The voter-fraud problem that plainly doesn’t exist
Loyola University Law School professor Justin Levitt is a national expert on democracy and election administration, and when he presents the results of a “comprehensive investigation” into voter impersonation, he doesn’t use the word “comprehensive” lightly.
Indeed, the professor has looked into every “specific, credible allegation that someone may have pretended to be someone else at the polls, in any way that an ID law could fix.” This includes every election in the United States from 2000 through 2014, including “general, primary, special, and municipal elections.”
In that time, “more than 1 billion ballots were cast” by Americans. And how many instances of voter impersonation – the kind of fraud voter-ID laws are intended to address – did Levitt find?
So far, I’ve found about 31 different incidents (some of which involve multiple ballots) since 2000, anywhere in the country. […]Some of these 31 incidents have been thoroughly investigated (including some prosecutions). But many have not. Based on how other claims have turned out, I’d bet that some of the 31 will end up debunked: a problem with matching people from one big computer list to another, or a data entry error, or confusion between two different people with the same name, or someone signing in on the wrong line of a pollbook.
Note, we’re not talking about 31 percent; we’re talking about 31 separate incidents, some of which may turn out to be nothing.
Kevin Drum added that if every one of these instances “turns out to be a genuine case of fraud, that’s a fraud rate of 0.00002%.” [continue reading]
— by Steve Benen writing for The Maddow Blog
Rochester Community House in Rochester, Michigan, Aug. 5, 2014.
