People for the American Way
www.pfaw.org/
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Shortly after George W. Bush took office in 2001, his administration launched a concerted effort to crack down on a supposed epidemic of voter fraud in the United States. The campaign to identify and eliminate such fraud became such a priority that escalating political pressure from the White House eventually drove the Justice Department to
fire U.S. attorneys who were seen as weak on prosecuting cases of fraud, in a politically-charged purge.
State legislatures across the country also embarked on a zealous mission to fight the problem of “voter fraud,” while right-wing pundits and advocacy groups made it their goal to expose and defeat the so-called voter fraud epidemic. Claims that corrupt organizations, illegal immigrants and political machines were stealing elections away from voters became common refrains in the right-wing media and political debates.
But the Bush Justice Department’s
war on voter fraud found little evidence of the illegal voting it alleged.
Between 2002 and 2006, the DOJ’s efforts resulted in only 86 convictions out of
nearly 200 million votes cast, a rate of 0.0000004%.
Unfazed by the complete lack of proof that widespread voter fraud exists, right-wing politicians, media personalities, activists and think tanks have continued their attacks on voting rights in the name of “voter integrity,” “ballot security” and “fighting voter fraud.” The resulting policies present a massive threat to citizens’ right to vote, which is at the very foundation of our democracy.
Is There Widespread Voter Fraud?
While open to a variety of interpretations, the term “voter fraud” usually refers to voting without registration, registering nonexistent voters, voting more than once, voting in places where one is ineligible to vote, manipulating or rigging the vote count, or buying votes.
The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has
found that the most common causes of voting irregularities include clerical mistakes, transcription blunders and computer errors, such as mistakes in poll books or in voter registration documents. Personal information listed on voter rolls may be out of date, incomplete, or include typos. In 2005, the Brennan Center looked at a list of purportedly fraudulent voter registrations in New Jersey and found that most of the suspected cases of ”double-voting” ended up being matching errors, where two people with identical or similar names were thought to be one person voting twice.
A
New York Times analysis of federal voting fraud cases found that roughly a third of the 86 convictions from 2002 through 2006 involved small vote-buying schemes in local elections. Nearly all the others were the result of honest mistakes by those who didn’t know they were ineligible to vote or instances of individuals acting alone. Ultimately, as the
Times reported, prosecutors and election experts agreed that evidence of large-scale or coordinated fraud just wasn’t there.
In 2010,
Tova Andrea Wang, a senior fellow at the think tank Demos, wrote, “Law enforcement statistics, reports from elections officials and widespread research have proved that voter fraud at the polling place is virtually non-existent.”
Lorraine Minnite, an elections expert at Barnard College,
argues that there is “no threat” of voter fraud, with official statistics showing that from “2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty people were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once.”
In Minnesota, which has been at the center of the Right’s search for voter fraud, a report by Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota
found that a grand total of 26 people were convicted of voter fraud in 2008 — all because they were felons who mistakenly voted. In other words, “nine ten-thousandths of one percent (0.0009%) of 2008 voters were convicted of fraud” in Minnesota.
Nonetheless, the Republicans who control both houses of the state legislature are pushing a voter ID bill that would disenfranchise tens of thousands of Minnesotans:
the Star Tribunefound that approximately “144,000 eligible voters in Minnesota lack a valid, state-issued identification card.”
