Ron Berger

As a corollary to Karen McKim's recent post on election integrity, I want to add something I have previously written about the issue of individual voter fraud:

In recent years, a good deal of media attention and calls for electoral reform have been directed at the question of fraud committed by individual voters. All over the country states have passed restrictive photo voter identification (PVID) laws, among other reforms, that make it more difficult to vote, such as eliminating same-day registration and narrowing the opportunities for early voting. In the case of PVID reforms, citizens are required to have a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID. If they do not have a driver’s license, they may be required to produce a birth certificate in order to obtain a state-issued ID. Critics of PVID laws think they discriminate against individuals who do not have a driver’s license, which is more pronounced among the poor, elderly, and racial-ethnic minorities. In the past, all that was necessary to confirm one’s eligibility was a check or utility bill confirming one’s address; now there are more legal hoops to jump through.

Critics of PVID laws acknowledge inaccuracies in voter registration lists and anecdotal cases in which individuals have cast a vote when they were not qualified to do so. But they find little evidence that intentional voter fraud is widespread or that it has influenced any election in recent years. In her book The Myth of Voter Fraud, political scientist Lorraine Minnite reports on the results of her research in California, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Oregon. She writes:

“The United States has a fragmented, inefficient, inequitable, complicated, and overly complex electoral process run on election day essentially by an army of volunteers. It is practically designed to produce irregularities in the administration: the number of voters signing the poll book do not exactly match the number of ballots case because of the unexpected crush of citizens who wanted to vote and the fact that a poll worker’s bathroom break was not covered; confused voters go here and there trying to cast their ballots in their precinct, the one they voted in eight years ago, only to find their wandering recorded as double votes; absentee ballots do not reach their rightful destination in time, causing anxious voters to show up at the polls where they are again recorded as voting twice; John Smith Sr. on line number twelve in the poll book signs for John Smith Jr. on thirteen…; voter registration applications go unacknowledged so voters send in duplicates, sometimes adding middle initial or a new last name.”

Minnite also notes that most of the alleged incidents of voter fraud reported by the media come to their attention from partisan political operatives, yet for the most part “the multitude of alternative explanations for any one irregularity” is not investigated further. Testifying for the plaintiffs in a recent federal court case challenging the PVID law passed in Wisconsin, Minnite informed U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman of her research on elections in that state between 2004 and 2012 in which she could verify only one case of intentional voter fraud. After reviewing this and other evidence, Judge Adelman concluded:

“The evidence at trial established that virtually no voter impersonation occurs in Wisconsin. The defendants could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past. While there is no way to know how many of the 300,000 people who lack the acceptable photo ID will be deterred from voting because of the law, it is absolutely clear that [it] prevents more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent votes.”

Similarly, in his research that was reported in the Washington Post, law professor Justin Levitt found only 31 credible cases anywhere in the country (out of more than one billion ballots cast) in which an individual showed up at the polls pretending to be someone else.

In sum, as Karen suggested, the main problem with the electoral process in the U.S. lies not with the ill intentions of individual voters but with the corruption in the administration of elections and the counting of votes.