the large gap we see between the proliferation of spurious voter fraud allegations in recent elections and the reality of a small amount of individual criminal fraud, as observed in the tiny fraction of investigations, prosecutions, and convictions obtained against fraud.

* The case of St. Louis, Missouri, a majority black city with budget problems, shows how the mishandling of voter registration and elections procedures can be misrepresented as fraud. There is little doubt that in the past St. Louis experienced some election fraud and public corruption. St. Louis politics were long organized by political machines, and fraud has a storied past in that city that for some, condemns the politics of the present.32 In 2000, the historical memory of fraudulent elections, bribery, conspiracies, ballot tampering, and voting from the grave colored the rush to judgment when administrative mismanagement and shockingly poor record-keeping by the city’s election bureaucracy combined to produce troubling election irregularities.33 Before the irregularities could be sorted out, they were seized on by partisans, including Christopher “Kit” Bond, Missouri senior Republican senator, who claimed the problems were evidence of a Democratic Party–driven “major criminal enterprise designed to defraud voters” instead of what a federal probe later determined them to be—procedural incompetence and official failure to abide by the law.

* “In politics as in everything else it makes a great difference whose game we play. The rules of the game determine the requirements for success.”24 The power of the voter fraud myth is its power to justify electoral rules that competitive parties and politicians create to “keep down the vote” and gain advantage over their opponents.

* Today, stringent voter identification laws have been championed almost exclusively by Republicans and, with two exceptions (in Alabama in 2003, and in Washington in 2005), have been enacted only when Republicans achieved unified control over state government…

* In response to opponents’ claim that no one in Indiana or elsewhere was known to have been prosecuted for impersonating registered voters, [Richard] Poser dismissed the value of prosecution data as a measure of voter fraud. “The absence of prosecutions,” he writes, “is explained by the endemic under-enforcement of minor criminal laws (minor as they appear to the public and prosecutors, at all events) and by the extreme difficulty of apprehending a voter impersonator.”

But, again, Posner’s assertions about matters of fact bearing on his reasoning are poorly supported. He cites no evidence that minor criminal laws are endemically underenforced. Quite to the contrary, the stepped-up enforcement of minor criminal laws across the United States against offenses such as fare beating, littering, public drinking, and disturbing the peace is so significant that it is credited by some with lowering crime rates over the past fifteen years.81 A prolific scholar of the law, Posner, who has written a sharp critique of the “law and literature” movement in U.S. jurisprudence,82 violates his own warnings against the discovery of legal justification in fiction and imagines a madcap scenario to explain why voter identification laws are justified. He tells a tale of voter impersonators lurking around the polling place, scanning the voter registration rolls, and matching names to the obituaries to figure out if any of the dead are still on the rolls. The myth of voter fraud takes over from there…

To summarize Judge Posner’s opinion, voting is, on the one hand, of little benefit to the individual and most people who do not vote know this. In fact, it is so inconsequential an activity that committing a fraud against it is akin to littering, another another minor crime that goes unprosecuted.83 On the other hand, it is a monumental crime because committing it deprives others of their civil rights through “vote dilution,” as recognized by the Supreme Court (something even the poll tax did not do because that controversy involved balancing the right to vote with a state interest in things such as “limiting the franchise to people who really care about voting or in excluding poor people or in discouraging people who are black”). Poll workers are usually too busy to scrutinize a signature but apparently not too busy to scrutinize a picture, match it to the face before them, and check for a valid address and expiration date on the ID. One source of fodder for vote fraud is the massively out-of-date voter registration rolls. But the fact that the rolls are so poorly maintained is not relevant to the proclaimed grave concern over the undetectable, unprosecuted, trivial but monumental crime of voter fraud. Obtaining a photo ID is not really so difficult if you really want to vote, although why would you? If you do not have an ID, you can get one by presenting a motor vehicles official with a birth certificate (or copy) and another official document with your name and address on it, such as a utility bill. As everyone who drives knows, this is much easier to do than sending in ID with your absentee ballot, such as a copy of the same birth certificate and document with your name and address on it that everyone else needs to produce in order to get a government-issued ID! And if people would just stay home on election day, no one would be harmed by the new ID law—except, maybe the Democratic Party, which, apparently, few want to join anyway, at least in Indiana, a conclusion we can draw from Posner’s admonition that Democrats need to work much harder there to get out their vote.84 The plaintiffs appealed the case. But they were no more able to dislodge the myth of voter fraud from the minds of Supreme Court justices than they were with Judge Posner.

