Help us improve in just 2 minutes—share your thoughts in our reader survey.
Voter registration fraud
 |
|
Voter registration fraud is a form of vote fraud in which someone registers to vote or registers someone else to vote using a fictional name or without that person's consent.
There is debate surrounding the extent to which this and other forms of voter fraud occur. John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky—with The Heritage Foundation, which describes itself as a conservative think tank—wrote that "the media aren’t doing our democracy any favors by summarily dismissing the existence of voter fraud – like the almost 1,200 proven cases in the Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database – while questioning the very need for accurate voter rolls."[1][2] According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy institute which describes itself as progressive, "The consensus from credible research and investigation is that the rate of illegal voting is extremely rare, and the incidence of certain types of fraud – such as impersonating another voter – is virtually nonexistent."[3][4]
This and other pages on Ballotpedia cover types of election and voter fraud for which there are documented cases and around which there is debate concerning the frequency of instances and proposed responses.
Relevant research
A sampling of research related to voter registration fraud, arranged in reverse chronological order, is presented below.
Heritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation's Voter Fraud Database contained, as of December 2019, 182 cases since 1997 in which one or more individuals were found to have registered or attempted to register under a false name or without another individual's consent. Cases of both in-person and absentee fraud were documented. Heritage states that its database contains a sampling of "election fraud cases from across the country, broken down by state, where individuals were either convicted of vote fraud, or where a judge overturned the results of an election."[5]
Brennan Center for Justice
The Brennan Center for Justice released a report in 2007 by Justin Levitt in which he stated that "flawed matches of lists from one place (death records) to another (voter rolls) are often responsible for misinformation. Sometimes the interpretation is flawed: two list entries under the same name indicate different individuals. Sometimes the lists themselves are flawed: as Hilde Stafford discovered in 2006, individuals who are in fact quite spry are occasionally listed as deceased on the Social Security Administration’s master files. And sometimes, because of clerical error by election workers or voters or both, an individual is marked as voting when she did not in fact cast a ballot, or is marked as voting under the wrong person’s name. ... Indeed, a 2007 investigation of about 100 “dead voters” in Missouri revealed that every single purported case was properly attributed either to a matching error, a problem in the underlying data, or a clerical error by elections officials or voters."[6]
Case studies
This section provides a sample of two cases in which someone was convicted of voter registration fraud.
- In November 2019, Mark Goode of Massachusetts pleaded guilty to charges that he attempted to vote twice and registered under different dates of birth to avoid detection by election officials. Prosecutors said that Goode was registered to vote in two separate towns and voted in both of those towns during the 2016 presidential election.[7]
- In October 2009, Latoya Lewis of Wisconsin was sentenced to three years of probation after pleading guilty to election fraud. Lewis was charged for submitting at least two of eight voter registration cards filled out for the same man, who later told people he did not register to vote through Lewis. Lewis told police she was trying to meet a quota as a paid voter registration for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).[8]
See also
- Electoral fraud
- Election governance by state
- Voting and election governance: Support and opposition topics
- Voting rights for convicted felons
- Voter identification laws by state
- Mail ballot collection and return laws by state
- Laws permitting noncitizens to vote in the United States
Footnotes
- ↑ The Heritage Foundation, "Voter Fraud Exists – Even Though Many in the Media Claim It Doesn’t," October 29, 2018
- ↑ The Heritage Foundation, "About Heritage," accessed February 10, 2020
- ↑ The Brennan Center, "Resources on Voter Fraud Claims," June 26, 2017
- ↑ The Brennan Center, "Progressive Groups Oppose White House Prison Reform Bill," April 18, 2018
- ↑ Ballotpedia searched the database for three terms: "deceased," "died," and "dead." Nineteen entries included voters who attempted to or did vote in a deceased person's name.
- ↑ The Brennan Center for Justice, "The Truth About Voter Fraud," 2007
- ↑ Cape Cod Times, "Forestdale man pleads guilty to voter fraud," November 27, 2019
- ↑ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Woman gets probation for voter registration fraud," October 12, 2019
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
