Voter Fraud, Irregularities, and other Problems
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This is a collection of sources that point out, contrary to media and liberal pundit claims, that mail fraud exists often enough-- on ALL sides of the political spectrum-- that it is something that should be prevented.
Unless, of course, like so many in the media, they don't really want to prevent it since it helps "their" side to win.
The vast majority of Leftists name any attempt to reduce fraud as "voter suppression" and project their own behavior onto their political enemies.
CNN’s Jim Acosta tweeted “voter fraud in this country is actually very rare.”
Glenn Thrush of The New York Times claimed: “there is essentially no voter fraud in this country.” He instead asked, "Will the (Justice Department) Civil Rights division prevent/investigate a real threat-voter suppression?"
Journalists have credulously repeated unsupported, patronizing claims that in Georgia and other states, voter registration and absentee ballot laws somehow suppress minority votes.
The preference for opinion journalism over real reporting prompted Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame to tell a CNN summit last Monday, “We need to be doing stories that really look at whether or not there is widespread voter fraud…. we still need to be doing that basic aspect of the reporting.”
David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report said there are “valid concerns about the restrictive impact of new voting laws and voters improperly removed from rolls, but there's also a lot of outrage-stoking and sloppy journalism in this realm that are counterproductive to fixing real problems.”
Court filings by the Texas attorney general reveal that funding for a voter fraud ring came from the former head of the Texas Democratic Party in Fort Worth.
Leticia Sanchez and three other vote “harvesters” have been indicted for allegedly submitting fraudulent absentee ballot applications and then either intercepting the ballots in mailboxes or improperly “assisting” elderly voters in filling out their ballots.
Separately, the Texas attorney general has announced he’s investigating mailers sent to non-citizens by the state Democratic Party asking them to register using applications that already had the box asking about citizenship checked ‘Yes.’”
California was recently forced to admit that it had mistakenly registered almost 25,000 ineligible voters. The state didn’t even realize it was registering noncitizens until a Canadian who is a permanent resident of the U.S. contacted The Los Angeles Times to say he had been improperly registered under the state’s new automatic voter registration system. In a letter calling for an audit, Democratic Secretary of State Alex Padilla admitted that such “persistent errors” will “undermine public confidence.” But did any of these people actually vote?
New Hampshire allows same-day voter registration, as do 14 other states. The theory behind the lenient policy is that voters who forgot to register will still be able to cast a ballot. But the policy is ripe for abuse: Poll workers take ID – even out-of-state driver's licenses – and, as long as the person asserts that he or she is a U.S. citizen who lives in the state, they get to vote.
Unfortunately, the latest news on the election integrity front is less than inspiring.
In August, the Justice Department announced it was prosecuting 19 foreign nationals for illegally voting in North Carolina—some of them in multiple elections. Those prosecutions are ongoing. A month later, Californians learned—just weeks before a tremendously consequential election—that a “processing error” had led to 1,500 people being improperly registered to vote in their state, including at least one noncitizen. Unbelievably, this is only the latest in a series of snafus that have plagued the state’s new “motor voter” law. Earlier this year, the state Department of Motor Vehicles botched 23,000 registrations and double-registered potentially tens of thousands more.
Just this week, The Heritage Foundation has added 20 new cases to its online election-fraud database, which now documents 1,165 proven cases of election fraud spanning 47 states. Some 1,011 of these cases resulted in a criminal convictions.
The new entries run the election fraud gamut, but voters heading to the polls may find one from Philadelphia particularly disturbing. The members of the election board responsible for administering polling station 43-7 during a March 2017 special election abused their authority to deny voters an opportunity to freely cast their ballots.
According to Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, Calvin Mattox, Wallace Hill, Thurman George, and Dolores Shaw employed “harassment and intimidation against voters who wanted to vote for candidates of their choice—but not the candidate being pushed by the city’s Democratic Party machine.” Mattox, Hill, and George pleaded guilty to various election law violations and received probated sentences and a loss of their voting rights. Shaw received an accelerated rehabilitative disposition for “compromising the local election board.”
Meanwhile, in Illinois an entire family—Calvin Borders Jr.; his son, Calvin Borders III; his daughter, Candace; and the son’s girlfriend, Janie Walker—registered to vote using a vacant lot on Jefferson Street in Brooklyn, Illinois. None lived in the city. The two men pleaded guilty to perjury, while Candice Borders and Walker pleaded guilty to forgery. The Borders were sentenced to probation, and Walker is awaiting sentencing later this year.