Ann writes Dec. 9, 2020 in her syndicated column:

The media have been lying about voter fraud for 20 years. The New York Times and The Washington Post will tell you: Let’s get something straight. There are only two cases of voter fraud in history and they were both Republicans.

NEVER? No voter fraud ever?

Nope!

That’s your first clue they’re lying. Liberals don’t try to say partial-birth abortion never happens. They don’t say black men killing cops never happens. They don’t say immigrants ripping off government programs never happens. Only voter fraud NEVER HAPPENS.

Why does Ann not provide evidence for her assertions? Easy. Because there isn’t any. She’s lying. Nobody expert in voter fraud argues it never happens. The argument is whether or not it is a big problem in American politics.

I have no expertise in voter fraud. I’ve spent about 50 hours reading the primary books on the topic, and that effort apparently provides me with more knowledge than the dozens of right-wing pundits who have claimed or insinuated or repeatedly raised the possibility that voter fraud determined the 2020 American presidential election without providing any compelling evidence. As of this writing, there is no compelling evidence to believe that voter fraud may have decided this election. To claim otherwise, is reckless, because once people believe that such an election may have been fraudulent, they then believe themselves victims and are free from all moral constraints. If you think the system is possibly fixed, you no longer have any allegiance to the system, and more behavior akin to the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot is to be expected.

In the past four months, I’ve read six books on voter fraud. I found the first three books that argued voter fraud is not a big problem in American elections far more credible than the three conservative books arguing the opposite (even though my emotional predisposition is in favor of the Republican point of view):

* The Myth of Voter Fraud by Lorraine C. Minnite (2010)
* Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy by Richard Hasen (2020)
* The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown by Richard Hasen (2012)
* If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It by Hugh Hewitt (2012)
* Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy by John Fund (2009)
* Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky (2012)

If voter fraud was as big a problem as Republicans claim, you’d think they’d try to make a serious case. Instead, they put forward buffoons such as Steve Cortes, John Fund, Kris Kobach, and Hans von Spakovsky. How bad is John Fund? In the second paragraph of his 2009 book Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, he writes: “At least eight of the nineteen hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11.”

There was no rational reason for the 9-11 hijackers to register to vote and no evidence that they did so. There is no rational reason for people in general to try to commit vote fraud in America because the penalties they face are severe and the odds that their individual votes will change elections are tiny.

Lorraine C. Minnite wrote in The Myth of Voter Fraud:

Yet the multitude of alternative explanations for any one irregularity are ignored by the media, which gets a story of fraud faxed to them in a press release by a political party and wants to avoid the gigantic public yawn sure to follow a report of simple bureaucratic failure. The press is attracted to the potential scandal, corruption, or a brewing political fight, and reporters avert their eyes from the more reasonable but boring explanation. In so doing, they become part of a party-driven campaign strategy to keep down the vote. To get a sense of how this works, let us look at an oft-repeated allegation of voter fraud made by John Fund, Wall Street Journal columnist and author, who proclaimed in his 2004 book Stealing Elections that several several of the 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote.18 Fund asserts, “At least eight of the nineteen hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11.”19 Fund’s source for this claim is a December 22, 2002, interview he said he conducted with Michael Chertoff, then an assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department Criminal Division.20 Fund provides no other corroborating evidence.

