More Voter Fraud Claims Debunked

I got a call from a reporter the other day about some allegations of voter fraud in Beverly Hills. I told the reporter that claims of voter fraud should be thoroughly investigated, but that in my experience investigation usually reveals human error by election officials or inadvertent mistakes by voters, rather than intentional voter fraud, as a more likely explanation. (I also said that it is always tempting to look to outside explanation when your side narrowly loses a close election. If my person won, it happened fair and square. If yours won, it must have been because of some kind of fraud.)

Here's the latest: A Tulsa World investigation of 12 million (!) votes cast in Oklahoma since 1999 turned up 10 possible cases of voter fraud involving dead people voting. (Let's leave aside the fact that this is an astonishing low rate of error, much less fraud.)

What did the follow-up investigation reveal?

In five cases, voters apparently signed the wrong line in the precinct registry. The mistakes led to data entry errors when county election board officials logged voter history into a database.

One of those cases involved a deceased voter whose son shares the same name.

In two cases, no signature was written next to the deceased's name. Again, data entry errors likely caused the mistakes, Ziriax said.

And in two more cases, voters appeared to have cast an absentee ballot just days before their deaths. Thus, the ballots were still legal under state law.

Ziriax said a 2006 case involving a Lincoln County man is still under investigation

There you have it. A single potential case of voter fraud (still being investigated) out of 12 million votes cast since 1999. Sounds like a fraud epidemic that requires use of strict voter identification rules, no?

Posted by Rick Hasen at June 3, 2009 08:32 AM