Kevin Williamson says I’m wrong to say that voter fraud is practically nonexistent. After all, maybe there really is lots of fraud, but nobody is getting convicted of it so we don’t know about it.
Well, OK. That’s pretty hard to argue with. But I’d still like to see some evidence that it’s actually widespread. And unluckily for me, says Williamson, “Kevin Drum has really, really bad timing, I think.” This is based on three examples of voter fraud that turned up just this week. So let’s roll the tape:
- Example #1 is some guy who ran for a seat on the Daytona Beach City Commission back in August and apparently requested 92 absentee ballots under suspicious circumstances. Today he was arrested and charged with committing absentee ballot fraud.
- Example #2 concerns Patrick Murphy, running for Congress in Pennsylvania, who has done — something. I can’t quite tell what. “Flooded” the post office with absentee ballot requests is one version of the story. “Fooled” voters into requesting absentee ballots they didn’t need is another version. Created a mailer that looked really official, goes another. But I can’t tell what’s really going on here. At worst, it appears that Murphy is nudging people to request absentee ballots even though they might not actually be absent on election day. On a corruption scale of 1-100, this rates about a 1.5.
- Example #3 concerns some felons who apparently voted in Hennepin County in 2008. According to the local prosecutor, “The rate of alleged fraud amounted to about 0.00006 percent of ballots cast….’There was no evidence of any organized effort to enable or promote this activity,’ he said.”
So that’s one (alleged) crook in an obscure municipal race, one election mailer that opponents have objected to, and a tiny bit of unorganized (and quite possibly unintentional) fraud two years ago. That’s really not a very impressive tally.
But look: the point isn’t that there’s no voter fraud. Of course there is. It’s a big country. If 50 million people vote and 0.01% of the votes are fraudulent, that’s 5,000 fraudulent votes. That might seem like a lot, but it would actually be an indication of a really, really clean election system.
In any case, nobody is suggesting we shouldn’t police elections. What I am suggesting is that mountains of evidence demonstrate that the actual incidence of voter fraud is minuscule and nearly always freelance. Nonetheless, every two years Republicans whip up a towering hysteria over the specter of massive organized efforts to steal the election from them. Efforts that quite plainly don’t exist. And since no party in its right mind would spend gobs of time and money fighting a tiny problem that affects virtually no actual election results, they must have some other motive for doing this. What might that be?
