The conservative activists’ largely partisan voter fraud debate, as Ian Urbina at the New York Times wrote this morning, “is flaring anew.” And despite scant evidence of actual fraudulent votes, anti-voter fraud efforts have already turned up fruitless investigations in one state while causing voter intimidation issues in another.
In Minnesota, a county attorney has charged 47 individuals in voter fraud cases stemming from the 2008 election, according to a TPMMuckraker report. But, investigations reveal that conservative groups have “exaggerated the threat of voter fraud” (and it should be further noted that none of these cases entailed voter impersonation, which is the only kind of fraud that strict photo ID laws would prevent). In fact, 43 of the 47 cases involve felons who were ineligible to vote and four cases of double voting.
These 47 cases boiled down from the initial 1,250 names (including more than 800 alleged felons) that conservative group, Minnesota Majority submitted last November. Most of the claims “didn’t pan out,” and even more of them were “either not felons or not on probation when they voted.”
Ultimately, “.00006 percent–six-one-thousandth of one percent–of voters in Hennepin County had been charged with improperly voting.”
Despite Minnesota’s example of voter fraud hysteria leading to negligible investigations, Republican poll watchers in Wake County, N.C. have already brought forth an unusually high number of voter intimidation complaints during the early voting period.
According to another TPMMuckraker report, the poll watchers–recruited by Republican U.S. House candidate Bill Randall– reportedly were illegally standing behind registration tables and taking pictures of license plates of voters using curbside voting.
“In other cases, [election] director Cherie Poucher said, it’s been a matter of voters finding normal, legal observing activities intimidating.”
Poucher says the observers are “unclear” on election law. “I think they got a lot of misinformation at whatever training they had,” she said, adding that her office was getting more complaints than usual.