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November 2, 2006

Myth or Fact—The 411 On Claims of Voting Fraud

In the past few years, widespread efforts have undertaken to place new obstacles and restrictions in the path of Americans seeking to exercise their right to vote. These barriers include making it more difficult to register to vote, chilling regulations of voter registration groups (such as those in Florida that caused the League of Women Voters to suspend registration for many months until the law was struck down as unconstitutional by a federal court), harassment and intimidation of voters, and highly restrictive identification requirements. Most of these barriers affect people of color and lower income Americans more harshly than they affect other groups.

Supporters of these new barriers claim that their motive is to prevent voting fraud. Yet, multiple studies and reports have found that voting fraud of the type that these new restrictions would address is virtually non-existent.

The truth is that claims of voting fraud have been vastly and misleadingly exaggerated by those who support measures that will make it more difficult for people of color and lower income Americans to vote.

Nonpartisan research studies show that the type of voter fraud that these new measures would prevent occurs exceedingly infrequently and never to the level of affecting election outcomes:

• A comprehensive study published in 2003 by Demos¹, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and advocacy organization, which examined election fraud in 12 states - Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin - from 1992 to 2002, concluded that the incidence of election fraud is "minimal."²
• A 2002 study conducted by Professor R. Michael Alvarez of the California Institute of Technology analyzed data from the 1994-2001 elections provided by the Election Fraud Investigation Unit of the California Secretary of State. Professor Alvarez?s study also found little evidence of fraud.³
• In September 2005, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) commissioned research on election administration issues, as mandated by Section 241 of the Help America Vote Act of 2002. This year, the draft of Status Report on the Voting Fraud-Voter Intimidation Research Project, as prepared for the EAC, was leaked to the press after the EAC declined to vote on it. This report finds that much of the research on voting fraud describes "anecdotes and draw[s] broad conclusions from a large array of incidents." The researchers found widespread agreement in the public and private sector that there is "little polling place fraud ... including voter impersonation, 'dead' voters, noncitizen voting and felon voters."⁴
• A report by the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio and The League of Women Voters of Ohio verified that the occurrence of voter fraud is exceedingly rare. The report uncovered only four fraudulent voters of the more than nine million votes cast in 2002-2004, equivalent to 0.00000044 percent of the votes cast. According to the authors of this report, "the odds are greater for an individual to win the lottery or get struck by lightning than to cast a fraudulent vote in Ohio."
• Although the federal government has placed an increased emphasis on investigating and prosecuting election fraud, the number of convictions for such fraud remains extremely low. In October 2002, the U.S. Department of Justice initiated the Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative. As of August 2005, this initiative had resulted in only 52 convictions out of 196,139,871 votes cast in federal elections during that time period.⁵

Some argue that restrictions making it harder to register will prevent election fraud. They point to a small number of forged registration applications that have been submitted. However, the fraud in those instances was not by a real voter, but rather by a registration worker who found it easier to "make up" applicants than to actually register real persons. There is no evidence that any of the made up applicants actually attempted to vote or voted. The motivation for this type of forgery is not election fraud, but employment fraud, in which a wayward employee of a voter registration group defrauds his or her employer. It is important for election officials and voter registration groups to work together to prevent this kind of scam by wayward employees. But the harm caused by these applications - which are a miniscule percentage of the total applications submitted by registration groups is not a compelling interest that would justify further burdens on the right to vote.

Supporters of stringent photo identification requirements claim that they will prevent election fraud from occurring. Yet, requiring photo identification only guards against one type of voter fraud-voter impersonation at a polling place - and past experience has proven that this type of fraud occurs very rarely, if at all. Photo identification requirements do not prevent voting by ineligible persons or absentee voting fraud. Based on interviews with members of the legal, election official, advocacy, and academic communities, the report prepared for the EAC concluded that "new identification requirements are the modern version of voter intimidation and suppression." While many Americans believe that everyone has photo identification, 12 percent of registered voters nationwide do not have a driver's license, and millions of citizens have no government-issued photo identification.

Inflexible, unnecessary measures adopted or being considered to prevent a perceived threat of voter fraud have a discriminatory impact on people of color, people with disabilities, the elderly, low income citizens, and others who do not work, drive, or travel as frequently as other Americans. In order to prevent widespread disenfranchisement, election officials and the general public must understand the truth about claims of election fraud.

¹ Lori Minnite and David Callahan, Securing the Vote: An Analysis of Election Fraud (2003).

² Id., 4.

³ Id. at 17 and n.6 (citing unpublished study).

⁴ U.S. Election Assistance Commission, Status Report on the Voting Fraud-Voter Intimidation Research Project (2006), 4.

⁵ Brennan Center for Justice and Spencer Overton, Response to the Report of the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform (Sept. 19, 2005), 10.