Why Did These Republicans Commit Voter Fraud ?
I didn't really want to create and seed this article, because voter fraud is not widespread and doesnt effect elections.
BUT, every now and then on Newstalkers we have someone claim that Democrats are fraud voters, and more often than not they try and do so by producing one case of some individual "Democrat" voting when they were not legally permitted to. I saw it here again yesterday.
Why the case of one individual in a country of a couple hundred million potential voters should provoke such intense interest is a mystery, and even if you lower the inquiry to the local level where it is one vote out of a few thousand it clearly is not a big deal.
But, alas, we have those who think it is somehow "enlightening" to show that a black , CRIMINAL, violated voting laws. STOP THE PRESSES!
The conservatives love to find one example of something and project it onto the behavior of all those they disagree with. It's completely silly, but they are not discouraged by such trivial consequences as looking stupid.
So , with that in mind, here is more news on individual "voter fraud"
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/1/29/1625154/-Sure-there-s-voter-fraud-By-Republicans
In January 2016, New Hampshire resident Derek Castonguay pleaded guilty to voter fraud. He was so excited about voting, he was registered to vote as a Republican in both Windham and Salem, N.H.
In February 2016, Wisconsin resident Robert Monroe was sentenced to jail on 13 counts of voter fraud. He had cast illegal votes in 2011 and 2012, including voting multiple times in the recall election, for Republican Gov. Scott Walker, from multiple locations and in the names of his son and his son's girlfriend. Monroe tried to claim he was in a "fugue state" when he voted so often, but the judge wasn't buying it.
In 2014, Leslie Rutledge, the Republican candidate for Arkansas attorney general, was registered to vote in Washington, D.C., Arkansas, and Virginia. She registered to vote in Washington in 2008, then voted absentee from Arkansas in the same election. An Arkansas county clerk canceled her Arkansas registration in 2014 when he learned she was registered in multiple states, meaning she couldn't run for office, because in Arkansas you must be registered to vote to run for office. Rutledge objected and blamed “big bureaucrat, big government” politics. Rutledge ultimately won her argument -- and the attorney general's race. Oh, and she's a YUUUGE Trump supporter.
In Illinois, a 2014 candidate for the General Assembly, Republican Nancy Myalls, was found to have cast votes in both Illinois and Wisconsin, where she owned a vacation home, in 2008 and 2012. She was another Republican , like Robert Monroe, who wanted to make sure she could vote for Scott Walker in the recall election. Although Myalls was never prosecuted for voter fraud, at least she lost the election for a state legislative seat.
In February 2012, the Republican secretary of state in Indiana, Charlie White, was found guilty on multiple counts: two counts of perjury and one each of false registration, voting in another precinct, submitting a false ballot, and theft. At the time of the fraud, he had used his ex-wife’s home as his voting address because he “didn’t want to give up a $1,000-a-month” town council salary. Remember that the secretary of state is in charge of elections.
In January 2013, Roxanne Rubin, a Nevada Republican , accepted a plea deal for voting multiple times in the 2012 election. Rubin claimed she didn’t want to commit fraud, she just decided to “test” the integrity of the voting system by voting multiple times.
In Arizona in 2012, a Republican candidate for county supervisor, John Enright, was forced to withdraw his candidacy when it came to light that he had been sending in absentee votes for his girlfriend—who had been dead for five years.
Also in Arizona in 2012, an unidentified Republican man thought it would be hilarious to register his dog as a Democrat, just to show how easy it was to commit voter fraud. He committed voter registration fraud, but not voter fraud -- the dog obviously wasn't going to show up to vote. And what dog would want to register as a Republican anyway?
There are four documented cases of voter fraud in the 2016 election out of 135 million votes cast, which turned up in an exhaustive online search by The Washington Post . Three of the four involved Republican voters and Trump supporters. The fourth involved an election worker in Florida counting absentee ballots who was arrested after she filled in bubbles for a Republican mayoral candidate.
Of course, Steve Bannon, President Popular Vote Loser's right-hand man in the White House, is registered to vote in two states —New York and Florida. One of the Trump offspring, Tiffany, is registered in both New York and Pennsylvania. Trump Treasury secretary nominee Steve Mnuchin is registered in both New York and California. And there are two more double dippers in Trump’s corner: son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner is registered in New York and New Jersey, and Baghdad Sean Spicer is registered in Rhode Island and Virginia. Presumably all five voted Republican .
What is there to say but: Sad!
Surely there must be cases where Democrats committed voter fraud, you might say. Perhaps, but a video example of Democratic voter fraud—widely spread by GOP conspiracy theorists in 2016—was actually filmed in Russia , according to Snopes.com. Also from Snopes: a piece shooting down video claims of voter fraud made by James O’Keefe’s “Project Veritas.”
