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Approximately 24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations in the United States were no longer valid or were significantly inaccurate.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

Political Fraud about Voter Fraud

In an April 11 speech to Al Sharpton's National Action Network, President Obama recited statistics purporting to show that voter fraud was extremely rare. The "real voter fraud," he said, "is people who try to deny our rights by making bogus arguments about voter fraud." These arguments themselves are bogus. Consider the two studies from which Mr. Obama drew his statistics. The first, which he said "found only 10 cases of alleged in-person voter impersonation in 12 years," is a 2012 report issued by News21, an Arizona State University project.

In Alabama, Vote Fraud Is No Myth

We are constantly told that voter fraud is some made-up pipe dream of racist Republicans hoping to suppress black votes and other folks who Democrats, insulting, imply are incapable of obtaining an ID. We are told that we are "racist" and that there is no such thing as voter fraud! Except there clearly is. AL.com's Mike Cason wrote this: "Less than three months before the June primary, four Alabama counties had more voters on their rolls than what the Census Bureau says is their voting age population."

President Obama: Vote Fraud Claims Are ‘Bogus’

At his appearance before Al Sharpton's National Action Network, President Obama called voter fraud claims "bogus" and said his Justice Department has "taken on more than 100 voting rights cases since 2009. " This is a bald faced lie. One need merely click this link at the Justice Department's own website to see it is a lie. The truth is that 39 cases have been brought, not 100, and only 13 relate to protecting minority voting rights - usually foreign language ballot issues. The rest of the cases involve states sending out military ballots (an effort only begun after blistering coverage at PJ Media and elsewhere in 2010).

Vote Fraud as ‘Payback Time’

Melowese Richardson is the poster girl for vote fraud. The Ohio poll worker was sentenced last July to five years in prison after being convicted of voting twice in the 2012 election and voting three times -- in 2008, 2011 and 2012 -- in the name of her sister, in a coma since 2003, according to USA Today. This might be below Chicago graveyard standards, but it's still impressive. Ms. Richardson has become a heroine to the left, which is working with its legal arm -- the U.S. Justice Department -- to kill voter photo-ID laws in order to ensure that creative voting continues.

Adams: ‘Toxic Movement’ Accepts Election Crime

The release of a woman convicted of voter fraud for casting ballots six times for President Barack Obama in 2012 is part of a "toxic movement" that accepts "criminal acts in the election" to push a progressive agenda, former Department of Justice lawyer J. Christian Adams charged Tuesday. Adams, whose book "Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department," focuses on alleged racial bias in the U.S. Attorney General's Office, told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV that "anybody who says there's no such thing as voter fraud is a liar." Referring to the case of Melowese Richardson, who served eight months of a five-year term for voter fraud, Adams noted that Richardson was hailed as hero at a rally last week with some fellow Ohio Democrats and civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton after the George Soros-funded Ohio Justice and Policy Center helped lessen her sentence to probation.

No Federal Charges for Ohio Woman Who Voted Six Times for Obama

Last week Al Sharpton embraced convicted vote fraudster Melowese Richardson at a "voting rights" rally in Cincinnati. The United States Department of Justice under Eric Holder has done nothing to Melowese Richardson 410 days after she admitted on camera that she committed multiple federal felonies by voting six times for President Obama's reelection. Federal law makes it a felony to vote more than once for President. In fact, 42 U.S.C. Section 1973i(e) subjects Richardson to twenty-five years in federal prison for her six votes for Obama. The lack of DOJ action against an unrepentant federal vote fraudster combined with Richardson's lionization by Sharpton and the organization that sponsored the rally demonstrates how the Justice Department is facilitating a culture of brazen criminality on the eve of the 2014 midterm elections.