"Voter Fraud is Real" (challenge from a right-winger friend)

[UtahJosh]

Talking with a right wing friend of mine, I mentioned that disenfranchisement was a concern, to which he replied something like "not remotely, anyone can vote!" and proceeded to hit me with a bunch of links on voter fraud (dead people voting and such). I realize that's a waste of time to delve through, but I was wondering if I could be pointed to some scholarly sites dedicated to the issues of voter fraud/disenfranchisement, and all the related sort of stuff that I need to refer back to when this comes up.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. I don't mean to sound lazy, I've googled a ton of info myself but I want to find serious, scholarly research on the topic in order to give proper references in these discussions.

Thanks!

[Vinca]

1. I wouldn't waste my time. Your friend is brainwashed.

All those "dead people voting" are actually lots of people who die during the course of a year and the people in charge of the voting rolls haven't gotten around to taking them off the list. Just because a dead person's name is there, doesn't mean they vote.

[CurtEastPoint]

2. Point him to this.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-comprehensive-investigation-of-voter-impersonation-finds-31-credible-incidents-out-of-one-billion-ballots-cast/

or this

https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/voter-fraud

or this

https://mediamatters.org/research/2016/10/21/right-wing-media-figures-conflate-voter-fraud-voter-registration-inaccuracies/214037

[stopbush]

9. Aren't those all biased, left-wing news sources?

I'll bet a nickel that will be the response from this person's friend.

[krispos42]

4. It exists. it is not remotely significant.

People move but don't update their address, so they vote in their old polling place. A person puts an absentee ballot in the mail, then gets hit by a bus the day before the election. Whatever.

Insignificant.

Election rigging? Whole different thing.

Voter purges, insufficient polling places, black box voting, stringent ID requirements, gerrymandering, closing down offices that issue the ID's to vote, closing down early voting, etc.

SIGNIFICANT.

[mercuryblues]

5. The actual result of "dead voter" investigation

In South Carolina, Joe you-lie Wilson, once made the claim that there were 953 dead voters in SC. It turned out that the 953 dead voters ranged a span of 7 years. In the 2012 election there were 207 cases of "dead voters" It cost the taxpayers millions of dollars for SLED to investigate this claim. Despite the claims made by Joe Wilson and Gov, Haley on Fox news, A local paper had to file a FOI request to get the results made public.

Why is this investigation result important? It completely debunks the dead voter claim. This is also why red states aren't really investigating for dead voters, If they investigate, republicans can't use this claim to rile up their base.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/the-case-of-zombie-voters-in-south-carolina/2013/07/24/86de3c64-f403-11e2-aa2e-4088616498b4_blog.html

of those 207

91 were name recognition error of the poll worker....father was deceased but the son of the same name voted. The worker marked the father as voting instead of son.

(91)

6 were from the worker starting to incorrectly marking off a name, then correcting themselves to the correct name. They failed to completely erase the mark on the wrong name and the machine picked it up as a voter

(97 )

56 cases of data mining errors. The wrong SS# was attributed to the live voter.

(153)

5 were incorrectly marked as voting absentee. 3 of those cases an absentee form was requested by someone whose name appeared either above or below the deceased person on the list. The other 2 were given credit for voting when no absentee ballot was ever requested in their name.

(158)

3 cases where the absentee ballot was issued in the wrong name, the name of a deceased person. All those voters filled out the form and signed their own name. They had actually requested the form for themselves.

(161)

32 cases of scanning errors. The scanner picked up stray marks on the voter roll and attributed them to a voter.

(193)

3 cases of an absentee voter form requested and they died before the election. 2 did not return the form and a 3rd died the day before election.

(196)

The remainder of the cases were inconclusive. They all had a deceased father or son of the same name, where 1 voted and the other hadn't. The investigators were unable to contact the individuals to find out if it was a clerical error of marking the wrong voter.


They now have voter ID laws despite the claim being false and over exaggerated.

[underpants]

6. VOTER FRAUD- Thanks for bringing this up. Bookmarking for the great info here.

[Cal33]

7. I have recently read that "voter suppression" accounts for far more Democrats from being

prevented from voting than "voter fraud."

To me, voter suppression is also a form of voter fraud. We ought to roll up our sleeves and
do battle with both.

I don't think the Republicans have won a single election honestly in the past 4 decades.

[Wounded Bear]

8. I'd be willing to bet that your friend is beyond the reach of any scholarly reports.

I'd bet that his intellectual ceiling on this issue does not get higher than InfoWars, et al.

[Vogon_Glory]

10. If Voter Fraud Was As Real And Prevalent As the Righties Would Have Us Believe

If voter fraud was as real and prevalent as the righties would have us believe, there wouldn't be these scattered cases that occasionally make it to the newspapers, there would have been dozens of cases, scores of cases, hundreds of cases, and red-state prosecutors, particularly during the reign of Dubya, would have prosecuted those offenders with zeal to blaring headlines.

To ask the rest of us to believe in wide-spread and rampant voter fraud in an age of ID checks and immigrants trying to carefully toe the line so they can eventually get US citizenship legally is to ask for a bigger suspension of disbelief than believing that Disney's cartoon elephant Dumbo could actually fly.