The Latest on Voter Fraud

Josh Marshall shares the result of an intense effort by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted to identify and prosecute cases of voter fraud on Talking Points Memo.

Even one of the GOP’s point men on the vote fraud front is now trying to push back against the ‘hyperbole’ tied to the subject. And even with an especial emphasis on finding every instance of potential fraud, they appear to have come up with 135 - and most of those were apparently caught by the simple non-voter ID methods all good canvassers use. So guilt notwithstanding, those instances had no actual effect on the race in question. As Husted put it, “Voter fraud does exist, but it is not an epidemic. To put this into context, … that’s 135 referrals out of more than 5.6 million votes cast.”

All of which brings you back to one central point: if you care about the integrity of elections and people actually being able to vote, the supposed cures for vote fraud are vastly more destructive than the problem. All evidence suggests that vote fraud is a minuscule, minuscule problem. Voter ID and most of the other nostrums are solutions looking for a problem. The people who support these policies are either ignorant of the facts or actually want to cull a certain subsection of the population from democratic participation. There are simply no two ways about it.