As a regular columnist for a national newspaper, Fund writes stories intended to inflame though his language is never partisan or inflammatory. The care he takes in his regular columns to appear reasonable is evident in his book, in which Fund writes that the hijackers “were actually able to register to vote,” not that they did register to vote or were registered to vote. What does it mean to say someone is “able to register to vote”? Fund echoes previous statements by prominent conservatives that the hijackers or their associates may have been registered to vote. For example, more than a year before Fund says he interviewed Chertoff, Diane Ravitch, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, wrote, “Thus far, no reporter has observed that the hijackers were eligible to vote in state and federal elections, despite the fact that they were not American citizens.” Of course, foreign nationals are not eligible to vote, only citizens are eligible to vote under state law. Senator Christopher “Kit” Bond (R-Mo.) picked up on the idea that our voter registration procedures are so lax that foreign terrorists can successfully apply when he asserted on the floor of the Senate that a Pakistani citizen in Greensboro, North Carolina, “with links to two of the September 11th hijackers was indicted by a federal grand jury for having illegally registered to vote.”21

In person Fund is less careful in parsing his words. He confused what he meant by “able to register to vote” when he appeared on the CNN Lou Dobbs show on October 24, 2004, to promote Stealing Elections. Here is the exchange:

DOBBS: You point out in your book that eight—eight, was it?—of the 19 . . .
FUND: Eight of the 19.
DOBBS:. . . 9/11 hijackers could have registered to vote?
FUND: No, they did register to vote.

Without explicitly stating it, Ravitch and Fund are referring to the fact, known within weeks of the attacks, that some of the 9/11 hijackers had obtained driver’s licenses.22 Ravitch incorrectly implies this made them “eligible” to vote because the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) requires that applicants for driver’s licenses be presented with an opportunity to register to vote. But being presented with an opportunity to register does not make a person eligible to vote. No state creates a right to vote or establishes voter eligibility through possession of a driver’s license. By linking the 9/11 hijackers to the “motor voter” law, one of the very first bills signed into law by President Bill Clinton, over the objection of congressional conservatives, both Ravitch and Fund are talking in code, reinforcing the idea held fervently by right-wing partisans that the NVRA has corrupted democracy by opening the door to voter fraud.

…More recent efforts to confirm Fund’s allegation that some of the 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote in either Virginia or Florida have failed to turn up any supporting evidence at all… Fund provides no evidence from Virginia or Florida elections officials confirming the registration status of any of the hijackers…

Fund’s allegation about the 9/11 hijackers was widely circulated and has had a surprisingly long life given that it is poorly documented and very likely false. For example, in protests on the floor of the House over various border security provisions stripped from the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, U.S. Representatives Ed Royce (R-Calif.), Steven King (R-Iowa), and Sam Johnson (R-Tex.) all repeated Fund’s allegation that eight of the nineteen hijackers were registered to vote.

The lack of scrutiny of voter fraud charges and the ease with which partisans have been able to insert them into the public discourse means that arguments based on demonstrably false information, or no information at all, are entered into the congressional record, sway lawmakers, and are cited by Supreme Court justices as fact. It means pundits who relish the charges and their whiff of scandal will continue to manipulate public understanding.

On the evening of the November 2006 congressional elections, John Fund was a guest on Glenn Beck’s CNN syndicated talk show. Two years had passed since the publication of his book, and because he has yet to be upbraided for any of the misleading information he provides there, Fund must have felt it was safe to again repeat the provocative charge that eight of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote: BECK: OK. To put this into perspective on how bad and out of control our system is—and I don’t think the Republicans or the Democrats really want to fix it—explain how many of the 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote.

FUND: Eight out of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote in either Virginia or Florida. They could have easily voted if they’d wanted to.

BECK: And how did they do that?

FUND: Well, we have something called the motor voter law. You can go into any government office building, any transaction you conduct with them, driver’s license, unemployment, whatever you get the check off, [sic] do you also want to register to vote? All the registrations are on a postcard. There’s no question as to whether you’re a citizen. There’s not [a] question as to whether or not you’re a real, live human being. You’re automatically registered. Our registration rules have a lot of people on there who are dead, don’t exist or registered many times over.29

This is a good example of what I call voter fraud politics, the use of spurious or exaggerated voter fraud allegations to persuade the public about the need for more administrative burdens on the vote. I frame my analysis and case studies to explore the politics of fraud allegations—to ask who are the actors, who are the targets, what are the tactics deployed, and what are the factors that account for their success in maintaining barriers to the vote that disproportionately affect certain Americans?

