How Many Foreign Voters?

On August 24, the Justice Department charged 19 foreigners in North Carolina with illegally voting in the 2016 election. Those charged hail from a wide variety of countries—Germany, Japan, Nigeria, Haiti, South Korea, Italy, Guyana, the Philippines, and Poland. Many of them are charged with other fraud involving visas, passports, and other documents, and the indictments appear to be the result of diligent work by local law enforcement and the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina.

Nineteen arrests may not seem like much cause for concern, but it’s worth noting the indictments all stem from a single swing state where the margin of victory in several recent elections has been razor thin. In 2014, an election for North Carolina District Court was decided by just five votes.

The question of voter fraud has come up in other electorally consequential and more recent elections. In 2017, a state audit found that 136 of Detroit’s 662 precincts recorded more votes that than registered voters in the 2016 election. The audit concluded, incredibly, that the irregularities were not the result of fraud, but when 20 percent of the precincts in a major city are producing unreliable voting records, something’s not right.

Yet the great majority of Democrats are staunchly opposed even to modest voter ID reforms and other efforts to address voter fraud, believing as they do that these efforts must be intended to block minority votes or steal elections or some such. Observers on the left routinely claim there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. That’s true in one sense, but not in the sense they mean. Voter fraud has historically been a product of urban political machines—organizations typically run by Democrats—and as a result Democrats have never had much of an incentive to investigate or prosecute it. With few interested in stopping it, left-leaning media outlets in turn write stories pointing to the lack of convictions as proof that voter fraud is a partisan “myth.”

But there’s a growing body of academic evidence suggesting that voter fraud is a bigger issue than many want to admit. In 2014 two liberal academics published a major survey of voter data in the journal Electoral Studies that included the finding that “more than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote.” To put that in perspective, about 12.1 million illegal immigrants reside in America, according the Department of Homeland Security. That’s nowhere remotely close to “millions” of illegal voters, but neither is it nothing.

It’s also hard to square Democrats’ opposition to voter ID laws and efforts to root out voter fraud with their more sensible concern over foreign governments attempting to hack into the country’s election databases—an issue that, weirdly enough, was prompted by the election of Donald Trump. There’s a simple way to make American elections unhackable. If every voter presents some form of credible identification at the polling place and his or her vote is recorded and stored on a paper ballot—not put in some easily penetrated database—any problems arising from hacking by foreign meddlers can be solved by counting ballots the old-fashioned way. If Democrats care as much as they claim about the integrity of our democracy, they should be willing to consider these and similar reforms.

As is his habit, Donald Trump has done extraordinary damage to a cause he claims to care about. One suspects he will do further damage by predicting voter fraud before the 2020 election and claiming the election was stolen if he loses. It doesn’t follow that voter fraud doesn’t exist.