The Reality of Electoral Fraud
Wherein I detail evidence of fraud and take the Heritage Foundation's database of fraud to task.
It is not unusual for officials or journalists to say things like there is “no evidence of systematic fraud” or “significant” or “widespread” fraud. I noted now-former AG Barr used such a formulation in a post yesterday. I have even done so in my own writings. Technically, it is true: there is some fraud out there, but nothing widespread. We know, for certain, that it happened in 2020. But what are we really talking about?
In the same post I quoted Barr, I noted this story from Forbes: Pennsylvania Man Charged With Voter Fraud For Casting Ballot For Trump Under Dead Mother’s Name.
The piece notes three cases:
First, a man registered his late mother-in-law online to request an absentee ballot, which he used.
Second, another voter voted absentee and then tried to vote in person by pretending to be his son.
Third, another voter tried to register their dead mother so they could use the ballot.
It is worth noting: all three were caught. Of the three, only the first successfully cast a fraudulent ballot. As such, we have here only one case of actual voter fraud and two cases of attempted fraud.
In regards to the conviction:
“For all the conspiracy theorists out there, this case today does not represent widespread voter fraud,” Delaware County D.A. Jack Stollsteimer said Monday, noting the case was an isolated incident and the only instance of voter fraud the county found after following up on “hundreds” of tips.
Emphasis mine.
So yes, fraud exists, but it is minuscule, almost to the point of not existing. So, even formulations like “no widespread fraud” creates a false impression.
But, you say, three cases is not enough to draw conclusions from. And, you would be right to say so. So, let’s throw in the Heritage Foundation’s Electoral Fraud Database, which I have noted before. It has collected information across decades.
Some facts about the database:
- “The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database presents a sampling of recent proven instances of election fraud from across the country.”
- Each entry represents a conviction (criminal and civil) or some other legal finding (such as a diversion program).
- The database reaches back to 1982.
- The entries in the database are not limited to actual fraudulent voting, but to things like false registrations/petitions or attempts to alter voter counts or to buy votes.
The entire list is here. A searchable (although clunky) version is here. I wish there was a version that would easily allow me to create a table of types of cases. I could likely take the PDF version and generate what I want, but I am not disposed to doing so at the moment.
The grand total of cases in the database is 1,308.
While even one case of fraud is bad, anyone with any understanding of the sheer number of elections that have been held and the number of votes that have been cast in the last almost forty years knows that 1,308 shouldn’t be some shocking number.
Sure, it sounds like a lot, but context (the number of elections and votes) and the range of types of cases suggest that it really isn’t.
Now, I am not sure how many actual votes these 1300+ cases are supposed to entail. First, the database itself does not even try to provide such data (which, from a social science POV, strikes me as lazy analysis). Having compiled the cases it is somewhat shocking to me that no one has done a deeper analysis. There should be a breakdown of types of cases, as well as some accounting of how many votes were affected.
Second, a lot of the cases like a 2020 “scheme to give homeless people on Skid Row cash and cigarettes in exchange for fraudulently signing ballot petition initiatives and filling out voter registration forms” simply are not the same as attempts to fraudulently vote. Let’s face facts: homeless folks on Skid Row are unlikely to vote in any event, although they have to right to do so. Bribing them to sign initiate petitions in CA is a problem, as such petitions help get items on the ballot. Still, in the grand scheme of what people think of as “electoral fraud,” I am not sure this kind of thing should be included as part of an “Election Fraud Database.”
The most recent write-up on the site from last week, The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database Tops 1,300 Cases fails to do any deep analysis. Instead, it highlights anecdotes, such as:
During the 2014 general election, for example, Avery Ayers sought to run as an independent challenging Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. However, he forged the signatures of voters to qualify to be a candidate on the ballot. Ayers pleaded guilty to a third-degree felony fraud charge in state court and was sentenced to five years in prison.
Regarding which I would agree that it is a prosecutable offense deserving of legal sanction. But, it bears noting that even if he had been successful, his actions would have had zero significant effects on the Texas Senate race. Unknown third party candidates without resources don’t win a lot of votes (and the votes themselves would still have been legitimate ones).
