Kevin Drum at Mother Jones takes another look at the myth of voter fraud, a dark tale being told over and over again by Republicans in order to justify regressive policies that make it far more difficult for people — especially those likely to support Democrats — to vote.
In her 2010 book, The Myth of Voter Fraud, Lorraine Minnite tracked down every single case brought by the Justice Department between 1996 and 2005 and found that the number of defendants had increased by roughly 1,000 percent under Ashcroft. But that only represents an increase from about six defendants per year to 60, and only a fraction of those were ever convicted of anything. A New York Times investigation in 2007 concluded that only 86 people had been convicted of voter fraud during the previous five years. Many of those appear to have simply made mistakes on registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, and more than 30 of the rest were penny-ante vote-buying schemes in local races for judge or sheriff. The investigation found virtually no evidence of any organized efforts to skew elections at the federal level.
Another set of studies has examined the claims of activist groups like Thor Hearne’s American Center for Voting Rights, which released a report in 2005 citing more than 100 cases involving nearly 300,000 allegedly fraudulent votes during the 2004 election cycle. The charges involved sensational-sounding allegations of double-voting, fraudulent addresses, and voting by felons and noncitizens. But in virtually every case they dissolved upon investigation. Some of them were just flatly false, and others were the result of clerical errors. Minnite painstakingly investigated each of the center’s charges individually and found only 185 votes that were even potentially fraudulent.
The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University has focused on voter fraud issues for years. In a 2007 report they concluded that “by any measure, voter fraud is extraordinarily rare.” In the Missouri election of 2000 that got Sen. Bond so worked up, the Center found a grand total of four cases of people voting twice, out of more than 2 million ballots cast. In the end, the verified fraud rate was 0.0003 percent.
One key detail: The best-publicized fraud cases involve either absentee ballots or voter registration fraud (for example, paid signature gatherers filling in “Mary Poppins” on the forms, a form of cheating that’s routinely caught by registrars already). But photo ID laws can’t stop that: They only affect people actually trying to impersonate someone else at the polling place. And there’s virtually no record, either now or in the past, of this happening on a large scale.
What’s more, a moment’s thought suggests that this is vanishingly unlikely to be a severe problem, since there are few individuals willing to risk a felony charge merely to cast one extra vote and few organizations willing or able to organize large-scale in-person fraud and keep it a secret. When Indiana’s photo ID law, designed to prevent precisely this kind of fraud, went to the Supreme Court, the state couldn’t document a single case of it happening. As the majority opinion in Crawford admits, “The record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history.”
This mountain of evidence suggests to most liberals that there’s another agenda at work: suppressing votes from Democratic-leaning populations. And Minnite’s research confirms a partisan tilt. Today’s voter ID laws are championed “almost exclusively by Republicans,” she told me, and, with only one exception, have been enacted only when Republicans have unified control in a state capitol.
That is not a coincidence. This is a deliberate political strategy to disenfranchise as many people who are likely to vote for their opponents as possible. The disenfranchising of tens or hundreds of thousands of voters in a state is far, far more likely to swing an election than a handful of people voting twice or impersonating another voter, at great risk to themselves.
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Ben P
July 10, 2012 at 9:38 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
As ridiculous as it is, you’re behind the curve on this one.
If you read some conservative sites where voter fraud comes up every so often the new message being thrown around is “Because they don’t check ID’s, the system isn’t set up to catch fraud and the fact that we haven’t caught any people voting fraudulently isn’t evidence it doesn’t happen.”
I shit you not, the lack of evidence of fraud is not evidence that it doesn’t happen….
Michael Heath
July 10, 2012 at 10:00 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Popular new conservative justification reported by Ben P [he's paraphrasing]:
Ben P writes:
I don’t think this conservative point is absurd; I think it has merit. We don’t do a good job of measuring the quality of the electoral process or that process’ margin of error. However, I am confident their leaders’ motivation is to suppress votes to gain an electoral advantage with no concern regarding the integrity of the electoral process. Even if it requires them to infringe upon some Americans’ right to vote.
Our electoral process has more in common with primitives dipping their fingers in blood than it does with modern approaches to determining a result where we approach a high level of statistical confidence the reported outcome is reflective with the behavior of the population which voted or intended to vote which reveals their lack of ethics.
So while we can be confident Republicans have only nefarious motivations for changing voter laws, that doesn’t mean our electoral process has acheives process optimization. The best example is the Bush v. Gore in FL. We can be near-certain we don’t know who won the popular vote in Florida, that both the result at the time votes were counted and the effort by certain media outlets to determine who won both came up with results inside the margin of the error for that process. Where the odds VP could have achieved a run-off win with high statistical confidence was good.
