I find it hard to imagine an immigrant or felon taking the time and the risks to vote illegally, especially when so many registered voters don’t take the time to vote, and so many eligible voters don’t bother to register. Those who imagine the nightmare, cannot find significant actual votER fraud.
Here is a short post from Mother Jones articulating that hunt and the examples supplied by one of the most prominent votER fraud imaginers, Hans von Spakovsky: Repeat After Me: In-Person, In-Person, In-Person <read>
There are plenty of other types of voter fraud, of course. There’s registration fraud, where you send in forms for Mary Poppins and James Bond. There’s insider fraud, where election officials report incorrect tallies. There’s absentee ballot fraud, where you fill in someone else’s absentee ballot and mail it in. But a voter ID law does nothing to stop those kinds of fraud. Even in theory, the only kind of fraud it stops is in-person voter fraud…
Hasen[Author of The Voting Wars] provides what few examples he can. Hans von Spakovsky, a Bush-era Justice Department appointee, claimed to have found an occurrence of impersonation fraud in a 1984 case in Brooklyn. But when Hasen finally managed to get a copy of the DA’s report (von Spakovsky refused to share it), it turned out that the fraud consisted almost entirely of insiders manipulating registration books and cards. What little impersonation fraud they found was possible only thanks to collusion with corrupt election officials. Von Spakovsky also brought up a 1997 case in Miami, but that turned out to be absentee ballot fraud. In a later op-ed, he pointed to a case in Kansas, but a court ruled that, in fact, no illegal votes had been cast.
So there you have it. Hasen apparently doesn’t know of any confirmed cases of in-person voter fraud, and the folks who have tried their best to find some have failed…
UPDATE: Rick Hasen emails to say that he recently came across a case that might be genuine in-person voter fraud. The allegation is something stupid (a mother taking her teenage son to vote in her husband’s place), not something corrupt, but still. It’s a case! [Which we suspect could have been identified just by the checkers doing a bit of age guessing]