Not to downplay Ayers’ criminality, but when people worry about “electoral fraud” this is not the kind of thing they mean.
The piece notes:
The Heritage database is not an exhaustive, nor comprehensive list. It doesn’t capture all cases, and certainly doesn’t capture all reported instances or allegations of election fraud, some of which may be deserving of being investigated or prosecuted, but aren’t.
But the database does highlight vulnerabilities in the election system.
All well and good, but here’s the thing: if Heritage wants to take this issue seriously, it needs to construct a better database that better distinguishes between types of cases. Bribing someone to sign a petition is not the same as attempting to vote illegally, for example. It also needs to analyze how many votes it can prove were cast illegally or that have been illegally manipulated.
As I often argue, if a problem is to be solved, it has to be properly diagnosed. Lumping together all kinds of election-related malfeasance into a broad category of “fraud” is poor social science and it is, to be honest, more an attempt to drum up concern about “fraud” for political reasons than it is analysis.
Note that things like voter ID aren’t going to stop people from forging petitions or voter registration cards. Making it harder for folks to vote doesn’t solve a lot of the problems listed in the database, but the fraud narrative is often used to that end.
The bottom line remains that hundreds of millions of votes have been cast since 1982. There have been hundreds (thousands?) of elections across the country (if we count state and local elections across jurisdictions) during this period. As such, the question is not whether 1300+ is a big number, but whether it is a big number relative to the universe of actions it is sampled from. And, as noted, the question remains as to 1,300+ cases of what?
The reality is, while the database does “does highlight vulnerabilities in the election system” it also shows the legal system is apparently doing a pretty good job of policing these behaviors since this is a list of people caught and convicted.
Worse, it shows that Heritage needs to do a little harder work with its research. Just compiling a list is not analysis, nor is highlighting examples (especially when those hand-picked highlights don’t even illustrate top tier examples of voting fraud). You’d think, for example, that it would be easier to make a list of actually voting fraud if that was a real problem.
A think tank ought to be breaking down such a list into categories so as to make policy recommendations about specific vulnerabilities. That is to say, the solutions to fraudulent petitions are radically different from that of illegal registrations or to solutions to in-person voter fraud. Lumping it all together is, to reuse a word, lazy at best and ideological at worst.
To circle back to where we started, yes, there are examples of actual voter fraud (like the one successful and two attempted cases cited above). There are also examples of various types of voting-linked fraudulent behavior (both attempted and successful) as the Heritage database shows. BUT, the incidences are almost entirely mathematically inconsequential.
As such, formulations like “no widespread fraud” are both accurate and inadequate. It is more accurate to say “incidences of electoral fraud in the elections are practically nonexistent” (and even that seems to give too much importance to the cases of fraud that do exist).
As a postscript, I will note there was a consequential case in North Carolina back in 2018: New Election Ordered in North Carolina Race at Center of Fraud Inquiry. But, again, authorities detected the fraud and ordered a new election (and I am sure many readers will note that in the three cases cited above, and in the NC case, the perpetrators were all Republicans).
You mean, you don’t want to spend Christmas… đ
The fact that they can only document 1308 incidents, indicates that there is no support in the data for what would be the premise that a Heritage researcher is trying to prove.
Thanks for demonstrating that electoral fraud isn’t wide spread and election officials are quite good at identifying it when it happens.
Merry Christmas
So what does it tell you if people who should know better don’t care about the proper diagnosis?
In this case, the “problem” the Heritage Foundation is trying to solve is people voting for Democratic candidates, but they can’t say that out loud, now can they?
IIRC from thumbing through a bunch of the cases in an earlier version of the data base, the cases that actually affected elections were all what I call wholesale fraud: crooked election officials manufacture ballots in sufficient numbers to change the outcome. Typically these occurred in rural county-level races. For example, the incumbent sheriff comes up a hundred votes short and his friend the county recorder goes through the polling books, finds voters who neither requested an absentee ballot nor voted on election day, and fills in the absentee paperwork and ballots for 150 people.
