Is Voter Fraud Real?

While the major media fixates on the influence of foreign powers on American elections, a much more serious attack has been taking place right under our noses: Good old-fashioned, home-grown voter fraud. Let’s look at three of the worst offenses. 

Example number one: bloated voter rolls. 

In 244 counties across the United States, there are more registered voters than there are people legally eligible to vote. Twenty-nine states have counties with more registered voters than legal residents. And eight states have more registered voters than actual voting-age people.

When the Supreme Court upheld Ohio’s efforts to clean up its own voter rolls in 2018, the majority opinion cited Pew Center statistics: 24 million voter registrations in the United States are either “invalid or significantly inaccurate.” And nearly 3 million people are believed to be registered to vote in more than one state.

These numbers have a shocking implication: It’s very easy to exploit our voting system. During an undercover investigation, New York City detectives made 63 attempts to cast illegal ballots based on flawed voter rolls. They were successful 61 times. Similar investigations in other cities and other states produce the same dismal results. But phony voters on the rolls is just one threat to election integrity.

Here’s example number two: ballot harvesting.

In 2016, the state of California—one of the states with more registered voters than citizens—became the first state to legalize the practice of ballot solicitation; that is, the collection and delivery of ballots by third parties. With no trace of irony, this is called “ballot harvesting.”  

It works like this: In California, organizations with a clear political agenda are legally permitted to go to a location—say, a nursing home or a church, and collect—literally harvest—ballots. The third party then transports these ballots to a polling place or an election office.

This raises an obvious question: Once this third party collects the ballots, what’s to stop them from changing them—or from just throwing out the ones they don’t like? A guilty conscience? How do we know ballot harvesters from Democratic organizations aren’t destroying Republican ballots? Or Republican harvesters aren’t destroying Democratic ballots? We don’t. We have no way of knowing.

Let’s look at one specific example. On Election Night 2018, California Central Valley Republican Congressman David Valadao held a 5,000-vote lead over his challenger, Democrat T.J. Cox. The margin was wide enough that the networks even called the race for Valadao, the Republican incumbent. 

But wait!

There were late ballots still to be delivered by the third-party vote harvesters. When those votes came in, they broke so overwhelmingly for Cox (in a historically conservative district, no less) that Valadao’s 5,000-vote victory became an 862-vote loss.

Maybe that was just a coincidence. Or maybe not.

In the first major election after ballot harvesting was allowed in California, Democrats won every single congressional seat in Orange County, which had been a Republican stronghold for decades. A year earlier, no sober person would have thought that possible.

Voter corruption example number 3: Voting by non-citizens.

Should you have to be a citizen to vote? Silly question, right? It was once. Not anymore. 

According to a recent poll, more than half of Democrats—53%—support granting illegal immigrants the right to vote—forget the legal ones!

Democratic National Chair Tom Perez, before working for the Obama administration, worked for a group called CASA de Maryland, which has been a longtime advocate for expanding non-citizen voting rights.

Yes, it’s true that federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections. But 11 states, all run by Democrats, currently allow noncitizen voting of some kind. Cities such as Chicago and San Francisco, for example, allow noncitizens to vote in certain city-wide elections. Why? Because for progressives, demography is destiny, and many see illegal immigrants as future voters.

So, there you have it—three different ways to tamper with the vote:

Bloated voter rolls.

Ballot harvesting.

Voting by non-citizens.

These are just three ways in which the left creates a clear advantage for itself on Election Day.

The major media will tell you that corrupt voting practices either don’t exist or are so minor they don’t matter. But to believe that, you have to believe two things: That voter registration rolls are accurate and secure from fraudulent registrations, and that no one is trying to manipulate the results for political purposes. Those are two very big leaps. 

Maybe you want to make those leaps because you like the results they produce. But if you care about free and fair elections, no matter which party you belong to, you need to pay attention. Or pretty soon, free and fair elections will be a quaint relic of the past. 

No foreign government can undermine our democracy. But Americans can—and some do.

I’m Eric Eggers, investigative reporter for the Government Accountability Institute, for Prager University.