Vote Fraud

Vote fraud disenfranchises Americans and poses a serious threat to both the integrity of and confidence in our electoral system. Opponents of measures to prevent vote fraud contend that its occurrence is either nonexistent or so rare as to be insignificant.

Vote fraud is insidious, committed quietly. And once it’s committed, it cannot be undone. Vote fraud contaminates the pool of votes, and if sufficiently extensive, will affect the outcome of an election. As elections determine who exercises political power, there is a motivation among some bad actors to cheat.

Vote fraud is rarely prosecuted for two main reasons. First, it is virtually impossible to identify the fraud before the damage is done as it is primarily committed through absentee and mail-in balloting; second, prosecuting the crime is expensive and is usually a low priority of prosecutors and local law enforcement more concerned with public safety. However, vote fraud is a crime that strikes at the center of our republic.

The principal weakness in our electoral system that fosters vote fraud is inaccurate voter registration rolls. The federal requirement that counties maintain clean, accurate voter rolls has been ignored over the years and actively resisted under the Obama Department of Justice.

Voter rolls should contain only the names of eligible residents of a jurisdiction, but in far too many counties, voter rolls bulge with the names of the dead, those who have moved away, non-citizens, fictional names and voters registered in more than one place.

A Pew Center on the States study in 2012 revealed that:

Approximately 24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations in the United States were no longer valid or were significantly inaccurate.
More than 1.8 million deceased individuals were listed as voters.
Approximately 2.75 million people had registrations in more than one state.

In nearly 200 counties around the nation, more people are registered to vote than the counties’ population of eligible citizens. Examples abound of non-citizens and convicted felons registered to vote. In Philadelphia, an ACRU lawsuit in 2016 revealed thousands of ineligible people on the voter rolls. A sampling of counties in Virginia also found hundreds of illegal registrations, according to a 2016 study by the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

In-person vote fraud, while far more rare than absentee voting, does happen, as shown by the video sting operations of Project Veritas, in which an impersonator at a polling place in the District of Columbia claimed to be then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. and easily obtained a ballot. In other Project Veritas videos political operatives openly discussed how to commit vote fraud in Wisconsin and other states.

The institutional Left has focused on preventing common-sense laws to require voters to prove they are who they claim they are, making the ridiculous and unprovable claim that photo ID laws discriminate against racial minorities and the poor. But, vote fraud is accommodated by other means such as extended voting periods and relaxed standards for acquiring absentee or mail-in ballots and not requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

Several reasonable actions should be adopted to guard against vote fraud:

enforce federal voter roll maintenance laws;
require photo ID to vote in person;
require voter ID and signature verification for absentee ballots;
limit early voting to no more than a week prior to an election;
require proof of U.S. citizenship;
encourage more states to participate in cooperative efforts to identify voters registered in more than one state.

Voting is a privilege of citizenship and only legal votes should be counted. The only way to stop vote fraud is to prevent it!

ACRU Commentary

Don’t Believe Voter Fraud Happens? Here Are More Examples

By Hans von Spakovsky In the interest of helping out the editorial writers and pundits of media outlets who don't think voter fraud occurs, I wanted to note just a few recent cases (and readers interested in seeing almost 200 more such cases can do so here.): In McAllen, Texas, two campaign workers (known as politiqueras in local parlance) who bribed voters with cocaine, beer, cigarettes and cash during a 2012 school board election have been sentenced separately to serve eight and four months in prison, respectively. U.S. District Court Judge Randy Crane called this election fraud "terrible" and said that "our country requires that our voting process be clear and free of fraud for democracy to work... it's dangerous for this to occur without consequence." A couple in Le Sueur, Minn., was charged with felony voter registration fraud for lying about where they lived so they could vote in a school bond referendum in another town. A woman in Dothan, Ala., was sentenced to six months in prison for her part in a voter fraud scheme that got a city commissioner re-elected. She was the second of the four people charged to have been found guilty of voter fraud in the case, which may have involved more than 100 absentee ballots.

