Read this local news article today, and it got me thinking. Whenever there’s an investigation into voter fraud, it seems the fraud is always perpetrated by Democrats or left-leaning organizations. Are there any stats that indicate the political leanings of those who commit voter fraud?
This will likely end up as a debate, but I’ll just point out that what the article cites is voter registration fraud, not voter fraud. Nobody voted fraudulently.
ETA: At the end of the article it lists one possible case of voter fraud that it is investigating - a person that may have voted in two counties.
Here’s a report from 2007 that indicates that in the 5 years prior very little voter fraud had occurred (120 charges and 86 convictions in 5 years) and that most of those charged have been Democrats.
It seems like a lot of the cases were either confused immigrants or felons that didn’t know they couldn’t vote.
I did a bit of googling and found nothing that has anything like what the OP asks.
Then I did brute force:
Voter Fraud Republican yields 4.11 million results.
Voter Fraud Democrat yields 2.24 million results.
There’s backwash effect there - “Republicans investigate voter fraud” would end up in the Republican pile, and vice-versa.
I’m trying to keep this as GQ as I can. Those two numbers, with huge grains of salt, are the best I got.
Here’s a “fair and balanced” account of modern vote fraud from the New York Times this past weekend.
This needs to be repeated, as it comes up again and again and certainly will come up hundreds of more times between now and the election. There was no voter fraud, nobody cast even one illegal ballot.
The phony registration cards were filled out and turned in, but during the evaluation process were flagged and when investigated were tossed out. Not one fake voter got registered, and for certain no one risked committing a felony by voting as a phony voter. Not in this case. Not to mention that 100 votes in the half-a-million population Montgomery County, OH, wouldn’t swing a vote for dog-catcher.
This is analagous to some idiot joking about a bomb in his luggage while in the TSA line at the airport. That is a crime, and the guy should be charged and prosecuted, but it does not mean that he intended to, or in fact did, smuggle a bomb onto a plane. He most certainly did not detonate one while the plane was in the air.
As the other posters have pointed out, most of the alleged instances of “fraud” are just honest mistakes that are easily caught before any fraudulent voting actually occurs. The reason why most of these mistakes are made by left-leaning organizations is that higher voter turnout almost always favors Democrats. There’s fewer mistakes made by Republican get-out-the-vote groups because increasing voter turnout in general is going to hurt them strategically, so there are only very small and targeted right-leaning voter drives.
I think first you need to understand the difference between voter fraud and voter registration fraud.
They aren’t the same thing. If you sign up a bunch of people to register to vote, and some of the registrations aren’t real (like the dude collecting the signups just made up names so he wouldn’t have to work) that’s voter registration fraud.
Voter registration fraud almost never leads to fraudulent ballots. If you register Mickey Mouse to hit quota, he isn’t actually going to show up.
This probably is mostly on the left, because people on the right don’t want more people to vote.
Voter fraud, is when people actually cast (or count) ballots that aren’t legitimate. And that happens so rarely I don’t think you can attribute it to left or right. It’s literally a handful of cases per decade.
So when you heard about ACORN, they had some of their contractors make up names. This was voter registration fraud. They tried to fight it, but when you’re paying people to get names, some of them will scam you.
Anyone who tells you that ACORN committed voter fraud is wrong.
It should also be emphasized that ACORN was the victim of the registration fraud, not the perpetrator. They hired people to register voters, and some of those people, instead of doing the (perfectly legitimate) job they had been paid to do, just made up names themselves. ACORN, before submitting the applications, flagged those they deemed suspicious, but they did not throw any of them away, because that would have been illegal. So the net result was that ACORN was paying for something, but did not get it.
In re; Republican voter fraud. I am not raising this to stir up political debate in GQ, but to ask two GQ-ish questions – and that only. Following the foofaraw in Florida in the 2000 election, and again in Ohio in 2004, there were allegations raised that Republican officials in various places had taken actions aimed at barring largely Democratic voter groups from the polls. The questions:
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Were either of these followed up on with serious investigations beyond the allegations?
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If so, was any evidence of wrongdoing shown to have happened, or, alternatively, to clear the Republicans’ besmirched names?
Please don’t vex the mods. with political debate – I phrased the question as carefully as possible to keep it from being a partisan jab, and the answers would be, more or less, yes/no responses (with hopefully some facts following a ‘yes’ to #2).
There is very little verifiable voter fraud in the US. Fraudulent voter registration cards are not the same as voter fraud.
However voter fraud can be used to push legislation that makes it harder for democrats to vote (eliminating early voting, requiring photo IDs, making registration harder, etc). So articles claiming voter fraud is a democrat issue would feed into that response.
No, but someone giving his name as Mickey Mouse may show up, and, with no ID required to vote, the election judges have no grounds to refuse the someone a ballot.
That’s how it’s done in Chicago, anyway. Name lists are harvested from the fraudulent registration data. People circulate voting multiple times, using different names in different precincts.
The voter registration rolls are purged annually. Voter registration cards are mailed out, and registrants whose cards are returned by the Post Office as “no such person at this address” are de-registered – typically about 20% of registrations.
The idea that there isn’t vote fraud in Chicago (and there are plenty of other techniques) is … interesting. 
In some places you can use ID or utility bills to verify you.
If you have evidence of this, you need to bring it up to election officials. Because the Bush admin found something along the lines of ten cases. That’s it. Ten, across the country. For several years.
Since you don’t have evidence, I have no reason to believe you. I find it more likely that you’re either misinformed or confused.
Even if we accept this statement at face value for both procedure and percentages, this doesn’t demonstrate voter fraud. All it tells you is that people move.
Absent some requirement that each voter show ID at the polls, how does anyone even KNOW if fraudulent votes are cast?
I mean, if SWIM goes to the polls and says he’s me and votes in my name, who’s to ever know? Well, if I later go to the polls and try to vote and get told “Sorry, says here you already voted” then I suppose somebody’s going to try to investigate – but investigate what? They can never fish out of the ballot box the alleged fraudulent ballot, and they can never really know if I’m just trying to vote twice.
And if I don’t go vote at all, then there will never even be a complaint lodged.
So when they talk about the small number of fraudulent votes actually cast, they’re just talking about the ones that somehow got caught. How does anyone have any idea how many bogus votes got cast that didn’t get caught?
I understand the arguments against voter-ID laws (that they make it hard for a lot of people to vote, because just getting the right kind of ID can be a hassle, and that this is presumed by one side to hurt Democrats the most). But how do we really know that the Republicans, in screaming about the rampant voter fraud, are so wrong?
Interestingly enough, even they admit that non-citizens voting is a real problem, not just a GOP scare story. And those are just the cases where the person got caught.
20% of the population moves every 4 years? I doubt it.
And you’re right to doubt it. It looks like the number over 4 years is actually much higher, since around 12% of Americans move each year.
In this particular case, how would a person wanting to commit voter fraud know that “Mickey Mouse” was registered in the first place? The people who were submitting arbitrary fake names for registration were just trying to make more money as contractors by turning in more names.They weren’t announcing the fake names to the public so that a person could then show up and vote using one of them.