Even this single case easily caught.

UPDATE: A few readers have pushed back on my statement that the case was “caught.” By this I mean that the issue came to attention of election officials, not that they stopped the casting of the fraudulent vote in time. It shows how ridiculous and boneheaded it would be to try to have a scheme to steal elections in this way. You would have to identify voters on the roll who have not yet voted in sufficient numbers to swing the election. You’d have to pay people to go into the polling places claiming to be someone else and hope, without the chance of verification, that they will vote the way you will pay them to vote. And then hope that the whole scheme never gets detected as those legitimate voters whose votes were fraudulently taken don’t show up, as in this New Mexico example, and complain that someone had already voted for the voter.

It is no surprise that in going back to the 1980s I couldn’t find a single example where an election was arguably stolen with this kind of impersonation fraud. In contrast, i could find examples just about every year somewhere in the country of absentee ballot fraud schemes used to try to swing (sometimes successfully) an election.

So if there were any real scheme in New Mexico, aside from an isolated incident (and this one could yet be clerical error—with a voter with a similar name being directed to sign the wrong line), we’d know about it.