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Approximately 24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations in the United States were no longer valid or were significantly inaccurate.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

The Truth about Voter ID: An ACRU Special Report

By Don Feder No reform is more necessary for the integrity of the electoral process - and none has been subjected to more savage and disingenuous attacks -- than voter ID laws. Of all these, the most outrageous is the charge that voter ID is the same as Jim Crow -- the racist system that was used to disenfranchise Southern blacks for generations after Reconstruction. Voter ID laws currently in place in 20 states - though some have been delayed by activist courts or are being challenged by Eric Holder's Justice Department - require voters to present a valid photo ID, like a driver's license, before voting. J. Christian Adams, formerly with the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, warns: Liberal foundations, public interest law firms and advocacy groups have created a permanent network of experts and organizations devoted to an arcane but critical task: monopolizing the narrative on elections laws and procedures, Cloaking their actions in the rhetoric of civil rights and the right to vote, they seek to affect the outcome of elections. They challenge any efforts to protect the integrity of the ballot box by denying the possibility of vote fraud and crying "Jim Crow." Opponents of voter ID take a three-prong approach to defeating the reform. First, they argue that it's unnecessary -- that voter fraud is so rare as to be virtually non-existent. This constitutes a denial of both history and reality. Election fraud has always been with us, from ballot-box stuffing and the graveyard vote to voting by illegal immigrants. By requiring voters to prove their identity, ID laws help to ensure honest elections.

Here Comes the 2014 Voter Fraud

In the past few months, a former police chief in Pennsylvania pleaded guilty to voter fraud in a town-council election. That fraud had flipped the outcome of a primary election. Former Connecticut legislator Christina Ayala has been indicted on 19 charges of voter fraud, including voting in districts where she didn't reside. (She hasn't entered a plea.) A Mississippi grand jury indicted seven individuals for voter fraud in the 2013 Hattiesburg mayoral contest, which featured voting by ineligible felons and impersonation fraud. A woman in Polk County, Tenn., was indicted on a charge of vote-buying--a practice that the local district attorney said had too long "been accepted as part of life" there. Now come the midterm elections on Nov. 4. What is the likelihood that your vote won't count? That your vote will, in effect, be canceled or stolen as a consequence of mistakes by election officials or fraudulent votes cast by campaign workers or ineligible voters like felons and noncitizens?

Could Non-Citizens Decide the November Election?

Could control of the Senate in 2014 be decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens? Some argue that incidents of voting by non-citizens are so rare as to be inconsequential, with efforts to block fraud a screen for an agenda to prevent poor and minority voters from exercising the franchise, while others define such incidents as a threat to democracy itself. Both sides depend more heavily on anecdotes than data. In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races. Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether they actually voted. How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.

‘Ghetto Aurora’ Is Ground Zero for Colorado Vote Fraud

A Greenpeace activist supporting Senator Mark Udall has been caught on undercover video by James O'Keefe saying a great town to commit voter fraud is Ghetto Aurora. I couldn't find Ghetto Aurora on a map, but the activist says it is in Colorado. It's no surprise that the best place to commit voter fraud is Colorado. If you deliberately tried to design an election system to aid fraud, here's how you'd do it. You'd put ballots in the hand of folks that you have some indication no longer live where they did long ago. You'd make sure folks got ballots even if many of the counties had more people on the voter rolls than people alive. Then, you'd make sure that voting is decentralized, out of sight of election officials so that there is no way to know who is really voting the ballots. Check, check and check. Welcome to Colorado's new vote by mail system.

Video Sting Shows How Easy Voter Fraud Is in Colorado

Many liberals are adamant there is no threat of voter fraud that justifies efforts to improve the integrity of elections. "There is no real concrete evidence of voter fraud," tweeted Donna Brazile, former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee, this week. "It's a big a-- lie." James O'Keefe, the guerilla filmmaker who brought down the ACORN voter-registration fraudsters in 2010 and forced the resignation of NPR executives, politely disagrees. Today, he is releasing some new undercover footage that raises disturbing questions about ballot integrity in Colorado, the site of fiercely contested races for the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, and the governorship. When he raised the issue of filling out some of the unused ballots that are mailed to every household in the state this month, he was told by Meredith Hicks, the director of Work for Progress, a liberal group funded by Democratic Super PACS.: "That is not even like lying or something, if someone throws out a ballot, like if you want to fill it out you should do it."

ACLU ‘Thrilled’ to Kill Voter ID in Arkansas

Reacting to the Arkansas Supreme Court's ruling declaring the state's voter-identification law unconstitutional, ACLU of Arkansas Legal Director Holly Dickson said her group is "thrilled." Well, why not. They've been at it all over the country, trying to take down voter ID laws and enrich the ground that can yield a bumper crop of vote fraud. The unanimous decision on Oct. 15 upheld a lower court ruling and will affect early balloting, which began Monday, Oct. 20. Election Day is Tuesday, Nov 4. The Republican-controlled state legislature enacted the fraud-prevention law in 2013 over a veto by Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe. The justices ruled that the law requiring all voters to present government-issued photo identification, "imposes a requirement that falls outside" four qualifications outlined in the state constitution: A voter must be a U.S. citizen, an Arkansas resident, 18 years old and registered to vote. Providing proof that voters are, indeed, who they say they are, a requirement that the and more than 70 percent of the public strongly supports, is too high a hurdle, according to the ACLU. Ms. Dickson called the law "an unconstitutional barrier that has already stolen legitimate voting rights." When clerks ask to see an ID before selling beer, are they "stealing legitimate drinking rights?"