Brian Lowry writes for Kansascity.com Dec. 14, 2020:

Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law said Kansas “never should have even taken the case to the Supreme Court in the first place given Kobach’s utter failure in proving his claims of widespread voter fraud and his inept running of the trial.”

In 2018, after a series of missteps in district court, Kobach was found in contempt and ordered to take six hours of remedial legal training on civil procedure. That gave Schmidt little chance of success when he took over in the case for the appeal.

“The Supreme Court has tolerated a number of laws that make it harder for people to register and vote in the name of preventing voter fraud and giving states the ability to run their elections as they see fit. The Fish case shows there are limits to that,” Hasen said, referencing the ACLU’s client Steven Wayne Fish.

“Disenfranchising tens of thousands of people without proof of fraud goes too far under federal law and the Constitution.”

In a phone call, Kobach rejected the notion that his courtroom performance resulted in the state’s loss at the district court level.

He agreed with Schmidt’s office that the high court’s Monday denial represents the end of the Kansas litigation, but he said that the issue of proof of citizenship could still come before the court in the future if a state outside of the 10th Circuit enacts a similar law and it results in a contradictory ruling.

“There’s nothing more the (Kansas) attorney general’s office can do on the case, but I think the issue is far from over. There were a number of states looking at this in the past few years. I think the 2020 presidential election has raised the focus on election security,” Kobach said.

“The rest of the country has a wide open path ahead of it if more states want to pursue proof of citizenship,” Kobach said, contending that the ruling only affects Kansas and the five other states covered by the 10th Circuit.

Kobach said that he was involved in Texas’ failed attempt to overturn the presidential election results in four states, serving as an adviser on Texas’ briefs. The court rejected the lawsuit Friday evening.

Kobach said he would not consider Joe Biden to be president-elect until Congress votes to accept the Electoral College results on January 6, but he acknowledged that few opportunities remain for President Donald Trump to contest the election results after Friday’s decision.

Ann writes:

I bet you couldn’t find EVEN ONE!

How about these?

— JOHN ASHCROFT, 2000

John Ashcroft absolutely had a Senate seat stolen from him in 2000 when a state judge ordered polls in heavily Democratic St. Louis to remain open for an extra three hours. Republicans didn’t even hear about it for another hour. Despite an appellate court striking down the ridiculously lawless order, St. Louis was given an extra 3 1/2 hours to kick out tens of thousands of additional votes. Ashcroft lost the election by 49,000 votes.

Twitter: This claim about election fraud is disputed.

Ann is not telling the truth about what happened. Even if she were, a judge ordering polling places to stay open for an extra three hours is not voter fraud. Republicans failing to hear about it for an hour is not voter fraud. None of what Ann presents here is evidence of voter fraud. John Ashcroft did not believe that voter fraud decided the election. The New York Times reported Nov. 9, 2000:

On the day after, the loser, Senator John Ashcroft, the Republican, announced that he would not challenge the results…

Mr. Carnahan won with 50 percent of the vote compared with 48 percent for Mr. Ashcroft. The margin of victory was about 49,000 votes.

Mr. Ashcroft also said today that he would discourage other Republicans from challenging the outcome of Tuesday’s election, something that Republicans had privately said they might do.

”You have to know when people speak with clarity, how to take orders,” Mr. Ashcroft said today, adding that voters had clearly demonstrated their wishes. ”I reject any legal challenge to this election. I will discourage others from challenging the will of the people in the selection of their United States Senator.”

He added: ”I believe the will of the people has been expressed with compassion. The people should be respected and heard.”

…Republicans had considered a legal challenge, contending that the election of a dead man raised constitutional questions. Late Tuesday, some Republicans here also claimed that Democrats had been given an unfair advantage when polls in heavily Democratic St. Louis were kept open 45 minutes later than in the rest of the state.

