In the fall of 2002, just over a year after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft summoned a group of federal prosecutors to Washington. He had a new mission he wanted them to focus on: voter fraud. “Votes have been bought, voters intimidated and ballot boxes stuffed,” he told the attendees of the Justice Department’s inaugural Voting Integrity Symposium. “Voters have been duped into signing absentee ballots believing they were applications for public relief. And the residents of cemeteries have infamously shown up at the polls on Election Day.”
This might seem an unusually dark portrait of America’s electoral system, coming from the nation’s top prosecutor. But Ashcroft spoke from personal experience. In 2000, as a U.S. senator from Missouri, he lost his reelection bid to a dead man. His opponent, Democratic Governor Mel Carnahan, died in a plane crash three weeks before Election Day. It was too late to remove the governor’s name from the ballot, so his wife, Jean, announced she would serve his term. Mel Carnahan won by 49,000 votes. Ashcroft and his fellow Missouri Republicans were outraged. Skeptical that voters might simply have preferred any Carnahan to him, Ashcroft and other Republicans accused Democrats in St. Louis of trying to steal the election by keeping the polls open later than usual. They dubbed it a “major criminal enterprise.” That December, George W. Bush nominated the out-of-work Ashcroft to be his first attorney general.
Ashcroft didn’t mention any of this in his speech, but the subtext was hard to ignore. “There is nothing funny about winning an election with stolen votes,” he said. “All of us pay the price for voting fraud.” To combat this, he declared, the Justice Department had launched a new “voting access and integrity initiative.” This was not the kind of announcement that was grabbing headlines at the time. Much of the country’s attention was focused on the mounting discussion of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. But voter fraud was a preoccupation of conservatives, who had nursed a variety of conspiracy theories stemming from the disputed 2000 election that put Bush in office.
In the closest presidential race in a century, Bush had eked out just 271 electoral votes. His opponent, Al Gore, had taken the popular vote by 540,000 ballots. Many Republicans believed the popular vote had been stolen and voter fraud was to blame. They talked of fraudulent absentee ballots and ex-felons voting illegally in Florida. Scott Jennings, who worked with Karl Rove as the White House associate director of political affairs, told investigators from the Office of the Inspector General that “many Republicans believed that fraudulent registration by Democratic Party voters in New Mexico was a widespread problem and that it had cost President Bush the state in the 2000 presidential election.” (Gore won New Mexico by 366 votes.) Later, when Bush ran for reelection in 2004, Rove himself went on Fox News and told Sean Hannity he was concerned about voter fraud in Ohio and other battleground states. “There are multiple registrations on the rolls,” Rove said. “There are felons who are ineligible to vote who are registered on the rolls.”
Democrats, for their part, complained that voter fraud wasn’t the crime that needed investigating. It was voter suppression, like the purge of voter rolls in Florida, that they said had disproportionately targeted African-American voters. But Democrats weren’t in power, so they didn’t get to decide what the Justice Department would spend its time on.
Ashcroft commissioned the nation’s 93 U.S. attorneys to make voting fraud a priority of their offices. Over the next four years, those prosecutors launched more than 300 investigations. But in the end, the government had little to show for it. On July 26, 2006, the day before Bush signed a renewal of the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department released a fact sheet summarizing the Voting Integrity Initiative’s accomplishments. Federal prosecutors had charged 119 people with election crimes and convicted just 86. The worst examples were vote-buying schemes in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia that helped keep local politicians in power. Cases that had fixated GOP officials—like the “major criminal enterprise” in St. Louis—were not substantiated. Instead, most of the cases involved individuals who had cast a single ballot that they shouldn’t have, or hadn’t even voted at all but simply had registered improperly. Some of them went to prison. At least one person was deported. The targets that ended up getting the most attention weren’t the alleged fraudsters but the handful of U.S. attorneys who didn’t push hard enough for prosecutions and were forced to resign.
…Eleven years after the books were closed on Ashcroft’s probe, another voter fraud investigation is gearing up. Once again, it is being driven by a Republican president who is convinced that he was robbed of the popular vote by a massive conspiracy, larger perhaps than even Bush’s administration had contemplated. In late November, Donald Trump tweeted: “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” In January, he told congressional leaders that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally and cost him the popular vote. He didn’t stop there. Trump promised to form a commission, headed by Vice President Mike Pence, to investigate. In a March 22 interview with Time magazine, Trump said, “I think I will be proved right” about the 3 million illegal votes. He elaborated: “When I say that, I mean mostly they register wrong, in other words, for the votes, they register incorrectly, and/or illegally. And they then vote. You have tremendous numbers of people. In fact I’m forming a committee on it.”