An argument that I get into regularly involves such cases and contemporary mail ballot systems. The county recorder can’t fake up 150 ballots in the contemporary system. There are too many independent things that would have to be fudged/forged in order to pass the audits: records of the ballots being mailed, the correct envelope being returned, signature matching records, etc, etc. One of the reasons that the vote by mail states’ systems consistently score high in the experts’ security evaluations is that contemporary VBM makes wholesale fraud very difficult.
And we all know why they haven’t.
Conservative analysis seems to somehow always involve a great deal of cherrypicking, and there simply aren’t enough cherries in their database to even try to make the case they want to make. They’re much better off just yelling “1300 cases of fraud” and ignoring the “over forty years” thing or any other details.
People fail to grasp the scale needed to successfully rig a statewide election. To begin with, it’s a matter of very large numbers of votes. Anywhere form hundreds of thousands to millions. It could be reduced to “mere” tens of thousands, if you knew in advance what the result was going to be (hint: you can’t).
Next, all the allegations of machines being rigged to flip votes are ridiculous. Yes, a hack could be accomplished by a few people.
Excepts these things are checked, Georgia did a hand recount. No amount of software vote flipping will get the hand recount to come out anywhere close to the rigged result. It’s beyond absurd. it’s willful ignorance and willful stupidity.
Finally to do all that and leave absolutely no evidence behind, well, that means there was no fraudulent election, or God Himself did It. Either way,t here’s nothing anyone can do that would change the outcome.
The very idea of widespread voter fraud is illogical when you stop and think about it. The incentives are strongly against it, as there are serious consequences to whoever gets caught committing it, yet it achieves almost nothing, since elections rarely come down to a single vote, and it’s never happened in a presidential election before (or even come close–the 537-vote gap that decided the 2000 election was the narrowest in history). So anyone who commits voter fraud is taking a major risk with virtually no reward. I guess those alleging fraud are imagining people doing it on a wide scale–but that only heightens the risk of their getting caught, and it further raises the question of why it’s left no tracks.
Gotta blame something for defeat – anything other than take responsibility for bad policies and adjust to represent what people actually want and need.
@Michael Cain:
Possibly worth noting that all of the fraud complaints by the Trump campaign and supporters were wholesale fraud. Trucks full of fraudulent ballots that were introduced into the counting stream. Modifications of the machines that do the counting. Definitely worth noting that when it came time to make arguments in court, where there are penalties (including for the lawyers) for lying, almost all those claims disappeared and only procedural faults were argued.
@gVOR08:
They’re a few cherries short of a cherry-picking.
There are so many frustrating aspects of trying to discuss this with Trumpist Republicans. They are wholly absorbed in some kind of massive fraud scheme that encompasses thousands of votes being “switched” by machines or remotely or…something, without the capacity to understand that is all but impossible.
It is so exhausting, and Heritage’s tendency to lump everything together is just another obvious attempt to conflate differing data points so that they can say “thousands” without proper context.
It’s both really important to clear this up and also so futile that talking to a brick wall seems more useful. It’s maddening that the President and his Republican enablers have taken us all so far down this road.
Spit-balling that for every known case, 9 more get through undetected, we are up to 13,000 cases of voter fraud since 1982. If there have been 1,300 elections,* that’s 10 votes in every election – not really a game changer.
*Define election: A national election really consists of at least 51 different elections for which you would have to change the outcome. Since the count started, there have be 10 presidential elections, which alone count for 510 different elections. The midterms get you another 510.
@Jen:
over atmthe creationist site http://www.uncommondescent.com, anyone who claims the election wasnât stolen is âinsaneâ and ârefusing to believe their own eyes.â
Ugh
@Teve: It’s unreal. I mean, I know they are out there, I know a few of them…but still, the stupid is so…comprehensive.
