“The Missouri voter ID scandal that wasn’t”

The Boston Globe posts the most important piece on voter impersonation fraud in a while:

It’s the biggest voter ID scandal you never heard of. An election in the United States stolen right under the noses of election officials thanks to lax laws and voter fraud.

A primary election for the Missouri State House normally doesn’t draw much national attention. But proponents of voter ID laws have seized on the election, which was decided by a single vote, claiming it shows why governments need to crack down on what they view as an epidemic of voter fraud.

This race, frequently cited by leading voter ID advocates like Kris Korbach, Kansas’s secretary of state, and the Heritage Foundation’s Hans Von Spakovsky has been described as an election “stolen … [with] votes illegally cast by citizens of Somalia.” As a result, it has become one of the key examples pointed to by voter ID advocates. It’s a concrete example of an election where fraudulent votes actually decided the result.

There’s just one problem with this tale of voter fraud: it never happened. No fraud was ever found and the only irregularities cited by the courts that heard the case were unrelated to voter ID.

Regular blog readers will remember what happened when I called out von Spakovsky on this a while back.  See here and here.

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