{"id":135298,"date":"2020-11-11T10:25:06","date_gmt":"2020-11-11T18:25:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=135298"},"modified":"2022-10-23T05:01:36","modified_gmt":"2022-10-23T13:01:36","slug":"the-voter-fraud-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=135298","title":{"rendered":"The Voter Fraud Myth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jane Mayer writes in the Oct. 22, 2012 New Yorker<\/a>:<\/p>\n

[Hans] Von Spakovsky, who frequently appears on Fox News, is the co-author, with the columnist John Fund, of the recent book \u201cWho\u2019s Counting?,\u201d which argues that America is facing an electoral-security crisis. \u201cElection fraud, whether it\u2019s phony voter registrations, illegal absentee ballots, vote-buying, shady recounts, or old-fashioned ballot-box stuffing, can be found in every part of the United States,\u201d they write. The book connects these modern threats with sordid episodes from the American past: crooked inner-city machines, corrupt black bosses in the Deep South. Von Spakovsky and Fund conclude that electoral fraud is a \u201cspreading\u201d danger, and declare that True the Vote serves \u201can obvious need.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mainstream election experts say that Spakovsky has had an improbably large impact. Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, and the author of a recent book, \u201cThe Voting Wars,\u201d says, \u201cBefore 2000, there were some rumblings about Democratic voter fraud, but it really wasn\u2019t part of the main discourse. But thanks to von Spakovsky and the flame-fanning of a few others, the myth that Democratic voter fraud is common, and that it helps Democrats win elections, has become part of the Republican orthodoxy.\u201d In December, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, wrote, \u201cElection fraud is a real and persistent threat to our electoral system.\u201d He accused Democrats of \u201cstanding up for potential fraud\u2014presumably because ending it would disenfranchise at least two of its core constituencies: the deceased and double-voters.\u201d Hasen believes that Democrats, for their part, have made exaggerated claims about the number of voters who may be disenfranchised by Republican election-security measures. But he regards the conservative alarmists as more successful. \u201cTheir job is really done,\u201d Hasen says. \u201cIt\u2019s common now to assert that there is a need for voter I.D.s, even without any evidence.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, he noted, the Pew Center on the States found that more than 1.8 million people who had died were still registered to vote in America, and that 2.75 million people were registered to vote in multiple states. How many of these errors translate into fraudulent votes? \u201cIt is impossible to answer,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have the tools in place.\u201d But he cited a 2000 investigation, by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, of voting records in Georgia over the previous two decades; the paper reported that it had turned up fifty-four hundred instances of dead people being recorded as having voted. \u201cThat seems pretty substantial to me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He did not mention that the article\u2019s findings were later revised. The Journal-Constitution ran a follow-up article after the Georgia Secretary of State\u2019s office indicated that the vast majority of the cases appeared to reflect clerical errors. Upon closer inspection, the paper admitted, its only specific example of a deceased voter casting a ballot didn\u2019t hold up. The ballot of a living voter had been attributed to a dead man whose name was nearly identical…<\/p>\n

Nearly all scholars of America\u2019s system of locally run elections acknowledge chronic problems, including administrative incompetence, sloppy registration rolls, unreliable machinery, vote buying, and absentee-ballot fraud. But Robert Brandon, the president of the Fair Elections Legal Network and a longtime reformer, says that the current debate, \u201cwhich is about people impersonating another voter, is silly.\u201d He adds, \u201cYou can\u2019t steal an election one person at a time. You can by stuffing ballot boxes\u2014but voter I.D.s won\u2019t stop that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Von Spakovsky offered me the names of two experts who, he said, would confirm that voter-impersonation fraud posed a significant peril: Robert Pastor, the director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management, at American University, and Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia. Pastor, von Spakovsky noted, had spoken to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about being a victim of election fraud: voting in Georgia, he discovered that someone else had already voted under his name.<\/p>\n

When I reached Pastor, he clarified what had happened to him. \u201cI think they just mistakenly checked my name when my son voted\u2014it was just a mistake.\u201d He added, \u201cI don\u2019t think that voter-impersonation fraud is a serious problem.\u201d Pastor believes that, compared with other democracies, America is \u201csomewhere near the bottom in election administration,\u201d and thinks that voter I.D.s make sense\u2014but only if they are free and easily available to all, which, he points out, is not what Republican legislatures have proposed. Sabato, who supports the use of voter I.D.s under the same basic conditions, says of the voter-impersonation question, \u201cOne fraudulent vote is one too many, but my sense is that it\u2019s relatively rare today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hasen says that, while researching \u201cThe Voting Wars,\u201d he \u201ctried to find a single case\u201d since 1980 when \u201can election outcome could plausibly have turned on voter-impersonation fraud.\u201d He couldn\u2019t find one. News21, an investigative-journalism group, has reported that voter impersonation at the polls is a \u201cvirtually non-existent\u201d problem. After conducting an exhaustive analysis of election-crime prosecutions since 2000, it identified only seven convictions for impersonation fraud. None of those cases involved conspiracy.<\/p>\n

Lorraine Minnite, a public-policy professor at Rutgers, collated decades of electoral data for her 2010 book, \u201cThe Myth of Voter Fraud,\u201d and came up with some striking statistics. In 2005, for example, the federal government charged many more Americans with violating migratory-bird statutes than with perpetrating election fraud, which has long been a felony. She told me, \u201cIt makes no sense for individual voters to impersonate someone. It\u2019s like committing a felony at the police station, with virtually no chance of affecting the election outcome.\u201d A report by the Times in 2007 also found election fraud to be rare. During the Bush Administration, the Justice Department initiated a five-year crackdown on voter fraud, but only eighty-six people were convicted of any kind of election crime.<\/p>\n

Hasen, who calls von Spakovsky a leading member of \u201cthe Fraudulent Fraud Squad,\u201d told me that he respects many other conservative advocates in his area of expertise, but dismisses scholars who allege widespread voter-impersonation fraud. \u201cI see them as foot soldiers in the Republican army,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s just a way to excite the base. They are hucksters. They\u2019re providing fake scholarly support. They\u2019re not playing fairly with the facts. And I think they know it.\u201d<\/p>\n

…In the spring of 2008, as Obama was clinching the Democratic nomination for President, von Spakovsky issued a lengthy report on electoral fraud, titled \u201cStolen Identities, Stolen Votes.\u201d In an op-ed piece on the Fox News Web site, he argued that \u201cone doesn\u2019t have to look far to find instances of fraudulent ballots cast in actual elections by \u2018voters\u2019 who were the figments of active imaginations.\u201d Yet the most recent evidence he cited in his report was decades old: a grand-jury report documenting criminal collusion, from 1968 to 1982, among Brooklyn election officials and local machine politicians.<\/p>\n

Richard Hasen asked to see the grand-jury report, but von Spakovsky did not respond. (\u201cWhat am I\u2014his research assistant?\u201d he asked me.) Hasen has another explanation for von Spakovsky\u2019s refusal to produce the document: \u201cHe must have known it was weak.\u201d Hasen eventually hunted down his own copy. On his blog, he observed, \u201cMost of this fraud took place forty years ago,\u201d adding, \u201cWhen election officials collude with those committing fraud, a voter-I.D. requirement would not help in the slightest.\u201d<\/p>\n

…Von Spakovsky said, \u201cThe idea that there\u2019s some deep conspiracy is just laughable.\u201d His own work, however, has suggested that liberals engage in conspiracies. \u201cWho\u2019s Counting?\u201d opens with an insinuating account of how Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, was elected to the Senate in 2008. According to the book, there is \u201ccompelling\u201d evidence, compiled by a citizens\u2019 watchdog group, that \u201c1,099 ineligible felons voted illegally\u201d in the contest\u2014\u201cmore than three times\u201d Franken\u2019s victory margin. The subhead of the chapter is \u201cWould Obamacare have passed without voter fraud?\u201d<\/p>\n

Fox News and other conservative media outlets have promoted this argument. However, Mike Freeman, the Hennepin County Attorney, who oversees Minneapolis, told me, \u201cThose numbers are fraudulent. We investigated, and at the end of the day, out of over four hundred allegations in the county, we charged thirty-eight people. Their research was bad, sloppy, incredible. They are just liars.\u201d Some of the targeted voters weren\u2019t actually felons; others were on probation and hadn\u2019t realized that they remained ineligible to vote. To be convicted of voter fraud, a suspect needs to have criminal intent…<\/p>\n

Von Spakovsky has also presented a more recent case as a scandal. Last year, in an op-ed piece that was nationally syndicated, he wrote, \u201cA 2010 election in Missouri that ended in a one-vote margin of victory included 50 votes cast illegally by citizens of Somalia.\u201d He told me that these voters \u201ccould only speak Somali, even though to become a U.S. citizen you must learn English.\u201d Once again, when the case was examined by a judge, no fraud was found. Although the judge\u2019s ruling had been issued before the column appeared, von Spakovsky didn\u2019t mention it. He told me that the omission was justified, because the judge hadn\u2019t investigated \u201cthe citizenship issue.\u201d Yet the voters\u2019 citizenship was never in doubt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jane Mayer writes in the Oct. 22, 2012 New Yorker: [Hans] Von Spakovsky, who frequently appears on Fox News, is the co-author, with the columnist John Fund, of the recent book \u201cWho\u2019s Counting?,\u201d which argues that America is facing an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42874],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-voter-fraud"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=135298"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":145827,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135298\/revisions\/145827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=135298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=135298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=135298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}