A post by FactCheck.org debunks Trump's claims of "massive" voter fraud, whether they're about dead people voting, non-citizens voting, or people voting more than once. These cases involving Republicans aside, the actual number of cases is so small that it couldn't affect any election outcome. Thirty-one incidents in 14 years, out of 1 billion votes cast. As FactCheck reports:
In an Aug. 16, 2014, article for the Washington Post , Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt, currently on leave to work with the Department of Justice overseeing voting, wrote that he has been tracking allegations of voter fraud for years, including any “credible allegation that someone may have pretended to be someone else at the polls, in any way that an ID law could fix.”
“So far,” he wrote, “I’ve found about 31 different incidents (some of which involve multiple ballots) since 2000, anywhere in the country. … To put this in perspective, the 31 incidents below come in the context of general, primary, special, and municipal elections from 2000 through 2014. In general and primary elections alone, more than 1 billion ballots were cast in that period.”
In 2012, a team of students led by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University analyzed 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases since 2000 and concluded that “while fraud has occurred, the rate is infinitesimal, and in-person voter impersonation on Election Day, which prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider tough voter ID laws, is virtually non-existent.”
Yes, states and local governments are slow to clean up voting rolls, so sometimes voters who moved from one location or one state to another might show up on multiple rolls. That doesn't mean they voted more than once (except for the Republicans named above). Voters die, and they remain on voting rolls until removed. That doesn't mean zombies trudge to the voting booth with arms outstretched as if they walked off the set of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video.
You know what is fraudulent about voting regulations? Things that make it harder for people to vote. Voter ID laws and other voter suppression measures target the elderly, recently naturalized citizens, African Americans, Latinos, and students, making it harder for them to cast ballots. And yes, those efforts are made by Republicans to depress votes for those who might be more likely to vote for Democrats.
Whatever "investigation" might be launched by the Trumpsters is sure to be used as an excuse for even stricter voter ID laws. The Trump team has said the probe will be focused on urban centers, which lean heavily Democratic.
The 2012 Pew study lists many voter registration problems and offers less expensive, effective ways to solve registration issues, such as online voter registration and online voter data comparisons. By all means, let's streamline voter registration to have accurate voter rolls. But let's not waste time, effort, and money on a problem that doesn't exist.
He was just doing a favor for a friend.
You conveniently left out all the cases of voter fraud by Democrats.
List them Gregger.
BINGO!!!
My issue is with those who don't want to have a discussion about the hypocrisies that occur. It's disappointing.
Just like a man with no arms doesn't want to get into a boxing match.
Thanks for posting, it was so annoying seeing the hype and punishment for that poor woman in Texas, who surprisingly (sarc) got the harshest sentence for far less than some of the (few) others did, who were guilty of worse. The only reason she got that was for republicans to have a target to point to when they go off on their 'voter fraud' rants. Hypocrisy again. Funny how they pick these non-problems to focus on, but don't even want to acknowledge the glaring issues right in front of us.
Well consider that she is black, unlike the vast majority of Republicans who get caught doing what she did. Just like the woman in Jacksonville who went to prison for firing a warning shot to deter her abusive spouse. Some things are only acceptable for white people.
Part of their bait and switch mentality.
Let me get this straight.
You believe voter fraud is not a problem but then you post this ..... a case that apparently proves voter fraud. You are a real piece of work ..... your rationalizations here on NT are approaching epic proportions. Hilarious!
It doesn’t matter where the fraud is coming from. Fraud is fraud regardless of who initiates it, no matter how minor it may be.
This just reinforces the need for better voter vetting. Thanks!
In the cases where people are registered to vote in multiple states, a Voter ID law would help prevent them from voting in multiple states, if the law states that any ID must be from the state where they are voting. But, no, we can't have a Voter ID law, because it would harm minorities...</sarc>
I've accepted that all non-partisan investigations of voter fraud have found about 0.02% of fraud, so that means there are always going to be a handful of cases we can point to and show yes, it does happen. The issue is that when it's such a low number, why add onerous voter ID laws that specifically target "with surgical precision" minority voters disenfranchising tens of thousands of eligible voters all to stop the handful of cases like those above? It would be like taking a sledge hammer and smashing half the walls in your house just to stop a single mosquito, which is what you tell your wife, but really you were taking the walls out to create or expand your man cave. The premise that these new voter ID laws are to stop the 0.02% of actual voter fraud is ridiculous, it's all about gaming the system to disenfranchise as many of the people who you determined won't vote for you or your party.