Pence has yet to launch his version of what Ashcroft attempted in 2002, and the very fact that the inquiry is not being run out of the Justice Department indicates that it might proceed very differently. But it wouldn’t be a waste of time for the former Indiana governor (who himself was accused of voter suppression in October) to spend some time studying what happened the last time a Republican administration went looking for a national web of illegal activity at the ballot box. If anything, the results of Pence’s commission might be even less spectacular than before. Elections experts say that’s because voter rolls are cleaner now than they were then, voting systems have been updated in many jurisdictions and stricter voter ID laws are in force. Yet, despite skepticism from high-ranking Republicans in Congress, some conservatives who were involved in the original investigation and who are pushing hardest for the new inquiry insist that the failure to prove widespread fraud is not evidence it doesn’t exist, only that the pursuit wasn’t aggressive enough. It’s a fixation that makes voting experts shake their heads.
…their counterparts in Washington state were busy pressuring U.S. Attorney John McKay to investigate that state’s highly contested 2004 governor’s race. After three recounts, Democrat Christine Gregoire beat Republican Dino Rossi by 129 votes. Newspapers called it the closest gubernatorial race in American history. Rossi sued to have the results overturned, alleging that hundreds of felons had voted illegally and there were mistakes in the way ballots were counted. But the Republicans never discovered which candidate the felons voted for, so Superior Court Judge John Bridges could not determine whether they swayed the outcome of the election. He also found no evidence of voter fraud.
…Some U.S. Attorneys had better luck finding election crimes to prosecute than others, but they weren’t in the big cities like Los Angeles and New York, where Democrats typically rack up their biggest wins. In Appalachia, local politicians had a long tradition of paying constituents for their votes. In Wisconsin, felons voted before their civil rights had been restored. In Florida and Alaska, undocumented immigrants registered to vote when they received a card in the mail or at the DMV. This wasn’t the widespread identity fraud Republicans decried in news conferences, but it did send people to prison.
The feds convicted 27 people in vote-buying schemes in eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia. One Democratic county manager paid poor, handicapped and illiterate people to vote for him. He was still in office in 2004 when he was sentenced to just over two years in prison.
Other criminals included a sheriff, city police chief and a Circuit Court clerk in West Virginia. Prosecutors said the clerk, a Democrat, and his associates got precinct captains to pay people $20 to vote for a slate of preferred candidates in a May 2004 primary, with the goal of controlling county government. “This seems to be something that is just in the blood of people in southern West Virginia,” former West Virginia Secretary of State Ken Hechler told the Associated Press in 2005. “They’re always looking for ways to get away with this.”
…In 2012, the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States gave like-minded Republicans reason to cheer. Pew released a report declaring 24 million voter registration records were no longer valid and the nation’s registration systems needed a major upgrade. “Study: 1.8 million dead people still registered to vote,” read a National Public Radio headline when the report was first released. The findings gave ammunition to conservative groups like True the Vote, who were mobilizing volunteers around the country to analyze registration rolls and raise fears about voter fraud.
But Pew was not trying to scare people; it was trying to solve the problem. “There was no indication of fraud,” says David Becker, lead author of the Pew study. “It is a big leap from having an out-of-date record to intentionally attempting to cast a fraudulent ballot.” Along with the study, Pew launched a nonprofit, the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), and several red and blue states immediately signed up to join. The center compares voter registration data to information from DMVs, the U.S. Postal Service, and the Social Security Index, and allows states to share data to verify whether a voter has moved or died.
Much has changed in the five years since the report was released. Thirty-four states now offer online voter registration, and 20 are part of ERIC. Becker says it has helped correct about 5 million records and register 1 million to 2 million more voters. “The states have gone a long way toward correcting that administrative inefficiency in the system,” he says.
…“Just because someone can fill out a registration form doesn’t meant they get on a [voter] list, doesn’t mean they cast a ballot, doesn’t meant the ballot is counted,” Becker says. “There’s a variety of checks in place … that would easily prevent widespread fraud.”
Studies conducted by academics and secretaries of state have found noncitizen voting to be extremely rare. There are small-scale examples, such as the Texas city councilwoman who was sentenced to five years in prison for registering noncitizens to vote during a 2006 primary. But Lorraine Minnite, a public policy professor at Rutgers, studied the Justice Department’s voter fraud crackdown during the Bush years and found that only 14 noncitizens were convicted of voting between 2002 and 2005.
