Refusing to surrender ground to the leftist/media myth that voter fraud is a negligible problem, the Heritage Foundation this week released a short video highlighting this very real, continuing problem.
At a brisk three minutes, 26 seconds, the video isn’t meant as a comprehensive legal brief. It does, however, effectively explain why such a brief could honestly be written.
The video’s narrator is Heritage senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission. Von Spakovsky specifically mentions five different ways voter fraud is accomplished (he could have mentioned more), and notes that the Supreme Court has said (in his paraphrase of the court) “flagrant examples of voter fraud have been documented throughout this nation’s history.”
Helpfully, Heritage maintains an official Election Fraud Database listing (at last count) 1,216 cases of proved voter fraud just in recent years, often involving multiple fraudulent ballots. As von Spakovsky notes in the video, even this is a vast understatement of the problem, because “voter fraud often goes undetected, and even when it’s discovered, overburdened prosecutors rarely prioritize these cases.”
In recent weeks alone, though, numerous voters in Washington state were receiving two (or more) mail-in ballots each, thousands of voters in Tucson were mailed ballots incorrectly, and the mayor of Las Vegas came under criminal investigation for voter fraud.
Worse, the “Motor Voter” law of 1993 forbids states from stringent rules requiring proof of eligibility for people who register by mail and allows states to adopt ID requirements for absentee ballots that are less careful than those for voting in person. This latter, of course, uses exactly backward logic: Without an election official there to check on someone voting from a remote location, skullduggery is far easier to accomplish.
Other examples and obvious opportunities for rampant voter fraud have been amply demonstrated in prior columns here. To combat all these, the Heritage video helpfully lists several abundantly reasonable methods. Strong voter ID laws of course lead the way, but there are others, including state cross-check programs to ensure people aren’t registered in multiple states, along with requirements that states compare voter rolls with government records to keep ineligible convicts or foreign nationals from casting ballots.
“Preserving this great experiment that is America depends on having free and fair elections,” von Spakovsky says.
He’s right.
