Election Fraud is Rampant, and It's Not What You Think

Republicans have been screaming about voter fraud and have been using this almost-nonexistent crime to systematically disenfranchise millions of registered voters 

They'd like you to think (and many people do think) in-person voter fraud is rampant. And yet fraud by voters is not only rare, it's exceedingly rare.

In this and following posts, I'll talk about four types of election fraud: in-person voter fraud, petition fraud, irregularities at the polling place, and voter repression; that is, systematic attempts to disenfranchise legitimate voters and prevent registered voters from voting.

In-Person Voter Fraud

In-person voter fraud occurs when a voter intentionally casts a fraudulent vote in an election-- by voting twice, by voting in more than one location, or by impersonation another voter, alive or dead.

I'll hit you with some numbers in a moment, but first, when voter fraud does occur, it's typically something like this:

Last year, the Richland County Prosecutor’s Office received a report of voter fraud from the local board of elections. A man had voted twice: once with an absentee ballot and again on Election Day. 

Further investigation revealed the man was elderly and suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and he simply forgot about his first vote. Richland County First Assistant Prosecutor Brent Robinson said it would have been illogical and nearly impossible to prosecute the man for violating Ohio’s law against voting twice. 

Most allegations of double voting in Ohio end in a similar way. Local prosecutors said they rarely convict offenders of trying to rig elections. 

“It’s not that it never happens, but proven instances are quite rare,” said Daniel Tokaji, an election law professor at Ohio State University.

-- Balmert, 2012

There are lots of reports like this one-- just Google "voter fraud."

So, is in-person voter fraud a problem?

Here's what the Brennan Center for Justice has to say:

* Fraud by individual voters is both irrational and extremely rare. 

* Many vivid anecdotes of purported voter fraud have been proven false or do not demonstrate fraud. 

* Voter fraud is often conflated with other forms of election misconduct. 

* Raising the unsubstantiated specter of mass voter fraud suits a particular policy agenda. 

* Claims of voter fraud should be carefully tested before they become the basis for action.

Efforts to measure the extent of voter fraud by compiling criminal cases have indicated that the problem isn’t particularly widespread. One study last month, conducted by a group of journalism students through a project called News21, found 2,068 cases of alleged voter fraud in the U.S. since 2000, including 10 cases of voter impersonation.

-- Blalik, 2012

The most extensive study of  in-person voter fraud in the United States was conducted by News21, a Carnegie-Knight investigative reporting project.

To get the data, News21 reporters sent records requests to elections officers in all 50 states seeking every case of fraudulent elections activity, including registration fraud, absentee ballot fraud, voter impersonation fraud and casting an ineligible vote. News21 said it received no useful responses from several states. With some states, including Massachusetts, Oklahoma, South Carolina and South Dakota, the cases included in the database came from a survey of alleged election fraud conducted by the Republican National Lawyers Association. And in some states, some but not all local jurisdictions responded, and some responses were missing important details about each case. Despite those issues, News21 defends its work as "substantially complete" as the largest collection of election fraud cases gathered by anyone in the country.

-- Carson, 2012

News21 found 2068 cases of alleged election fraud in the United States between 2000 and 2112. That's election fraud, now, not voter fraud. Just under 31% of reported cases were suspected voter fraud-- that's 67 cases in 13 years or five cases per year. Most of those 67 cases were due to confusion, as with the Ohio man with Alzheimer's Syndrome described above.

In short, in-person voter fraud, while certain wrong, and while it should certainly be prosecuted when it occurs, is not much worth worrying about.

The right-wing nonprofit True the Vote is scrambling to find cases of voter fraud, but their case is built primarily on the twin pillars on voters registered in more than one state and deceased voters who remain on the rolls. They act as if every American who has moved to another state and registered to vote without deactivating their registration in their former state is a felon, or at least likely to become one.

Citing the federal requirement that citizens must cast ballots at their permanent residences, True the vote has alerted authorities about several hundred cases of what they consider interstate voting fraud and almost certainly isn't.

Certainly states are lax about removing the names of deceased voters from their records and certainly there's no bureaucratic mechanism for tracking people who move from state to state, but that doesn't correspond to widespread voter fraud. Conservative group Election Integrity Maryland, after an review of % of Maryland records, found (unsurprisingly) some 1500 deceased  people still on the rolls and just under 700 duplicate registrations-- most of people who had moved out of state. They discovered two people who became registered after they died-- probably because their paperwork was processed after their deaths; neither of them voted. Two dead voters showed up to cast ballots (unless the zombie apocalypse is upon us, this was certainly fraudulent), and one elderly woman had voted twice.

So yes, in-person voter fraud happens, and yes, it should be dealt with, but it's no cause for hysteria and it's certainly no cause for disenfranchizing legitimate voters-- both of which have occurred and are occurring.

Bottom Line-- in person voter fraud is not the widespread menace Republican fearmongers would have the populace believe.

Sources

Balmert, Jessie.  (2012, 4 November). Voter fraud: Prosecution of double voting rare. Coshocton (Ohio) Tribune. Read it here.

Blalik, Carl. (2012, 1 September). Counting voter fraud. Wall Street Journal. Read it here.

Carson, Corbit. (2012, 12 August). Exhaustive database of voter fraud cases turns up scant evidence that it happens. News21. Read it here.

Gazanijan, Glynis. (2012, 30 September). Dead people voted and registered to vote, watchdog group finds; hundreds of deceased still on rolls. MarylandReporter.com. Read it here.

Policy brief on the truth about voter fraud. Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. Read it here.

PolitFact Georgia. In-person voter fraud "a very rare phenomenon." Read it here.