Friday, May 29, 2020

To be fair, I stuck my tongue out first

Twice today I was asked if absentee ballots would increase voter fraud.  I explained some of the checks and balances that go into verifying them.  Figured that it was the furor over the president's recent tweets that is causing concern.  Decided to get on-line and see if maybe I was missing something.  Found the White House.gov site had a page on Voter Fraud compiled by the Heritage Foundation (a self-described conservative think-tank).  Figured it should explain why the president would feel there were issues w/ America's voting system.  At the top of the page it tallied 1,071 cases of voter fraud.  More than I thought but spread over the entire country I didn't think it was significant.  I started looking at the instances they had documented.  There weren't a thousand cases in one year - it was a thousand cases over twenty years!  I paged down to my state and read each case.  Most were people, convicted of a felony, who only voted once but shouldn't have voted until their probation time was over.  The next largest group of cases didn't involve voting per se but  people who had forged names on recall petitions, lied on nomination papers, or, again, were convicted felons who served as poll workers.  Then there were five people who only voted once but in the wrong jurisdiction.  There were a handful of cases where people purposely voting twice (one man confessed that he'd gotten too worked up by talk radio and made a stupid decision).  However, absentee voting wasn't the cause of any of the cases -  not in my state at least. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well that is certainly reassuring!
Rebecca