Luke Ford

From Harvard’s Kennedy School, released November 6, 2020:

Proponents of stricter voting laws often claim restrictions are necessary to prevent voter fraud, but there is little evidence to support this assertion. President Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that widespread voter fraud was committed by his opponents in the 2016 election, asserting that “there were three to five million illegal votes cast in the 2016 election.”102 On November 27, 2016, the President tweeted: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”103 On January 25, 2017, Trump tweeted: “I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and….even, those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time). Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!”104 The White House produced no evidence to support these claims, which seem to have been intended to encourage regulation to suppress voting, not combat fraud.

Claims of widespread voter fraud have been made without evidence by other Republican officials. Kris Kobach, former Secretary of State of Kansas, has been outspoken campaigner against voter fraud – for example, claiming without evidence that “fraudulent votes tipped the election in Minnesota for (former Senator Al) Franken.”105 In 2005, the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee stated in a report that “voter fraud continues to plague our nation’s federal elections, diluting and canceling out the lawful votes of the vast majority of Americans.”106 The report contained no credible evidence to back up the claim.

Since 2018, there have continued to be multiple accusations of election fraud again presented without evidence. In the 2018 elections, there were allegations of fraud in Florida and Arizona made by Republican politicians. In Florida’s Senate race, Republican Rick Scott filed a lawsuit alleging “rampant fraud” in the counties that heavily favor Democrats because the counties took longer to tally the votes.107 The lawsuit led to a Broward County Circuit judge ordering the Broward County Supervisor of Elections to release records requested by Scott and the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee related to voting tabulations. The records released did not include any evidence to support the accusations of fraud, and the Florida Department of State, which oversees elections, did not receive or observe any credible evidence of fraud or criminal activity.108

In Arizona’s 2018 Senate race, the Arizona Republican Party accused the Maricopa County Recorder of “premeditated destruction of evidence” after “voting irregularities” in the election. However, no evidence of voter fraud was produced and Republican Martha McSally conceded the race to Democrat Krysten Synema. In Kentucky, Governor Matt Bevin claimed that there were a “number of significant irregularities” and “thousands of absentee ballots that were illegally counted” in the November 2019 gubernatorial election.109 No evidence was produced to back up this claim and Bevin eventually conceded the race after losing a recount.110

Bipartisan studies have concluded that there has been little evidence of widespread voter fraud in modern American elections. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has compiled a nationwide database of charges of voter fraud over 37 years (from 1982 to 2019). During this period, 1,085 charges resulted in criminal convictions, an average of just 29 convictions nationally per year.111 A 2017 national voting study by the Brennan Center for Justice, an academic policy center and think tank, concluded very few noncitizens voted in the 2016 election. Across 42 jurisdictions studied, election officials who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. In other words, improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001% of the 2016 votes in those jurisdictions.112 Forty of the jurisdictions — all but two of the 42 studied — reported no known incidents of noncitizen voting in 2016. In the ten counties with the largest populations of noncitizens in 2016, only one reported any instances of noncitizen voting, consisting of fewer than 10 votes.

In California, Virginia and New Hampshire — the states where President Trump claimed the problem of noncitizen voting was especially acute — no official identified an incident of noncitizen voting in 2016.

In 2002, the Justice Department established the Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative to prosecute voter fraud. From 2002 to 2006, just 86 people across the country were convicted of ballot fraud offenses.113 Voter fraud convictions were an infinitesimal part of the overall vote of more than 110 million votes cast nationwide.

In February 2017, President Trump established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to investigate voter fraud in the 2016 election. The Commission found no significant evidence of voter fraud and was disbanded in January 2018 after it became the target of eight lawsuits accusing it of violating federal laws ranging from transparency to discrimination.114 Documents released from the lawsuits, including e-mails and PowerPoint presentations from the two meetings held by the panel, contained no evidence of widespread voter fraud.115, 116 A 2017 study published in the Electoral Studies Journal examined President Trump’s accusations of voter fraud by looking closely at three states where Trump claimed such fraud took place: New Hampshire, Virginia, and California. The study found “little evidence consistent with widespread and systematic fraud, . . . no evidence of problems in the vein raised by Donald Trump, . . . [and] no suspicious patterns in result timing” that would imply a “rigged” election.117 The study’s results were “consistent with various state-level investigations conducted in the initial months of 2017, all of which have failed to find any evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 General Election.”118

In an earlier preliminary study by The New York Times, 26 states and the District of Columbia reported no credible allegations of voter fraud in the 2016 election, and eight states reported only one credible allegation. The highest numbers of credible allegations were very low: Tennessee (40 allegations out of 4.3 million votes cast in the primary and general elections) and Georgia (25 allegations out of 4.1 million votes cast in the primary and general elections). There was no evidence of widespread fraud.119 A 2014 study published in the Electoral Law Journal looked for evidence of voter impersonation, the type of fraud targeted by strict voter ID laws and later cited as a basis for President Trump’s short-lived Advisory Commission. The study found few reports of impersonation and concluded that “the proportion of the population reporting voter impersonation is indistinguishable from that reporting abduction by extraterrestrials.”120 (Nor has there been significant evidence of fraud in voting by mail; see section on “Response to the Novel Coronavirus,” below.) In fact, the only significant case of voter fraud in recent years has been the case of a Republican political operative accused of ballot tampering, perjury, and obstruction of justice in connection with the 2018 congressional race in North Carolina. The case is currently pending in state district court.121

Benford's Law.