“The evidence in this case casts doubt on the notion that voter ID laws foster integrity and confidence,” Judge Peterson wrote. “The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities. To put it bluntly, Wisconsin’s strict version of voter ID law is a cure worse than the disease .” U.S. District Judge James D. Peterson
“ The new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision ” and “impose cures for problems that did not exist,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote for the panel. “Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the State’s true motivation.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/appeals-court-strikes-down-north-carolinas-voter-id-law/2016/07/29/810b5844-4f72-11e6-aa14-e0c1087f7583_story.html?utm_term=.d8dbd03b067b
Yeah, it’s not a problem until one vote changes the result of a vote. Problematic for either side.
This is one of those head scratchers for me. The last National election turn out of the eligible electorate was I believe around 43%. As a people we seem to have difficulty getting folks to cast a vote period, let alone do so more than once.
Whatever fraudulence may be going on is most likely minimal at best, unless it is happening at a local level it is a drop in the bucket
Both sides cheat.
One side is afraid to uncover it. Wonder why?
Here are some results from a quick websearch on Democrats convicted of voter fraud:
HA! Thanks for the laugh - I sincerely needed one today.
Studies Agree: Impersonation Fraud by Voters Very Rarely Happens
The Brennan Center’s seminal report on this issue, The Truth About Voter Fraud, found that most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices. The report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Given this tiny incident rate for voter impersonation fraud, it is more likely, the report noted, that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”
A study published by a Columbia University political scientist tracked incidence rates for voter fraud for two years, and found that the rare fraud that was reported generally could be traced to “false claims by the loser of a close race, mischief and administrative or voter error.”
A 2017 analysis published in The Washington Post concluded that there is no evidence to support Trump’s claim that Massachusetts residents were bused into New Hampshire to vote.
A comprehensive 2014 study published in The Washington Post found 31 credible instances of impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2014, out of more than 1 billion ballots cast. Even this tiny number is likely inflated, as the study’s author counted not just prosecutions or convictions, but any and all credible claims.
Two studies done at Arizona State University, one in 2012 and another in 2016, found similarly negligible rates of impersonation fraud. The project found 10 cases of voter impersonation fraud nationwide from 2000-2012. The follow-up study, which looked for fraud specifically in states where politicians have argued that fraud is a pernicious problem, found zero successful prosecutions for impersonation fraud in five states from 2012-2016.
A review of the 2016 election found four documented cases of voter fraud.
Research into the 2016 election found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
A 2016 working paper concluded that the upper limit on double voting in the 2012 election was 0.02%. The paper noted that the incident rate was likely much lower, given audits conducted by the researchers showed that “many, if not all, of these apparent double votes could be a result of measurement error.”
A 2014 paper concluded that “the likely percent of non-citizen voters in recent US elections is 0.”
A 2014 nationwide study found “no evidence of widespread impersonation fraud” in the 2012 election.
A 2014 study that examined impersonation fraud both at the polls and by mail ballot found zero instances in the jurisdictions studied.
A 2014 study by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, which reflected a literature review of the existing research on voter fraud, noted that the studies consistently found “few instances of in-person voter fraud.”
While writing a 2012 book, a researcher went back 30 years to try to find an example of voter impersonation fraud determining the outcome of an election, but was unable to find even one.
A 2012 study exhaustively pulled records from every state for all alleged election fraud, and found the overall fraud rate to be “infinitesimal” and impersonation fraud by voters at the polls to be the rarest fraud of all: only 10 cases alleged in 12 years. The same study found only 56 alleged cases of non-citizen voting, in 12 years.
A 2012 assessment of Georgia’s 2006 election found “no evidence that election fraud was committed under the auspices of deceased registrants.”
A 2011 study by the Republican National Lawyers Association found that, between 2000 and 2010, 21 states had 1 or 0 convictions for voter fraud or other kinds of voting irregularities.
A 2010 book cataloguing reported incidents of voter fraud concluded that nearly all allegations turned out to be clerical errors or mistakes, not fraud.
A 2009 analysis examined 12 states and found that fraud by voters was “very rare,” and also concluded that many of the cases that garnered media attention were ultimately unsubstantiated upon further review.
Additional research on noncitizen voting can be found here: .
Additional resources can be found here: .
RATHER THAN BE PARTISAN, LOOK AT THIS ENTIRE GROUP OF NON-PARTISAN STUDIES. THIS IS A PROBLEM WITHOUT A PROBLEM. IT IS A TRULY MADE UP ISSUE. If I had every vote that was illegally cast in the past 16 years, I couldn't win an election for township supervisor. That is how few real cases there are.
Voter fraud? Pshaw. Conservatives and their lackey the GOP has been committing voter fraud since their implementation of The Southern Strategy. This is voter fraud.
Perfect, let’s make sure voter fraud doesn’t occur. Hooray voter ID laws.
Hooray!