There are all kinds of voter fraud

Of course there’s voter fraud.

I’ve witnessed it on numerous occasions in elections in Bridgeport and if it happens there, you can bet your last hanging chad or forged absentee ballot it happens everywhere.

Now, Donald Trump’s claims that millions of illegal voters cost him the popular vote in the 2016 election aganst Hillary Clinton was, of course, preposterous.

He still occasionally hawks the same canard. In 2017, he created a commission called the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to go find the goods to support the claim.

He appointed Kris Kobach of Kansas — KKK, as I think of him — to run the commission.

When Kobach started asking for information on voters, Connecticut’s Secretary of the State Denise Merrill — along with Democratic and Republican colleagues around the country — told KKK, also a secretary of the state, to go pound sand.

Trump disbanded the commission on Jan. 3, 2018.

Now, equally preposterous were some reports I read that purported to totally discredit Trump’s claim.

A researcher at Loyola University in Los Angeles, a news report read, reviewed a billion ballots and found 31 cases of voter impersonation, while an Arizona State University study found 10 cases in a review of a decade of ballots.

Maybe they didn’t know where to look. In the ’ 70s and ’ 80s when I was regularly pounding the beat in Bridgeport, Election Day and the octave around it was an exhausting, exciting and educational time. After the close of polls, Democratic operatives would return to headquarters, flash open their sportcoats and display their tally of little “I Voted Today” stickers, one from each precinct where they’d voted somebody’s name.

Sort of like the accumulated buckeye- leaf stickers on Ohio State football players’ helmets. It was not simply a worn out punchline that one of the businest voting precincts was the one that contained Mountain Grove Cemetery.

In the years before computers, it was politicians with pencils and erasers who kept count of voters. One year, after an election I looked at checkers’ sheets from some of the city’s precincts. On State Street, not far from where the newspaper’s offices were, there was a long- vacant apartment building.

The names of long- gone residents were not only still on the

But here’s the biggest voter fraud of all. It’s not the people who manage to pull off an extra vote or two, who scheme to steal absentee ballots out of nursing homes or a graveyards, it’s the organized attempt by a political party to keep people out of the electoral system entirely.

voting list ... they’d been checked off as having voted in the election the week before.

Another year I visited with a 103- year- old blind woman at a city nursing home who somehow had found the energy that year to register for the first time as a voter in the city, participate in that year’s Democratic primary and general election.

The dear thing, her feet dangling just above the footrests on her wheelchair, had no idea what was gong on. She’d been used and told to sign papers that party zealots had put in front of her.

And so on. There’s not room for all the stories.

But here’s the biggest voter fraud of all. It’s not the people who manage to pull off an extra vote or two, who scheme to steal absentee ballots out of nursing homes or a graveyards, it’s the organized attempt by a political party to keep people out of the electoral system entirely.

It’s called voter suppression. And it’s the biggest fraud of them all.