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 11, 2020

According to Wikipedia: “Walter Richard Mebane, Jr. (born November 30, 1958) is a University of Michigan professor of political science and statistics and an expert on detecting electoral fraud. He has authored numerous articles on potentially fraudulent election results, including a series of notes on the results of the Iranian presidential election, 2009.[1] He authored a paper[2] disputing the Organization of American States’s claim of fraud in the 2019 Bolivian general election as well.[3] He also drafted a paper regarding the possibility of frauds on both of 2 major parties in the 2020 South Korean general election from a statistical point of view.”

Walter Mebane is the best known political scientist who has used Benford’s Law to try to detect voter fraud.

Professor Mebane writes November 10, 2020:

As vote counting is drawing to a close in the 2020 presidential election in the United States, some1 are claiming that application of Benford’s Law to the precinct vote counts from a few counties and cities give evidence of election fraud…

It is widely understood that the first digits of precinct vote counts are not useful for trying to diagnose election frauds. See for example the discussion in Carter Center (2005) and Pericchi and Torres (2011). The first digit is largely determined by the number of voters in each precinct, as usually—and especially in small jurisdictions such as individual cities and counties—the share of the votes received by parties or candidates does not vary all that greatly across precincts. Consider for example the densities in Figure 1 for votes from Chicago. The Biden/Harris ticket on average received a proportion of about .82 of the votes, and the Figure shows that the shape of the Biden/Harris vote count distribution pretty closely mirrors the shape of the distribution of votes cast. Trump/Pence received on average about .17 of the votes, but the Trump/Pence vote count distribution has a couple of hitches: for low counts the distribution reflects that in many precincts Trump/Pence vote counts are single digits.

Clearly the first digits of the Biden/Harris counts will most frequently be 3, 4 or 5. That non-Benford’s Law pattern simply relects the distribution of precinct sizes (presuming turnout did not vary that much across the city),2 given the strong support for Biden/Harris across the whole city. The first-digit distribution has nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of election fraud…

To date I’ve not heard of any substantial irregularities having occurred anywhere, and the particular datasets examined in this paper give essentially no evidence that election frauds occurred.

Professor Richard Hasen writes in The Atlantic:

Despite the clear math showing that Joe Biden has won the election, President Donald Trump has refused to concede. He has directed his legal team to keep on fighting to try to overturn the results of the election, including in a new 105-page federal-court filing in Pennsylvania. These legal maneuvers are unlikely to pay off in the form of a second term for Trump; he would need the equivalent of three consecutive Hail Mary passes to stay in office.

But what Trump and his legal team are doing can nevertheless cause real harm to the country going forward, should millions of people believe Trump’s false statements that Biden won the election through fraud. It is this near certainty, and not the long-shot possibility of Trump staying in office, that is reason for grave concern.

The state of play can be described as follows: Biden appears very likely to win 306 Electoral College votes, 36 more than he needs for the presidency. This is a comfortable lead. Recounts in even the closest states, where the candidates are 10,000 to 20,000 votes apart, are extremely unlikely to change the election results; the most recent Wisconsin recount, in 2016, shifted the result by 571 votes. And nothing in those closest states indicates the kind of systemic failure that could lead to a more dramatic reversal.

The lawsuits filed in Pennsylvania and elsewhere are highly unlikely to go anywhere. The most recent complaint filed in federal court in Pennsylvania amounts to virtually nothing. Its core idea, that the different procedures for voting by mail and voting in person constitute an equal-protection violation, is ludicrous.

First, the differences between mail-in and absentee voting were obvious for months and nothing prevented the Trump campaign from suing earlier over this; a late suit now is barred by a legal doctrine called laches, which says that you cannot simply wait until after an election you don’t win to sue over an election problem you could see beforehand.

Further, having different procedures for mail-in and in-person balloting does not create an equal-protection violation. If this claim succeeds, it would mean that voting was unconstitutional across the entire country. The claim is especially weak when voters had the choice to vote using either system. The other claims in the complaint are mostly retreads of issues that have been rejected legally, factually, or both in other lawsuits. There has been no proof of widespread fraud.

