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  • Approximately 24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations in the United States were no longer valid or were significantly inaccurate.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

Voter ID: Protecting the Integrity of Our Elections

With midterm elections underway in Texas, the fight over voter ID will undoubtedly garner some serious attention in the national media in the coming weeks and months. Ten states will require voters to present photo ID when voting in this year's midterms, despite vigorous attacks from liberal opponents and the Obama Administration. A favorite claim made by those who oppose voter ID is that voter fraud is a rare occurrence. On the surface, this argument may have some appeal, because it is not very often that huge voter fraud conspiracies dominate the national headlines. But, by its very nature, voter fraud is hard to detect. It becomes even harder to catch when there are virtually no safeguards in place to defend against it. It is particularly troublesome in close elections--especially on the local level, where outcomes are often determined by a handful of votes. Taking reasonable security precautions is just common sense: You don't wait for your house to get robbed before locking your door at night. Moreover, there is rock-solid proof that voter fraud is occurring in America. Here are just a few recent examples: An NBC station in Fort Myers, Florida, just aired a report about the many non-citizens it caught voting illegally. California state Senator Roderick Wright (D) was recently convicted of eight felony counts of voter fraud and perjury for acts that were committed in five different elections.

Voter Fraud in New York — Proof that It’s Easy

Liberals who oppose efforts to prevent voter fraud claim that there is no fraud -- or at least not any that involves voting in person at the polls. But New York City's watchdog Department of Investigations has just provided the latest evidence of how easy it is to commit voter fraud that is almost undetectable. DOI undercover agents showed up at 63 polling places last fall and pretended to be voters who should have been turned away by election officials; the agents assumed the names of individuals who had died or moved out of town, or who were sitting in jail. In 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, the testers were allowed to vote.

For Those Who Don’t Believe in Election Fraud

"Yes, the Rizzo-Royster race turned on vote fraud," admitted the Kansas City Star's Barbara Shelly in a crow-eating column nearly three years after it would do any good. For years the Star has routinely mocked anyone who dared suggest vote fraud was a problem.... What follows is a letter from a young Democrat who observed the process up close. The letter details the various tools Democrats use to steal elections and kill would-be Democratic reformers in the womb. It is edited only for length and clarity.

The Latest Evidence of Voter Fraud — and Discrimination

Obama-administration officials and their liberal camp-followers who routinely claim there is no reason to worry about election integrity because vote fraud is nonexistent suffered some embarrassing setbacks last week. Federal law requires states to clean [...]

Holder: Feds Will Sue over Voter ID, but Not over Weed

Mississippi columnist Sid Salter: Seems U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is fully prepared to sue Southern states over Voter ID laws, but is not willing to sue Colorado and Washington in their efforts to legalize and regulate recreational marijuana. Holder's logic is apparently that while states should have lots of leeway on how they deal with enforcement of federal laws against smoking and selling weed, states should not have that same leeway when it comes to efforts to fight perceived voter fraud.

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