In one case of double voting, Jeffrey Hartman, a resident of Westminster, Maryland, illegally registered to vote in both Maryland and Morgan County, West Virginia, and on nine different occasions since 2006 cast ballots in both states. Hartman pleaded guilty in West Virginia to illegal voting and was given a suspended 30-day jail sentence, was put on probation for one year, and ordered to pay a $100 fine and court costs.
These are just a handful of the more colorful cases from Heritage’s database, which is itself likely only the tip of the election fraud iceberg.
Simply put, the full scope of fraud in U.S. elections is unknown, and many states do not have in place the policies and procedures to detect and deter voter fraud.
Yet efforts at studying the problem, such as President Donald Trump’s thwarted Presidential Commission on Election Integrity, or proactively addressing the issue, like Ohio’s move to clean up voter rolls riddled with errors, are vigorously attacked and opposed by liberal activists and politicians.
They have spent years insisting, despite mounting, incontrovertible evidence—to say nothing of common sense—that election fraud is nonexistent. They claim that “election integrity” is a smokescreen designed to conceal efforts at suppression and disenfranchisement.
What they ignore, or more accurately, seek to bury, are the inconvenient facts that dispel these narratives. Participation rates have increased in states that have adopted voter identification laws.
When states do pass photo identification requirements, they include provisions that ensure that anyone without an acceptable ID can get one for free.
Opponents of election integrity also want to deflect attention away from the broad popularity of the measures they attack. Voter ID, for example, is so uncontroversial that even in our bitterly divided era, a Rasmussen poll found that 70 percent of likely voters favor it.
They also want to deflect attention away from the bitter truth that each illegal ballot that is cast essentially disenfranchises a lawful voter. That is something no American should tolerate.
With elections, the process matters at least as much as the outcome, and Americans deserve a process they can trust.
"I’ve talked about fraud here before. In CO in 2012, when I both poll-watched and was in touch with poll watchers throughout the state on a party line, we were counting 1/3 people being told they had voted before. On the party line, I learned that in Denver it was 2/3. You can’t beat shit like that. Yes, the people turned away were allowed to vote a provisional ballot, but you see… the thing is that that only gets counted if they come up short — ie. if the difference between the winner and loser is less than the number of provisionals — but the other ballot just gets counted. It’s already in. It’s already in the system. Do. The. Math.
Even so, 12 was tight, and they had to find boxes of votes up in Boulder county. Which is why the first thing the dems did when they captured Colorado legislature was to go all vote-by-mail. To save money. You know how fiscally conscious dems are, right?"
Just Facts’ conclusions confront both sides in the illegal voting debate: those who say it happens a lot and those who say the problem [is] nonexistent.
In one camp, there are groundbreaking studies by professors at Old Dominion University in Virginia who attempted to compile scientifically derived illegal voting numbers using the Harvard data, called the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.
On the other side are the professors who conducted
the study and contended that “zero” noncitizens of about 18
million adults in the U.S. voted. The liberal mainstream media adopted
this position and proclaimed the Old Dominion work was “debunked.”
The ODU professors, who stand by their work in the face of attacks from
the left, concluded that in 2008 as few as 38,000 and as many as 2.8
million noncitizens voted. Mr. Agresti’s analysis of the same polling
data settled on much higher numbers. He estimated that as many as 7.9
million noncitizens were illegally registered that year and 594,000
to 5.7 million voted.
For 2012, Just Facts said, 3.2 million to 5.6 million noncitizens were
registered to vote and 1.2 million to 3.6 million of them voted. Mr.
Agresti lays out his reasoning in a series of complicated calculations,
which he compares to U.S. Census Bureau figures for noncitizen residents.
Polls show noncitizens vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
“The details are technical, but the figure I calculated is based
on a more conservative margin of sampling error and a methodology that
I consider to be more accurate,” Mr. Agresti told The Washington
Times.
He believes the Harvard/YouGov researchers based their “zero”
claim on two flawed assumptions.
First, they assumed that people who said
they voted and identified a candidate did not vote unless their names
showed up in a database. “This is illogical, because such databases
are unlikely to verify voters who use fraudulent identities, and millions
of noncitizens use them,” Mr. Agresti said. He cites government
audits that show large numbers of noncitizens use false IDs and Social
Security numbers in order to function in the U.S., which could include
voting.
