The statistics from the NPR report Edgar Beem cites in “Voting by mail” (July 3), actually come from the Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database, which states it “presents a sampling of recent proven instances of election fraud from across the country.” Only a sampling! The 2005 Carter-Baker Commission stated that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud … Absentee balloting is vulnerable to abuse in several ways: blank ballots mailed to the wrong address or to a large residential building might get intercepted. Citizens who vote at home, at nursing homes, at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation. Vote-buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.”
Our system is ripe for fraud. An Obama-era study by the Pew Center on the States research organization found that of 24 million voter registration records in the U.S., “about one in eight are inaccurate, out-of-date, or duplicates. Some 2.8 million people are registered in two or more states, and as many as 1.8 million registered voters are dead.” A 2017 Judicial Watch investigation “found that the number of voter registrations exceeded the number of citizens over the age of 18 in 462 U.S. counties. In other words, those counties’ registration rates exceeded 100% of the population eligible to register.”
U.S. law forbids non-citizen registration and voting in state and federal elections. However, a 2014 study done by the Department of Political Science at Old Dominion University entitled “Do Non-Citizens Vote in U.S. Elections?” states, “We find that some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes, including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections. Non-citizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress.”
Sharon Spigel
Arrowsic
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