Voter Fraud

The “Voter Fraud” Fraud

The claim that so-called “voter fraud” threatens the integrity of American elections has been used throughout American history to persuade the public that more restrictive registration and voting laws are required.

Currently, with renewed partisan vigor, fantasies of fraud are being spun again to undo some of the progress America has made lowering barriers to the vote.

While protecting the integrity of the voter rolls is essential, there is no available evidence to suggest that voters are intentionally corrupting the electoral process, let alone in numbers that threaten to harm the legitimacy of our elections.

Here’s the real story:

• Multiple studies have proven that widespread or coordinated voter fraud, the kind that changes election outcomes, simply doesn’t happen in today’s America.
• Study after study has shown that voter fraud is extremely rare in the United States, and in-person voter fraud is so rare as to be almost non-existent.
• Voter fraud allegations, on examination, turn out to be one of three things: errors by individual voters or election officials, pranks, or unsubstantiated accusations by a losing candidate.
• The real fraud is that politicians use false claims of “voter fraud” to sell Americans on policies that disenfranchise Americans: policies such as strict voter-ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements, reckless voter purges, and restrictions on voter registration efforts.
• These laws are nearly all designed to combat in-person voter fraud, a crime that is virtually non-existent. The real impact of these laws is to disenfranchise eligible citizens from voting at all.

The history of civil-rights progress in America is the history of expanding access to voting. There is a genuine need to modernize and expand America’s voter registration systems, but we need to make voting easier, not harder.