Circuit Judge Evelyn Baker ordered the voting extension on Tuesday night, saying a lack of voting booths and equipment had deprived some residents of the right to cast ballots. Judge Baker ordered the polls to remain open an additional three hours, but a state appellate court overturned her ruling, and the polls were closed just before 8 p.m.

Ann writes:

— WASHINGTON STATE, 2004

A week after the 2004 Washington state gubernatorial election, Republican Dino Rossi was up by 3,492 votes against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Then Democratic King county began finding “misplaced” ballots, eventually producing more than 10,000 of them.

Hey, guys! I found another box of ballots under the sink!

So that’s another 800 votes for Gregoire.

Oh wait — you’re not going to believe this …

You found more votes?

Bingo! 600 votes for Gregoire.

An examination of the records later showed that about 1,800 more ballots had been cast than there were voters who had requested them.

Notwithstanding the miraculously appearing ballots, Rossi won the recount a few weeks later, but his lead was cut to 42 votes — easily within stealing distance. Democrat Christine Gregoire demanded a hand recount, and that put her ahead by 129 votes, whereupon she was promptly declared the winner.

Washington voters overwhelmingly believed the election had been stolen and wanted a revote. Democrats didn’t care. Nothing was ever done about the flagrant vote fraud. Washington now has 100 percent mail-in-ballots and no Republican has ever again won the governorship.

Twitter: This claim about election fraud is disputed.

We don’t have any evidence that the five American states using exclusively mail-in ballots have a higher percentage of voter fraud than other states. As for this particular election, Wikipedia says:

The Republican Party filed a lawsuit in Chelan County Superior Court contesting the election, but the trial judge ruled against it, citing lack of evidence of deliberate electoral sabotage.[1] Rossi chose not to appeal to the Washington State Supreme Court, formally conceding the election on June 6, 2005…

King County Council Chairman Larry Phillips was at a Democratic Party office in Seattle on Sunday December 12, reviewing a list of voters whose absentee votes had been rejected due to signature problems, when to his surprise he found his own name listed. Phillips said he was certain he had filled out and signed his ballot correctly, and asked the county election officials to investigate the discrepancy. They discovered that Phillips’ signature had somehow failed to be scanned into the election computer system after he submitted his request for an absentee ballot. Election workers claimed that they had received Phillips’ absentee ballot in the mail, but they could not find his signature in the computer system to compare to the one on the ballot envelope, so they mistakenly rejected the ballot instead of following the standard procedure of checking it against the signature of Phillips’ physical voter registration card that was on file. The discovery prompted King County Director of Elections Dean Logan to order his staff to search the computers to see if any other ballots had been incorrectly rejected.

Logan announced on December 13 that 561 absentee ballots in the county had been wrongly rejected due to an administrative error.[14] The next day, workers retrieving voting machines from precinct storage found an additional 12 ballots, bringing the total to 572 newly discovered ballots. Logan admitted the lost ballots were an oversight on the part of his department, and insisted that the found ballots be counted. On December 15, the King County Canvassing Board voted 2-1 in favor of counting the discovered ballots.

Upon examination of the discovered ballots, it was further discovered that, with the exception of two ballots, none of the ballots had been cast by voters whose surnames began with the letters A, B, or C.[15] There was a further search for more ballots, and on December 17, county workers discovered a tray in a warehouse with an additional 162 previously uncounted ballots.[15] All together, 723 uncounted or improperly rejected ballots were discovered in King County during the manual hand recount…

Republican leaders in Washington claimed there were enough disputed votes to change the outcome of the election and filed a lawsuit in Chelan County Superior Court in order to avoid having the case heard in the more liberal Western Washington counties.[21] King County’s election department (the greater Seattle area) was also targeted for how they handled the ballots, including untracked use of a “ballot-on-demand” printing machine. Also, ballots in six counties were discovered after the initial count and included in the recounts, the most being from King County. The judge hearing the lawsuit ruled that the Party did not provide enough evidence that the disputed votes were ineligible votes, or for whom they were cast, to enable the court to overturn the election.

