Have you seen any reliable statistics that prove that voter fraud in the U. S. is on the rise, or a true threat to the electoral process?

I have seen no real statistics. The last election saw the right criticizing ACORN and claiming mass voter fraud. They ignored that ACORN self reported all the voter fraud, and it was basically low level staff who were paid by the head to register people to vote, making of fake names and stuff to increase their commission.

Lately the right has been conjuring up claims of voter fraud as an excuse to tighten rules on voting. In ohio the right has moved to eliminate early voting, make it so poll station staff are not allowed to tell you if you are in the correct voting location and/or where your correct location is, increase the identification required at the station to vote, etc, etc.

Their belief, whether their masses want to accept reality or not, is that if it’s harder to vote their voting base will be more likely to go through the “rigors” than the liberal voting base.

I’ve even seen the right in some states trying to make it so college students can’t vote in the district, county, or state of their college. The rules would basically say you have to have lived in a spot for a minimum of a year to vote in this election, which most college kids continue to use their parents address as a permanent address since they move often. They would be forced to vote (absentee mind you, which would now be harder to do) in their elections at their parents home… even though many may not have lived there for years and wouldn’t ever again.

Here’s what the Republicans found in 2008:.

“Do we have a documented instance of voting fraud that resulted from a phony registration form? No, I can’t cite one, chapter and verse,”. – Ronald Michaelson,, member of the 2008 McCain-Palin Honest and Open Election Committee link

I am sure there is voter fraud on both sides simply because people are the way they are.

I have never seen any data that made me think it is “on the rise”.

I think it is probably just one more way that politicians try to discredit each other and their opposing constituencies.

@tedd

Sad to see that the right in some states are trying to make it so college students can’t vote. I think they are doing that because college students usually vote democrat, not republican. Yet take a demographic that usually votes right (say, older folks) and they will do EVERYTHING in their power to make sure they vote. They may even advocate for laws saying that the legally insane old folks can vote, if they think it will get a few more votes in! Sad. Everyone’s voting rights should be supported, as long as they are of the legal age, aren’t felons, and are legally competent.

the right keeps disappointing me. I’m a college student and I like their fiscal policies and have voted for “right” people for a while. Def don’t fit into the college liberal majority.

Not voter fraud possibly voter intimidation in Philly.

This Rolling Stone article seems germane to the conversation.

Have you seen what electronic voting machines are capable of? This has been a major concern of mine since I saw the HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy.
http://m.youtube.com/index?desktop_uri=%2F&gl=US#/watch?v=8JESZiLpBLE

Voter fraud has many faces and it is difficult to catch. There’s a reasonable discussion of it here. The College student issue is a ‘Red Herring’. You vote where you live. That is legal residence. There are good reasons for that. Ballots are not just for national candidates, they include local issues and candidates as well. Plus the states have their own rules which can not be enforced across state lines. If you want to vote where you go to school, either change your legal residence or use an absentee ballot. If you are going to college and you can’t figure out how to vote, maybe you shouldn’t be there.

I find it interesting that no matter how many times we recount the votes we never end up with the same count. Why is it so tough to count the same votes and end up with the same totals. It never happens. Take a look at the Minnesota recount. Only one county actually came up with the same total. That is at least one reason that most Americans believe there is a voting fraud issue.

In the Movie ‘Key Largo (1948) Edward G. Robinson while talking about getting a politician elected said “Get my boys to bring the voters out. And then count the votes over and over again till they added up right and he was elected.” It seems we haven’t progressed much in the past 60 some-odd years. We’re still haggling over which votes to count and recounting them until we get the number we want. All the while screaming there is no fraud nor any problem. The lady doth protest to much methinks.

We haven’t progressed in 60-odd years, from a scene in a movie?

@Jaxk The college issue of late is that Republican lawmakers in some states want to set it up so you have to have the same legal address for a minimum of a year before voting in that district. In other words if I go to school and live there at one address for 9 months, then move to another address that’s still at the school…. I can’t vote in that district, because my address wasn’t the same for a year long period. Even if I had lived at one house for 12 months and then moved to a new house still in the district, I would be ineligible to vote in that district because it would count as having just moved there. And frankly if you don’t have a problem with that, you disgust me, It’s a clear back handed way of trying to screw people out of a vote where they live. I had six residences in my time at college, and only one of them was for more than a year. Under those rules I wouldn’t have been allowed to vote in the 04, 06, or 08 elections. I would’ve been allowed to vote in my parents district though (since I still listed it as a permanent residence). But that doesn’t make sense either since I hadn’t lived there since the fall of 04. What sense (and for that matter legal grounds) does it make for me to vote in an election in a county 2 hours away I haven’t lived in for 5 years and have no intention of moving back to?

And they get different number in recounts because they have to hand count the ballots when they recount. They have to hand count all the absentee and written ballots already as it is. When you have districts with potentially millions of ballots, it’s pretty reasonable that they may miscount by a few hundred here and there.

There will always be some tiny amount of voter fraud, no matter what we do. But it is nowhere near a big enough problem to justify the measures Republicans are proposing.

Voter fraud has many faces and it is difficult to catch.
“It’s everywhere but we can’t show you any examples.”

Take a look at the Minnesota recount…
Your link shows a possible 0.069% error rate.

In the Movie ‘Key Largo..
Ummmmm yeah. Sorry to break it to you, but that movie is 60 year old fiction. It’s not a recent documentary. Seriously. I am not kidding.

Conservative vote fraud hysteria is a deliberate effort to spread fear and doubt without factual evidence. Thanks for helping prove the point.

Why does everyone seem to ignore the fact the electronic voting machines can be easily hacked?

@SquirrelEStuff That’s definitely worth noting, but what more can we do on that front? If they were being hacked you had better believe the side on the losing end would be up in arms, even if it was just a suspicion. One party hasn’t won the last like 50 elections or anything so I don’t think it’s a problem.

@tedd

I don’t know what state you live in nor what laws you believe are a problem. Unless there is some new issue I’m not famailiar with the residency requirements were resolved 40 years ago. The Supreme court ruled in Dunn v. Blumstein (1972) that residency rquirements in excess of 30 days were unconstitutional. The case was specifically for voting so if your state is requiring a year, it is blatantly unconsitutional.

Additionally, I can find no issue that reflects your complaint. The redidency requirements for all states are listed here. So I guess the question I have is, do you have a real issue or are you just reading too many liberal blogs?

@jaytkay

“Thanks for helping prove the point.”

You had a point? Who woulda guessed?

@Jaxk Yes because no politician ever has found a way to legislate around a court ruling. Ever. I don’t know if anything will come of it, but I know for fact that Republican legislatures/politicians in several states were looking into legislation such as this.

@Jaxk You had a point?

You really want me to spell it out?

Conservatives make the dishonest claim that voter fraud is widespread. It’s a deliberate lie.

Feel free to prove me wrong by providing details.When? Where? How? How many votes?

Recent history only, please. And movies do not count. You need to reference real life.

@jaytkay

You seem to set a lot of rules for my response to your argument that there should be no rules. I generally don’t respond well to being called a liar. I’ll write it off this time as simple ignorance.

Democrats are still constantly complaining that Bush stole the 2000 election. Even though several news organizations have recounted the Florida ballots many times with the same results. They still say the election was stolen and now say there’s no problem with the voting system. We’ll also write off the hypocrisy in that.

This is an except from a post I made on the same issue on a different thread. Reffering to the 2004 election between Dino Rossi and Christine Gregoire. The issue was that the election had been decided by 129 votes and there were 1678 illegally cast votes. The number comes from a court ruling during the recount in which Judge Bridges noted that there was evidence that 1,678 votes had been illegally cast throughout the state.

The Washington example is a good one however, since it shows the holes in our process. The first count put Dino Rossi The winner. The second count put Dino Rossi the winner. The third count however, they somehow discovered 723 new ballots and Christine Gregoire won. It’s beginning to sound a lot like Minnesota. To make the issue even more confusing, it turns out that some counties showed they had more ballots than they had received. Other counties they had received more ballots than they had. And not surprisingly, the counties that counted more ballots than they received were Democratic counties while the counties that had received more ballots than they counted were Republican counties. Now I have no idea if there was anything fishy going on here but it sure looks bad.

It seems to me that if you have to recount 3 times to get you’re guy to win, somethings wrong. It seems to me that if you ‘Find’ hundreds of new ballots on the third count, somethings wrong. It seems to me that if there are more illegal votes than the margin of victory, somethings wrong. And if this happens multiple times in multiple states, somethings wrong.