Playing the Race Card in Court

There's more racism afoot in the land, and it fits the soft bigotry of lowered expectations. Did you know that minorities need more than a full month in which to cast a vote? And they can't be expected to show a photo ID like other voters. That would be asking too much of them. Who, you might ask, is perpetrating this libel about the missing adulthood of America's minorities? Why, the very people who claim to speak for them on all matters. The same ones who created redistributive welfare policies that destroyed inner-city families. The latest ploy that makes some citizens out to be imbeciles in need of a master is a legal attack on several election reform laws enacted in 2014. In Ohio, leftist groups have filed a lawsuit demanding that state officials restore more than a full month of voting before Election Day, plus other measures intended to eliminate the slightest inconvenience at having to register or to vote. They claim the new rules violate the First, 14th and 15th amendments and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, plus the Civil Rights Act of 1964. "This is the Left's new legal strategy to go after election reforms aimed at discouraging vote fraud," said J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department Voting Section attorney and current policy board member of the . Mr. Adams, who has successfully sued counties in Mississippi and Texas to clean up their voter rolls, added, "If they succeed in Ohio, they'll roll this out all over the country." On May 8, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative filed in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Ohio, alleging that election reforms enacted in 2014 by the Republican-led legislature that reined in the state's lax requirements were intended to burden people who tend to vote Democrat, especially minorities and young voters.

Making It Easy to Cheat

On a host of electoral integrity issues, the liberal position can be summarized in two words: enable cheating. You think that's too harsh? How else to explain the race-baiting rhetoric from President Obama on down against something as common-sense as voter photo ID laws, which the public supports by wide margins? Or the intense drive for Election Day registration, mail-in voting and earlier and earlier balloting, all of which make it harder to detect and prevent vote fraud? Or the opposition to any law ensuring that only citizens can vote? A case in point of the latter is the Obama administration's stiff-arming of two states that want to require proof of U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote. Kansas and Arizona, which already require proof of citizenship on state election forms, asked the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to include a requirement for proof of citizenship on the federal form. Backed by the Obama Justice Department, the EAC declined. The two states sued, won in U.S. District Court, but saw the verdict overturned in the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Now, the case is heading for the U.S. Supreme Court. In a brief submitted this past week asking the court to take the case, the provided key evidence -- federal voter registration forms -- exposing the shocking ease with which noncitizens can register to vote without any proof of citizenship.

Wisconsin Is Ground Zero in Voter ID Fight

Wisconsin is not only an electoral battleground state, it is ground zero in the fight to ensure honest elections. Failing to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2012 or to defeat him in the 2014 election, union-backed legal groups are continuing their efforts to try to make voter fraud easier to commit. Rebuffed by the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a petition at the U.S. Supreme Court asking the court to overturn Wisconsin's Voter ID law. On Thursday, Attorney General Brad Schimel's communications director Anne E. Schwartz responded to an email, saying only that, "We will continue to defend the Wisconsin Voter ID Law." Enacted in 2011, Act 23 requires voters to show one of several forms of photo identification before voting. Wisconsin is one of 17 states that have added a voter ID law following the Supreme Court's upholding of Indiana's photo ID law in 2008. A total of 34 states now require some form of ID to vote, according to the ACLU's petition.

One in Eight Voter Registrations Is Flawed, O’Keefe Video Demonstrates

By John Fund Filmmaker James O'Keefe has yet again demonstrated just how vulnerable our election system is to fraud. A Pew Center on the States study in 2012 found that one out of eight voter registrations is inaccurate, out-of-date, or a duplicate. Some 2.8 million people are registered in two or more states, and 1.8 million registered voters are dead. So O'Keefe decided to take some of the 700,000 "inactive" voters the Voting Integrity Project says are on the rolls in North Carolina, the site of one of the nation's most hotly contested Senate races, and see just how easy it would be to obtain a ballot in their name. Sadly, it was child's play as his video demonstrates.

How to Fraud-Proof Elections

By Edwin Meese III and Ken Blackwell Once upon a time, Americans got together on Election Day, went to the polls, and chose our leaders. Voting on the same day helped bind us together as self-governing citizens in a free republic. It even felt like a national holiday -- Independence Day without the fireworks. Except for those traveling or who are infirm and who can use absentee ballots, Election Day puts everyone in the same boat. As a civic exercise in equality, it is unparalleled. It has the added advantage of making vote fraud more difficult, since there is a very short window in which to commit it. But over the past few decades, election laws have been relaxed in the name of convenience, with "reforms" such as early voting, same-day registration, Sunday and evening voting hours, no-excuse absentee voting and allowing out-of-precinct ballots. All of these increase the possibility of vote fraud. At the same time, despite a clear mandate in the National Voter Registration Act (also known as the Motor Voter Law) to keep accurate registrations, the system has grown lax; election authorities have left millions on the voter rolls who should not be there.