Controversy over the election’s outcome continued after the certification of the hand recount results. The Washington State Republican Party called into question the discrepancy between the list of voters casting ballots in King County (895,660) and the number of ballots reported in the final hand recount (899,199). They claimed that hundreds of votes, including votes by felons,[22] deceased voters,[23] and double voters,[23] were included in the canvass. As an explanation, election officials claimed that they had yet to finalize the list at the time, and argued that discrepancies in the two numbers are common and do not necessarily indicate fraud. As the election officials had expected, once the two lists were completed on January 5, the two numbers were indeed very close to one another. Also on January 5, 2005, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published an article investigating votes in King County apparently cast by dead people.[24] The PI uncovered eight cases of votes attributed to dead people; these included one administrative error, two ballots cast by the spouses of recently deceased voters (one who voted against Gregoire), one case of a husband apparently voting his dead wife’s ballot instead of his own, and a man who legally voted his absentee ballot and then died before election day. One dead woman was marked as having voted in person at the polls.

… On June 6, 2005, Judge John E. Bridges ruled that the Republican party did not provide enough evidence that the disputed votes were ineligible -or for whom they were cast- to overturn the election.[29] Judge Bridges noted that there was evidence that 1,678 votes had been illegally cast throughout the state,[30] but found that the only evidence submitted to show how those votes had been cast were sworn statements from four felons that they had voted for Rossi.[30] He stated that the judiciary should exercise restraint; “unless an election is clearly invalid, when the people have spoken, their verdict should not be disturbed by the court.”[31] Nullifying the election, Bridges said, would be “the ultimate act of judicial egotism and judicial activism.” He also concluded that according to his interpretation of the Washington Administrative Code, “voters who improperly cast provisional ballots should not be disenfranchised.” He also rejected all claims of fraud and the Republican Party’s statistical analysis, concluding that the expert testimony of the Republican party was “not helpful” and that the proportional reduction theory was not supported under any law in the state. Striking another blow against Rossi’s court case, he stated that “the court is more inclined to believe that Gregoire would have prevailed under statistical analysis theory”, rejecting the Rossi campaign’s claim that improperly cast ballots led to Gregoire’s victory.[29]

Bridges did accept the claim that some people voted illegally in the election, but said there was little proof of which candidate benefited from those votes. He ruled that 1,678 illegal votes should be subtracted from the total number of votes cast.[31] Bridges also removed five votes from the final count for two of the candidates: four for Rossi and one for Ruth Bennett.[32] No evidence was brought before the court of any of the illegal votes benefitted Gregoire.[32] The final margin of victory for Gregoire over Rossi was 133 votes…

Judge Bridges’ ruling was seen as a comprehensive defeat for Rossi. The judge admitted nearly every piece of evidence the Republican Party offered and then wrote a thorough, tough opinion rejecting the Republicans’ claims (while criticizing the administration of the election, particularly in King County); Rossi was left with very little legal ground for a successful appeal. After receiving such a negative verdict, Rossi declined to appeal to the State Supreme Court, claiming that the political makeup of the Court would make it impossible for him to win, thereby ending all legal challenges to the election of Gregoire as the Governor of Washington.

I’m not an expert on the 2004 gubernatorial election in Washington State. Neither is Ann Coulter. However, when one reads her account of the election and then reads the more detailed Wikipedia account and related links, it is easy to see that Ann’s story is not compelling.

Ann writes:

— AL FRANKEN, 2008

In 2008, Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota won his 2008 reelection bid against challenger Al Franken by 725 votes. But for weeks after the election, Democratic precincts kept “discovering” new votes for Franken.

Day after day, votes were added to Franken’s column, while votes were taken away from Coleman. Random error would not continually benefit only one side.

On account of Franken’s charisma shield, Barack Obama, who was running for president that year, won hundreds of thousands more votes than Franken in the same election, on the same ticket, in the same state that year. But during the “corrections,” Franken was winning three times as many votes as Obama .

