Voter fraud an imaginary threat
There’s an old joke with many variations but the general pattern is the same. A guy finds someone doing something odd, asks why and gets the explanation that it’s to keep the bears away.
But we don’t have any, comes the reply.
See, it’s working is the response and everybody laughs.
Keep that in mind when considering the latest attempts by the Trump administration and many Republican governors and legislatures to cut down on an equally imaginary threat — fraudulent voting.
It’s not only no joke, it’s no problem.
The most recent evidence comes from the same people who were sure that if they looked hard enough and long enough and spent enough money they would find what nobody else ever has been able to.
The voter integrity commission launched with great fanfare to investigate claims of massive voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election quietly disbanded with the leaders hoping that nobody would ask for details. But people did and documents were released and they showed what every person who has ever done any research into allegations of voter fraud has found consistently.
It’s not there.
Researchers have found that an occasional person has used false identification or other deception to cast a vote. And it is important to note that in many of the cases that have been documented, a person did produce documentation, just not their own, which means that the present push to require such papers is not likely to cut down on behavior that is almost nonexistent to begin with.
The most comprehensive inquiry into allegations of voter fraud was conducted by Justin Levitt, a professor with Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. As he has explained, in 2008 in relation to a voting case before the U.S. Supreme Court, he examined every single allegation and found 31 documented incidents. While that might be enough to sway an election in a very small village in an off-year, it is important to note that those 31 come out of, as he explained in an op-ed piece, “general, primary, special, and municipal elections from 2000 through 2014.” In the general and primary elections alone during that time, there were more than 1 billion ballots cast.
So it comes as no surprise that the latest Republican effort to find fraudulent voting has come up empty. As Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said, the documents show there was a “pre-ordained outcome” and drafts of a commission report included a section on evidence of voter fraud that was “glaringly empty.”
All of this should expose the efforts in several states to impose more restrictions on voting and the efforts by the Department of Justice to reverse the course under the Obama administration and support states as they purge voter rolls and make it harder for people to register and vote.
In the meantime, we do know about attempts to sway elections, attempts being waged by very sophisticated hackers from Russia. Yet the Republicans who control Congress just this summer rejected a call for more money to provide better cybersecurity, the kind that can detect and defeat real attempts at manipulating elections.
The Times-Herald Record