I would be surprised if voter fraud played a factor in the wrong result being reported relative to the actions of the population for nearly all elections. However it would be nice to both understand the integrity of the electoral process and have mitigation actions required by law in place if a result was within the margin of error for the electoral process used.
I think it’s important to note this because while we know conservatives don’t have the interests of the country playing a factor relative to their actions and advocacy, that shouldn’t necessarily cause non-conservatives to always take the opposite position since that might also be a position which harms the republic. If I were a Democratic legislator I would probably obstruct Republican voter ID mandates, but it’d leave a bitter taste in my mouth that we live in a country where such issues cause us to select the least worst position when good positions are also available.
evilDoug
July 10, 2012 at 10:01 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“…in local races for judge or sheriff”
Criminal activity in selecting law enforcement officials?
Unless someone is actually paid to vote fraudulently, it does seem that anyone brighter than a fence post isn’t likely to knowingly do it. Suppose one of the dreaded omnipotent illegal aliens votes. Is that not a sign that said person wants to behave like a responsible citizen of their country of residence? Isn’t that generally a good thing?
slc1
July 10, 2012 at 10:13 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Re Michael Heath @ #2
Actually, the race in Florida was decided by at least 2000 votes in Palm Beach Co. being disqualified due to the confusing ballot there. The evidence is overwhelming that all of those voters intended to vote for Gore but, because of the confusing ballot, voted for Buchanan and Gore, causing their votes not to be counted. This was the reason that the networks got it wrong. At least one of the sample precincts was in Palm Beach Co. and the exit polls indicated a large Gore vote which didn’t happen because of disqualified ballots.
baal
July 10, 2012 at 10:25 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“I don’t think this conservative point is absurd; I think it has merit.”
I disagree. The Bush admin tasked the various State attorney generals with finding fraud by actual voters[1]. They not only failed to find fraud by individual voters but they also ‘fired’ (among other reasons) the seven attorneys general who gave up or refused to look.
There are a trivial number of cases where felons voted (in State where getting the right to vote back is a separate court proceeding the ex-felon must bring) or screw ups associated with moving. I could google examples but the numbers are really low.
Now, if we wanted to do a simple non-disenfranchising method, we’d require the polling places have everyone* stick their thumb in dye.
*meaning everyone, no exceptions for districts with above average median incomes.
Raging Bee
July 10, 2012 at 10:34 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Has Ron Paul publicly broken with his party over this blatant attack on individual liberty? We all know how good he is at making a big splash in the media when he wants to, so I’m sure we’d have heard from him on this — if he actually had anything to say, that is…
Lycanthrope
July 10, 2012 at 11:58 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Meanwhile, Republicans, up in Canada there is compelling evidence of electoral fraud by the Conservative Party on a federal level, and who knows what will be done about it because the investigation is apparently closed to the public.
d cwilson
July 10, 2012 at 1:35 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Voter fraud is just about the most impractical way to influence an election. You’d need to get thousands of people to vote under assumed names (and hope none of the real people whose identities they stole show up to vote first) just to influence the outcome of single congressional district.
It’s much easier to hack the voting machines, having precinct supervisor “lose” about a bunch of ballots, or just make it harder for people who tend to vote for your opponents to vote in the first place.
Oh wait, those are all tactics the GOP likes.
John Pieret
July 10, 2012 at 3:29 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The Texas official in charge of the elections division who testified in the lawsuit seeking to overturn the Department of Justice’s block of the Texas voter ID law had this to say:
[Keith] Ingram also said that statewide, his office had identified at least 239 dead people listed as having voted in the past year. Under cross-examination he said clerical error may have accounted for such a high figure and that only four people had “definitely” been tied to voter fraud.
Four whole cases! And the law, according to the DOJ, will potentionally disenfranchize up to 1.4 million voters who lack any form of acceptable identification under Texas’ new law.
velociraptor
July 10, 2012 at 8:19 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ed, et al:
The motivation behind the GOP trying so mightily to suppress the vote is something they flat-out admitted back in 1980:
chezjuan
July 10, 2012 at 10:10 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’ve always felt that rather than making citizens jump through hoops to vote, the government should have to jump through hoops in order to prevent someone from voting.
When it comes to basic rights and freedoms, we should always strive to encourage them instead of suppressing them.
meg
July 11, 2012 at 12:26 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
There’s two assumptions I think that people believing in voter fraud make:
1. That people care enough to engage in it. (anyone have any good stats on voter apathy?)
2. That enough people can be made to care about it and therefore act illegally in order to make an impact. I suspect very few races get down to a handful (ie, under 100) votes, so the scale of the voter fraud would need to be enormous in order to have any real impact.