Voter fraud? Much ado about nothing
After the 2016 presidential election Donald Trump claimed Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing popular vote majority was due to “millions of cases of voter fraud.” This was a typical Trump outright lie supported, as usual, by no tangible evidence whatsoever.
The truth is that recent studies indicate voter fraud in the U.S. is extremely rare today. One study found only 31 convictions for voter fraud over a 10-year period. But things haven’t always been this way.
In the old days of northern bigcity political machines and segregation-based southern rural-county political oligarchies (both Democratic-dominated, I might add) election fraud was both rampant and routinely overlooked. The joke back then was “Vote early — and often.” But with election reform and modern computer-based ballot counting, electoral fraud is extremely rare today.
Voter impersonation, or fraud, occurs when a person otherwise ineligible to vote castes a ballot under the name of some other voter, often relocated or deceased. But there is little hard evidence that fraud has altered the results of any U.S. elections in the last 50-60 years. On the other hand, partisan-influenced, unnecessarily restrictive voter registration laws have resulted in voting-eligible Americans being prevented from registering to vote. Especially affected are non-whites, older people and those in the overseas military.
In former President Lyndon Johnson’s first Texas Senate race, which he won by a razor-thin margin, there was suspected ballot box tampering, hence the nickname “Landslide Lyndon.” But these irregularities were curtailed when computerized ballot counting was introduced. Even though absentee voting fraud can’t always be deterred by voter ID laws, ABC
News reported in 2012 that there were only four cases of voter impersonation that led to convictions in Texas over the previous decade.
Right here at home a 2012 study found no evidence of anyone voting for a dead or relocated voter in the 2006 Georgia general elections. And in 2016 News21 reviewed potential voter fraud cases in five states where politicians had expressed concerns. They found 38 total irregularities in these states from 2012 to 2016, none of which involved voter impersonation. Another study showed an infinitesimal 0.0000003 cases of fraud for every vote cast.
There are still occasional problems with out-of-date registration records due to people relocating or dying. But this is being continually monitored by computer programs designed to clean up the voter rolls after periods of inactivity. Voter impersonation is a complicated and risky thing to try anyway, and the possibility of success is so extremely low it seems hardly worth the effort.
Like so many other Trump lies and exaggerations, this overblown voter fraud accusation is a fraud in itself. But this doesn’t seem to bother his loyal supporters. To them all that counts is an anti-abortion position, lower taxes for the wealthy and his overall right-wing agenda.
In a recent joint study by the Harvard and University of Bologna (Italy) business schools, faculty members Vincent Pons and Enrico Cantoni found that stricter voter ID laws neither appreciably reduce voter fraud nor lessen voter turnout. It’s all a big “much ado about nothing” on which we should waste little time.