So the Democrats weren’t worried about believability.

Eventually, all these late-discovered ballots put Franken ahead by 312 votes, whereupon he was immediately certified the winner by the George Soros-backed Minnesota secretary of state.

A few years later, we found out that more than 1,000 felons, ineligible to vote, had cast votes in the 2008 Minnesota election. (To state the obvious, felons support Democrats by about 10-1.) There were 113 separate convictions for voter fraud in that election. That’s not easy: In Minnesota, a conviction for voter fraud requires proof that you broke the law knowingly.

More than 100 convictions for something that never happens, way, way back in the prehistoric days of 2008 — who could remember that?

Twitter: This claim about election fraud is disputed.

Wikipedia says:

The 2008 United States Senate election in Minnesota took place on November 4, 2008. After a legal battle lasting over eight months, the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL) candidate, Al Franken, defeated Republican incumbent Norm Coleman in one of the closest elections in the history of the Senate, with Coleman’s Senate predecessor Dean Barkley taking third place. Franken took his oath of office on July 7, 2009, more than half a year after the end of Coleman’s term on January 3, 2009.[1]

When the initial count was completed on November 18, Franken was trailing Coleman by 215 votes.[2][3] The close margin triggered a mandatory recount.[4][5] After reviewing ballots that had been challenged during the recount and counting 953 wrongly rejected absentee ballots, the State Canvassing Board officially certified the recount results with Franken holding a 225-vote lead.[6][7][8]

On January 6, 2009, Coleman’s campaign filed an election contest and on April 13, a three-judge panel dismissed Coleman’s Notice of Contest and ruled that Franken had won the election by 312 votes.[9][10] Coleman’s appeal of the panel’s decision to the Minnesota Supreme Court was unanimously rejected on June 30,[11] and he subsequently conceded the election.

…The court dismissed Coleman’s suit “with prejudice” in its final ruling on April 13, finding that his claims had no merit and ordering the Coleman camp to pay the legal costs associated with Coleman’s failure to disclose information about Pamela Howell, a precinct election judge and witness in the case,[9] which was later determined to amount to $94,783.[91] In the same ruling, the court also rejected Coleman’s claim to exclude 132 missing ballots from the recount total and his request to adjust the results based on Coleman’s allegations of double-counted ballots…

In July 2010, Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, conducted a study in which they flagged 2,803 voters in the Senate race for examination, including 1,359 they suspected to be ineligible convicted felons in the largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul area.[110][111] Subsequent investigations of Minnesota Majority’s claims by election officials found that many of their allegations were incorrect. Some of the cases that were submitted involved mistaking a legal voter for a felon with the same name, others involved felons who had had their voting rights reinstated after serving their sentences, and others were felons who illegally registered to vote but did not vote in 2008 election.[112][113][114] Ramsey County officials narrowed their investigation to 180 cases, while Hennepin County examined 216 cases.[115]

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty said, “They [Minnesota Majority] seem to have found credible evidence that many felons who are not supposed to be voting actually voted in the Franken-Coleman election. I suspect they favored Al Franken. I don’t know that, but if that turned out to be true, they may have flipped the election.”[116] Columnist Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune called the idea that illegal voting by felons made a difference in the race “unbelievable” and the Minnesota Majority report “good fodder for a right-wing scare campaign.”[117]

As of July 2010, the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office had brought charges against 28 people.[111] In August 2010, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office received for investigation 110 alleged cases of voter fraud during the 2008 election. In October 2010, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office concluded that there was enough evidence to charge six people for voter fraud. “Three of the suspects face two felony charges. Three other suspects each face one felony charge.”[118] In October 2010, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced that charges would be brought against 43 felons for illegally voting in 2008.

When comparing Ann Coulter’s account of the election with other sources of information referenced in the Wikipedia entry, Ann’s story does not hold up. Throughout her Dec. 10, 2009 column, she shows herself as acting with reckless disregard of the truth.