Second, Harvard assumed that respondent citizens sometimes misidentified
themselves as noncitizens but also concluded that noncitizens never
misidentified themselves as citizens, Mr. Agresti said.“This is
irrational, because illegal immigrants often claim they are citizens
in order to conceal the fact that they are in the U.S. illegally,”
he said. Some of the polled noncitizens denied they were registered
to vote when publicly available databases show that they were, he said.
This conclusion, he said, is backed by the Harvard/YouGov study’s
findings of consumer and vote data matches for 90 percent of participants
but only 41 percent of noncitizen respondents.
As to why his numbers are higher than the besieged ODU professors’
study, Mr. Agresti said: “I calculated the margin of sampling error
in a more cautious way to ensure greater confidence in the results,
and I used a slightly different methodology that I think is more accurate.”
Problems with voter rolls:
State-by-State instances of voter fraud and irregularities
| Alabama | Alaska | Arizona | Arkansas | California | Colorado | Connecticut | Delaware | Florida | Georgia |
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| Hawaii | Idaho | Illinois | Indiana | Iowa | Kansas | Kentucky | Louisiana | Maine | Maryland |
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| Massachusetts | Michigan | Minnesota | Mississippi | Missouri | Montana | Nebraska | Nevada | New Hampshire | New Jersey |
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"Jury finds Hoboken politico Frank Raia guilty" (2020). Raia was at the center of a vote-by-mail bribery scheme in which he directed campaign workers to pay residents $50 for voting for his council slate and for a referendum that would have weakened rent-control laws at the time. | |||||
| New Mexico | New York | North Carolina | North Dakota | Ohio | Oklahoma | Oregon | Pennsylvania | Rhode Island | South Carolina |
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| South Dakota | Tennesee | Texas | Utah | Vermont | Virginia | Washington | West Virginia | Wisconsin | Wyoming |
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"Keep in mind also that these are just a tiny portion of detected transgressions. How many more illegal acts have occurred that have gone unnoticed? After all, voting illegally is child’s play, with no checks and balances and a minimum of negative repercussions."
2020 Election: https://hereistheevidence.com/
Problems with moving to all mail-in ballots:
“Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” That quote isn’t from President Trump, who criticized mail-in voting this week after Wisconsin Democrats tried and failed to change an election at the last minute into an exclusively mail-in affair. It’s the conclusion of the bipartisan 2005 report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III.
Concerns about vote-buying have a long history in the U.S. They helped drive the move to the secret ballot, which U.S. states adopted between 1888 and 1950. Secret ballots made it harder for vote buyers to monitor which candidates sellers actually voted for. Vote-buying had been pervasive; my research with Larry Kenny at the University of Florida has found that voter turnout fell by about 8% to 12% after states adopted the secret ballot.
You wouldn’t know any of this listening to the media outcry over Mr. Trump’s remarks. “There is a lot of dishonesty going on with mail-in voting,” the president said Tuesday. In response, a CNN “fact check” declares that Mr. Trump “opened a new front in his campaign of lies about voter fraud.” A New York Times headline asserts: “Trump Is Pushing a False Argument on Vote-by-Mail Fraud.” Both claim that voter fraud is essentially nonexistent. The Carter-Baker report found otherwise.
Intimidation and vote buying were key concerns of the commission: “Citizens who vote at home, at nursing homes, at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation. Vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.” The report provides examples, such as the 1997 Miami mayoral election that resulted in 36 arrests for absentee-ballot fraud. The election had to be rerun, and the result was reversed.
There are more recent cases, too. In 2017 an investigation of a Dallas City Council election found some 700 fraudulent mail-in ballots signed by the same witness using a fake name. The discovery left two council races in limbo, and the fraud was much larger than the vote differential in one of those races. The case resulted in a criminal conviction. . . .
It is often claimed that impossibly large numbers of people live at the same address. In 2016, 83 registered voters in San Pedro, Calif., received absentee ballots at the same small two-bedroom apartment. Prosecutors rarely pursue this type of case.
Mail-in voting is a throwback to the dark old days of vote-buying and fraud. Because of this, many countries don’t allow absentee ballots for citizens living in their country, including Norway and Mexico. Americans deserve a more trustworthy system.
Leftist Voter Suppression: