Debunking Charlie Kirk on voter fraud

President Trump and his supporters throughout his time in office and campaigning have used “voter fraud” as a way to energize his base. There has no evidence of Trump’s main claims of massive voter fraud.

Yet one of his most loyal sycophants on this issue is Charlie Kirk, director and founder of Turning Point USA. Kirk though does not go to the same extreme as Trump does in his claims or lies. For example, as far as I can tell, Kirk has not lent his support directly to now former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and his effort to “investigate” on the president’s order massive voter fraud in the 2016 election.

This is not to say Kirk does not make some obviously false claims, echoing racist conspiracy theories about illegal immigrant “voters.” He though is a bit more circumspect in his drum beat of “voter fraud is real.”

Still there are several claims to debunk. So I’ll highlight the more recent tweets Kirk has posted since the 2018 midterms and address other, earlier claims.

First, some general reports that debunk the scale of voter fraud claimed by Trump.

“Fraud is vanishingly rare…”

This headline comes from a 2017 release by the Brennan Center for Justice, a self-described “a nonpartisan law and policy institute that works to reform, revitalize — and when necessary, defend — our country’s systems of democracy and justice.”

In its seminal report on this issue, The Truth About Voter Fraud, the center found “most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices.” The report “found incident rates [of voter fraud] between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent.” It notes “a comprehensive 2014 study published in The Washington Post found 31 credible instances of impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2014, out of more than 1 billion ballots cast. Even this tiny number is likely inflated, as the study’s author counted not just prosecutions or convictions, but any and all credible claims.” It also links to a 2014 academic study that concluded “the likely percent of non-citizen voters in recent US elections is 0.”

Michigan’s Over-Registration

Here is a tweet from two days after the midterms:

Kirk seems to be citing the Election Integrity Project of Judicial Watch from 2017 for the 3.5 million claim. He has tweeted and tweeted about other states and their “over-registration.”

Judicial Watch is an extreme right-wing source that often produces what MediaBiasFactCheck calls actual “fake news,” or “the deliberate attempt to publish hoaxes and/or disinformation for the purpose of profit or influence.” According to the bias watcher, “Judicial Watch has made numerous false and unsubstantiated claims, with a ‘vast majority’ of their lawsuits [on many issues] dismissed.” As of 2010, its biggest funder was a right-wing foundation.

The Michigan number seemingly comes from a National Review writer who also crunched the numbers by Judicial Watch. Yet that writer claimed in his analysis that 50 percent of counties in Michigan had “over-registered” voters. The debate over “ghost voters” (a misleading term) and “bloated” voter registration lists goes back some years, since at least the aftermath of the 2000 election, with no claims of voter fraud.

A report after the 2016 election in Michigan showed “there’s no evidence” of any systematic manipulation of Michigan votes in that election.

Project Vote has thoroughly debunked the method of “voter matching” that Judicial Watch and Kirk rely on: “Accurate database matching is a very complex practice; running simple procedures on large databases will produce a great many spurious matches… Much of what is being described as voter registration fraud is actually social security number and address matching problems caused by error filled, outdated databases, data entry mistakes, and cultural differences.”

Kirk has no direct evidence of voter fraud from his Michigan or nationwide numbers. Even the National Review writer didn’t make the fraud claim with the same information, misleading as it is, only writing such information is “an engraved invitation to voter fraud,” not actual fraud.

Georgia Over-Voting

This claim circulated among right-wing websites including Breitbart. It is based on a McClatchy news article on August 6 that began this way:

“It appeared, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s website, that Habersham County’s Mud Creek precinct in northeastern Georgia had 276 registered voters ahead of the state’s primary elections in May. Some 670 ballots were cast, according to the Georgia secretary of state’s office, indicating a 243 percent turnout. But on Tuesday at 10 a.m., the number of registered voters on the secretary of state’s website was changed for Mud Creek to 3,704 registered voters, reflecting a more likely turnout of about 18 percent.”

The information came from a lawsuit against Georgia election officials. Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who ran for governor as a Trump Republican, defended his office from the lawsuit. By the way, the change of Habersham County information was made after the news article that mentioned it was published.

Kirk has zero evidence of voter fraud here.

Ohio’s Old Enough to be Dead Voters

Here is a Kirk tweet from August:

Again, this claim was publicized by Breitbart on August 8. The claim centered on a special election for that 12th Congressional district on August 7. The Breitbart story was written by Eric Eggers, who, according to FactCheck.org, “works at the conservative Government Accountability Institute think tank, and recently published a book called, “Fraud: How the Left Plans to Steal the Next Election.” According to the bias watcher, the GAI was “co-founded in 2012 by conservative political strategist and former Executive Chairman of Breitbart, Steve Bannon.” It has an extreme right bias and publishes “misleading reports and omit reporting of information that may damage conservative causes.”

Snopes.com notes that the birth date info “are placeholder values for information that some voters were not required to supply at the time they registered; they are not indicative of voter fraud and have no relevance to the results of Ohio’s congressional special election.”

It adds: “At the time of the August 2018 Balderson-O’Connor special election, the 12th Congressional district’s voter roll did include 164 registered voters ostensibly aged 116 or greater. But the catch is that all but one of those voters had a recorded birth date of either 1800–01–01 or 1900–01–01, a pattern does not suggest voter fraud but rather simple recording error. The far more likely explanation is that these voters’ birth dates were not collected when they registered, or their birth dates were not properly entered into the system, or they were not transferred correctly when the voter roll management system was upgraded, and hence those birth dates ended up being set to a default value for that field in the voter database.”

Factcheck.org also called this claim false.

Others have fact-checked this in greater detail.

Registration in Multiple States

Here is a Kirk tweet from June:

In a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that upheld a “Controversial Ohio Voter-Purge Law,” according to NPR, Justice Alito did write this: “”It has been estimated that 24 million voter registrations in the United States — about one in eight — are either invalid or significantly inaccurate.” He was citing a 2012 Pew Center on the States study that Trump White House officials had “cited — misleadingly — to make the case that voter fraud was occurring and immigrants in the U.S. illegally were voting.”

How did Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller mislead with this study? According to The Washington Post, the study “found the problems with inaccurate voter registrations, people who registered in more than one state (which could happen if the voter moves and registers in the new state without telling the former state) and deceased voters whose information was still on the voter rolls.”

The Post in its own fact-check noted:

At an Oct. 17 rally, Trump cited the three main findings of the study to back up his claim that voter fraud is common across the country:

1. About 24 million (1 in every 8) voter registrations were significantly inaccurate or no longer valid because people moved, had died or were inactive voters.
2. More than 1.8 million records for people who are deceased, but whose registrations were still on voter rolls.
3. About 2.75 million people were registered to vote in more than one state. This could happen if voters move to a new state and register to vote without notifying their former state.

But the Post noted the study did not “say that these problems indicated signs of isolated or widespread voter fraud.” The Post even printed a comment from the primary author of the Pew report who “can confirm that report made no findings re: voter fraud.”

The Post gave Miller’s claim 4 Pinocchios, its worst rating for misleading claims.

Again Kirk skips some steps in the evidence-to-claim here only implying voter fraud but providing no direct evidence of it.

In the end Kirk can only imply what he can’t prove, inflaming conspiracy theories on the right to prop up Trump and his claims, which are even more outlandish. Kirk doesn’t have the receipts, as they say.