Voter Fraud and Where to Find It

As usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle of two extremes.

The US election system is flawed in a number of ways. But is it flawed enough to allow 3–5 million ballots to be cast by non-citizens in the 2016 Presidential election without anyone noticing? Donald Trump seems to think so. I disagree.

First though, we need to clarify terminology. Because, while voter fraud is a type of election fraud or election interference, it is not the only type of election fraud.

What voter fraud is NOT:

Being registered to vote in multiple states is not voter fraud.

Deceased individuals remaining on the voter rolls is not voter fraud.

Tampering with election machines is not voter fraud.

Vote suppression is not voter fraud.

A system that makes it easy for someone to commit voter fraud is not, in itself, an act of voter fraud.

Let’s be clear: all of these things that I listed above range from concerning to illegal, because all of them interfere with elections in some way. In fact, even the belief that any of these things are occurring may impact the perceived legitimacy of an election. But they aren’t voter fraud.

What voter fraud IS:

Voting under your own identity multiple times (for example, through being registered to vote in multiple states).

Voting under the name of a deceased individual (because that individual’s name hasn’t been purged from voter rolls).

Impersonating another voter and casting a ballot on their behalf.

Registering fictitious identities and voting under those fake names.

Voting in an election that you are not eligible to vote for (for example, you are not a citizen, you are a felon barred from voting, or you attempt to vote in a jurisdiction that you don’t live in.)

Okay, now that we have a general understanding of what voter fraud is, we reach the next logical question:

Does voting fraud occur? If so, how widespread is it?

Well, the short answer is yes, it does occur (see here, here, here, here, and here). But what can we observe about these instances of documented voter fraud?

First of all, they are all incredibly small-scale. For example, 117 non-citizen voters were discovered in 2011 in Fairfax County, VA who had voted in state and federal elections. By comparison, Fairfax County has a population of 1.1 million people, of whom 522,046 voted in the 2012 Presidential election.

Secondly, incidents of voter fraud are more common at the local and county level than at the state or national level, which makes sense — a single vote carries more weight in a population of 1,000 than of 1,000,000, and local elections are generally less sophisticated.

Lastly, there have absolutely been election results that have been decided by voter fraud. Chicago, New York City, and Miami have all seen these levels of corruption, where the voter fraud is typically perpetrated by an entrenched political machine, and typically perpetrated through ballot stuffing, destruction of ballots, and absentee voting.

Okay, but aren’t we just not finding voter fraud because we’re not looking?

I doubt it.

In a 2014 analysis of in-person voter fraud, only 31 instances of fraud were documented in 14 years, comprising 241 votes out of 1 billion (with a B) ballots cast.

“All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake,” according to Donald Trump’s own lawyers who lodged an official protest against performing a recount in Michigan.

Jon Husted, the (Republican) chief election official in Ohio, tweeted “We conducted a review 4 years ago in Ohio & already have a statewide review of 2016 election underway. Easy to vote, hard to cheat.” Ohio, it should be noted, maintained a practice of removing individuals from the voting rolls if they didn’t vote for a few years.

In the infamous 2000 recount in Florida, Republican Party chairman Al Cardenas recalled:

I lived it in 2000. I was party chairman in Florida. We had over 250 lawyers involved and volunteering in the state.

We had over 40 lawsuits. We had election supervisors. We had judges in every single county recounting every vote, tabulating, retabulating the votes, determining whether votes were fairly cast or not. There were challenges being made by lawyers from both parties as to votes that had not been accepted.

The whole process took 37 days, thousands of people, thousands of hours. And not once, not once did we find intent to defraud the process electorally. The press spent millions of dollars after that and went through its own process.

Surely widespread voter fraud in Florida would have been discovered after such an intensive process?

Or there was the intensive investigation by the Bush Administration (which led to the US attorney firing scandal) that, “five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department… turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.”

Or any of these other investigations listed by the Washington Post:

The National Association of Secretaries of State, which represents most of the nation’s top election officials (most of whom happen to be Republican), released a statement Tuesday saying, “We are not aware of any evidence that supports the voter fraud claims made by President Trump.”

In Kansas, the Republican secretary of state examined 84 million votes cast in 22 states to look for cases of duplicate registration. The project yielded 14 prosecutions, representing 0.000017 percent of the votes cast.

A team of Dartmouth researchers undertook a comprehensive statistical investigation of the 2016 results, looking for evidence of abnormal voting patterns. They checked for evidence of noncitizen voting, dead people voting and tampering by election officials. They didn’t find any. “Our findings do strongly suggest, however, that voter fraud concerns fomented by the Trump campaign are not grounded in any observable features of the 2016 presidential election,” they concluded (emphasis theirs). “There is no evidence of millions of fraudulent votes.”

In Conclusion…

We can state with certainty that voter fraud occurs.

I believe we can state with high confidence that actual incidents of voter fraud are incredibly rare, and not just rarely detected.

I believe we can further state with high confidence that voter fraud has not influenced a national election.

We can most likely say that voter fraud rarely impacts local or state elections, but has impacted them in at least a few instances.

Despite how screwed up our voting system is, and despite how many potential risks and flaws there are, everything worked as expected in the 2016 elections…

…unfortunately.