I’m not sure why Democrats are so dead set against anything that might shore up the integrity of this system. It makes me wonder about the integrity of the Democrats.

@Jaxk So for the sake of argument we’ll take your case from 2004 as a for sure incidence of voter fraud (even though I feel there’s a lot more to it, but whatever). There were how many hundreds, if not thousands of elections.. in 2004 alone? How about 06, 08, 10? Of those tens of thousands of elections, you have one case of voter fraud.

And if you want to point out that the margin of error was larger than the margin of victory, why don’t we revisit a little presidential election from 2000, where the Republican state legislature and government in Florida had a few recounts done until their guy came out on top…. by as few as 300 votes… which I would guess is pretty well below the margin of error considering almost 6 million people voted for president in the state.

@Jaxk In the Washington case, the judge you mentioned wrote, “there is no evidence that the significant errors that occurred resulted from intentional misconduct or someone’s desire to manipulate the election.”

Spare us the sham concern about “integrity”. Keeping Americans from voting has been a big part of the conservative game plan for a very long time, and the outrage over imaginary voting fraud is a big part of it.

And sorry about setting rules by asking for facts and rejecting fiction as evidence. I didn’t think that would be setting the bar too high. I’m naive that way.

@tedd

I don’t have a problem with any instance you present whether it be Republican or Democrat. I use the ones I’m familiar with which makes it appear I’m bashing Democrats. Actually, I’m merely bashing the process. If they ‘find’ additional ballots after the election is tallied, I have no way to know if that was a simple mistake or fraud (both Minnesota and Washington had that happen). Either way it seems we would want to plug that hole. If the election officials show that they received 1,000 ballots but when the tally the votes they count 1,100 ballots, it doesn’t matter whether it was fraud or a simple mistake. We should plug that hole.

I think everyone would agree that emotions are running high. Presidential elections, they typically run very high and the last few have been no exception. There is currently no way to verify the face of the person casting the vote against the name on the registration list. Democrats seem convinced that Republicans would do anything to win the election. A quick read of @jaytkay last couple of posts should verify that. Why would we assume that no one would take advantage of a system so fraught with errors. With no way to check the face with the vote, even if you know the vote was fraudulent, who do you prosecute? Proving fraud is almost impossible. There were 12,000 disqualified absentee votes in Minnesota. and the election was won by just over 200. Were 12,000 people disenfranchised? Were 12,000 votes fraudulent? Something in between?

Let me give you another way to look at it. Since the recession started, everyone has been railing about how Wall Street caused the recession. No one has been prosecuted let alone convicted. Does that mean there’s no problem on Wall Street?

“It’s everywhere! But I can’t give you any details! Because it’s everywhere!”

lol

@Jaxk I dunno about you but every time I’ve voted I had to have a state issued photo id, and some kind of address verification (usually a power or gas bill, or something like that). To commit voter fraud someone would have to make a fake id at the minimum, and then spend the time waiting in line and going through the process of registering a fake person (which would require a fake SS# and more). Not that its completely undoable, but that’s a ton of work for one vote.

And as far as 12,000 disqualified absentee ballots in Minnesota. Most absentee ballots are disqualified based on them being filled out incorrectly, or based on the information on them being entered incorrectly. For something as stupid as you put down the wrong apartment number when you registered, your vote can be disqualified. Those are the same stupid rules Republicans are trying to add more of!

@tedd

If you have to show a photo ID you in one of only a handful of states that require it. And that is all I ask. I don’t see that as a major problem for anyone but it is the requirement that Democrats are fighting against. It sounds like we are in agreement on the photo ID.

@Jaxk I don’t think you’d get a lot of opposition to a requirement to show photo id. That’s not what we’re looking at here though. It may be part of the legislation, but it definitely doesn’t stop there. Here in Ohio they’re straight up removing early voting, which was installed under our last Republican governor to deal with complaints of lines on election nights that easily got into 3–4 hours. They’re also trying to enact rules where election officials won’t tell you if you’re in the wrong voting location, and/or where your correct voting location is. Anyone who votes in the wrong location immediately loses their vote by law. How does that sound to you?