Even if some of the claims were to have merit, a strong argument exists that federal courts should not get involved. The Electoral Count Act, passed after the disputed 1876 presidential election, conceives of a state role, not a federal role, for resolving fights over the election, and federal courts will likely want to let states decide. A federal ruling could endanger the ability of a state to submit its Electoral College votes by the December 8 safe-harbor deadline; Congress cannot challenge Electoral College slates submitted by that date.

More important, this quixotic lawsuit presents no path to an ultimate Trump victory. The Trump campaign has not provided a good reason for a federal court to step in and delay certification. Nor has it provided any evidence showing that there were tens of thousands of ballots cast illegally for Biden or of legal ballots not counted for Trump. That kind of showing should be necessary to get any relief, and likely from a state rather than a federal court. Biden is currently ahead by about 45,000 votes in Pennsylvania, and may well be ahead by 100,000 when all the votes are counted.

And even if Trump somehow overturned the results in Pennsylvania, that would not be enough to flip the results in the Electoral College. In Arizona, where Biden now leads by about 15,000 votes, the Trump campaign has filed a lawsuit that could call at most 200 votes into question. And even overturning Pennsylvania and Arizona is not enough to make up for Biden being 36 votes beyond the Electoral College threshhold.

According to Wikipedia:

According to the New Yorker, von Spakovsky has promoted “the myth that Democratic voter fraud is common, and that it helps Democrats win elections”.[5]

Von Spakovsky has supported his claims about the extent of voter fraud by citing a 2000 investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which purported to find 5400 instances of deceased people in Georgia voting in the last two decades.[5] The Journal-Constitution later revised its findings, noting that it had no evidence of a single deceased person voting and that the vast majority of the instances were due to clerical errors.[5]

In an interview with the New Yorker, von Spakovsky cited two scholars who he said could substantiate that voter-impersonation fraud was a significant threat: Robert Pastor of American University and Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia.[5] Von Spakovsky said that Pastor had personally experienced voter impersonation, but Pastor refuted von Spakovsky’s claim, saying, “I think they just mistakenly checked my name when my son voted—it was just a mistake. I don’t think that voter-impersonation fraud is a serious problem.”[5] Both Pastor and Sabato said that they would only support voter ID laws if voter IDs were made free and easily available to all, which is not what Republicans have tried.[5] Sabato, the author of “Dirty Little Secrets,” also described voter impersonation as “relatively rare today.”[5] In a 2011 article published by the Heritage Foundation, von Spakovsky again referred to Sabato as an authority to establish the existence of common voter fraud, along with “Stealing Elections,” a book by John Fund, whose claims of voter fraud have been extensively debunked,[32][33] and whom he neglects to identify as the co-author of a book they jointly wrote. He describes the efforts of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, his colleague both at the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity and Heritage, to expose the alleged existence of extensive voter fraud, as “carefully described research,” although Kobach’s claims have also been shown to be vastly overstated.[34]

In a court decision, Fish v. Kobach, US District Court Judge Julie A. Robinson ruled that von Spakovsky’s claims of widespread voter fraud were not in fact found to be backed up with provable researched cases. Judge Robinson wrote that she gave his testimony little weight because it was “premised on several misleading and unsupported examples of non-citizen voter registration, mostly outside the State of Kansas.” She also noted that during the proceedings, Mr. von Spakovsky “could not identify any expert on the subject of non-citizen voter registration.” When he tried to use a list of 30 people provided by a Kansas election official as proof of voter fraud in one county, Judge Robinson wrote in her decision: “He later admitted during cross-examination that he had no personal knowledge as to whether or not any of these individuals had in fact falsely asserted U.S. citizenship when they became registered to vote and he did not examine the facts of these individual cases.”[35] Judge Robinson found witnesses for the defense were often found to be not credible, finding: “Defendant’s expert Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, ‘a think tank whose mission [is to] formulate and promote conservative public policies’.” Von Spakovsky “…cited a U.S. GAO study for the proposition that the GAO ‘found that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 individuals called for jury duty from voter registration roles over a two-year period in just one U.S. district court were not U.S. citizens’.” However, on cross-examination, he admitted that the GAO study contained information on a total of eight district courts; half reported that not one non-citizen had been called for jury duty. The three remaining district courts reported that less than 1% of those called for jury duty from voter rolls were noncitizens. Therefore, his report misleadingly described the single district court with the highest percentage of people reporting that they were noncitizens, while omitting mention of the seven other courts described in the GAO report, including four that had zero incidents of noncitizens on voting rolls.[36] Robinson said, “While von Spakovsky’s lack of academic background is not fatal to his credibility …., his clear agenda and misleading statements … render his opinions unpersuasive.”

According to Professor Richard L. Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California at Irvine, “there are a number of people who have been active in promoting false and exaggerated claims of voter fraud and using that as a pretext to argue for stricter voting and registration rules. And von Spakovsky’s at the top of the list.”[4] Hasen said that Spakovsky’s appointment to Donald Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity was a “a big middle finger” from Trump to people “serious about fixing problems with our elections.”