Voter fraud isn’t a myth, with nearly 1,300 proven instances, an elections expert told The Epoch Times.
“And that’s not a comprehensive list. It’s just a sampling of cases,” von Spakovsky told The Epoch Times this week.
“The problem here is that many potential cases of fraud, nothing is done about them. Elected officials don’t send them to law enforcement, law enforcement doesn’t investigate them. And we know the potential cases out there is far, far larger than the proven cases we have in our database.”
Recent additions to the list include Reginald Holman, a city council member in Ashtabula, Ohio, who pleaded guilty and resigned after an investigation confirmed he illegally registered at his parents’ address in Ashtabula rather than his actual residence in another town, and Courtney Rainey, a Mississippi resident who was found guilty of bribing and harassing individuals to win a municipal election.
The unprecedented increase in mail-in voting in this year’s primary elections and the record number projected for the Nov. 3 general election are concerning to some experts, who point out that in many cases, a larger percentage of mail-in ballots are rejected than in-person votes. That’s on top of the system being ripe for fraud, especially in states without signature requirements.
The problems don’t only affect local and state elections.
That year, the race for the U.S. House seat to represent North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District ended up with a 900-vote margin. Seven people were charged with allegedly tampering with absentee ballots in that election, and a judge ordered a new vote be held.
Other issues include votes cast by non-citizens and outdated voter rolls.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation report found tens of thousands of people credited with voting after they were dead, tens of thousands of others who were registered in more than one state and voted in more than one state, and tens of thousands of voters who were registered more than once in the same state and cast more than one ballot.
“The total potential cases of fraud that they uncovered is over 140,000 cases, just from the last two federal elections,” von Spakovsky said.
People across the country have been receiving multiple ballots in the lead-up to this year’s presidential election, with photographs of the splayed out documents circulating widely on social media. That issue related to voter rolls.
“The statewide voter registration lists are in notoriously bad shape. Election officials don’t do a very good job of maintaining their accuracy. They’re not good at taking people off after they’ve moved away or taking people off after they have died,” von Spakovsky said.
“And because of that, those states that have made the decision, I think an unwise decision, to simply mail out an absentee ballot to all registered voters are guaranteeing that ballots are going to arrive at people’s homes for people for folks who don’t live there anymore, or for individuals who have died, and the potential is there for others to gather up those ballots and to try to vote them.
“And whether or not they'll pass election officials is going to depend on, how good are the election officials that at detecting fraudulent ballots? Past history shows they’re not very good at that.”
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