“Is this proof of voter fraud or election rigging?: A user guide”

Philip Bump performing a useful service. For example, on dead people “voting,” here’s a common one, an administrative foul-up:

But there are stories about ballots being cast for dead people!

Is this vote-rigging? No.
Is this in-person voter fraud? Probably not.

Reports out of Philadelphia recently suggested that the voter registrations of a handful of dead people had been used to cast ballots. Voting commissioner Al Schmidt on Friday blasted those reports, noting that the board of elections had already ruled out fraud. What happened in one case was that a poll worker was looking for the name “Paul Bunch” and found it at the bottom of a page in the sign-in book. That Paul Bunch was the deceased Paul Bunch, Sr.; Paul Bunch, Jr., who was voting, was at the top of the page that followed. He signed in the wrong place — and didn’t then come back to vote as “himself.”

Most cases of suspicious voter behavior end up being situations like this: A mistake is made somewhere in the process. That’s not always the case, so we won’t say definitively that any report you see of a dead person allegedly casting a vote is not someone committing fraud. But it’s worth remembering that situations like this are caught and ruled out — so the idea that a slew of examples aren’t caught and comprise the thousands of votes needed to swing an election seems unlikely.

 

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