@Teve:
One thing creationism has in common with conspiracy theories is that it rests on assumptions that are, at their core, impossible to disprove. You can’t prove that God didn’t miraculously intervene in the history of life. You can’t prove voter fraud doesn’t happen to the degree they’re suggesting. This way of thinking is fallacious, of course–lack of evidence isn’t evidence of lack–but it’s seductive because it allows people’s imaginations to run wild, leading them to see what they want to see.
@Jen:
@Joe:
Want to bet some in the great nation of Dumbfu**istan read the numbers and conclude they mean 13,000 stolen elections?
@Kylopod: Crank Magnetism is a term that describes how conspiracy nuts donât just believe one conspiracy, the same logic makes them all attractive. Over at that creationist site, it is a proven fact that scientists around the world lie to protect the false theory of evolution, the communist lie that global warming is real, the heinous medical conspiracy to hide the fact that Hydrochloroquine is a cheap cure for Covid, and that Joe Biden committed the most extensive election fraud the world has ever seen, protected by Deep Staters like Joe Biden, Brian Kemp, John Roberts, William Barr, Mitch McConnell,…
Obviously Heritage has no intention of taking this seriously, they’d much rather flog a dead horse.
There was a similar case in S St.Louis in 2016:
The Hubbard family were/are long time political power brokers in the STL DEM party with Penny, her husband and daughter all holding elected offices of one type or another. As I recall it was Franks’ lawyer who picked up on something shady with the numbers coming from absentee ballots (the Hubbards were harvesting them)
And again, iirc, nobody was prosecuted over it, probably because the powers that be just wanted the mess to disappear.
@Teve:
They’re frustrated writers. You want to get paid it takes a bit more skill.
Dr. Taylor, as a concerned citizen about the precipitous decline in our National politics, I wanted to say thanks for this. One thing that has become all too rare nowadays, is the astute and objective analysis of experts in a given field. Case in point, the daunting task of trying to debunk the endless miss-information in this last election, just became incredibly easy with the consise data points you just presented. I hope it becomes a trend.
My first thought is to weigh the Ayers case against shadow candidates in Florida.
This also isn’t what one thinks of when hearing the term “voter fraud,” but strikes me as more impactful than Ayers’s actions.
Ileana Garcia, founder of Latinas for Trump, won her state Senate seat by 34 votes over the incumbent, JosĂ© Javier RodrĂguez. Republican-turned-independent, Alex RodrĂguez, who no longer even lived in Miami, received over 6000 votes though he did no campaigning beyond fliers.
As an aside, after the story broke, a former state Senator named Frank Artiles, an acquaintance of Alex RodrĂguez claimed credit for the scheme.
Mr. Artiles’s tenure as a Florida Senator ended in resignation after he paid a couple models as campaign consultants. Neither the Hooters calendar girl or the Playboy lady had previous political experience.
Well, actually, that was under investigation when another scandal broke. He let the booze talk a little too much at a Tallahassee tavern one night [I initially typed this out in my own words, but decided to just quote the Miami Herald article instead.]
Dude is a Real Americanâą like George Liquor.
In an effort to avoid the capricious Spam filter, I didn’t provide a link to the quoted text. here it is.
@Kathy:
“People fail to grasp the scale needed to successfully rig a statewide election.”
For Trump, and his team, this is a feature, not a bug. This is why there has not been a serious attempt to gather, and present any evidence.
Case in point, weeks after purporting that a large amount of voting machines were tampered with to cheat for Biden, they threaten to have the MILITARY seize them. Something that is not going to happen, and this is actually their goal. They don’t want anything to do with those machines. If they did, state and federal law enforcement would of simply impound and investigate them. In reality, they don’t want any verifiable evidence obscuring their modern “stabbed in the back” story.
Excerpt from letter from Dominion Voting Systems to Giuliani star witness Melissa “Is it still happy hour?” Carone:
“We write to you now because you have positioned yourself as a prominent leader of the ongoing misinformation campaign by pretending to have some sort of âinsiderâs knowledgeâ regarding Dominionâs business activities, when in reality you were hired through a staffing agency for one day to clean glass on machines and complete other menial tasks.”
Ouch. That’s going to leave a mark.
@Kylopod:
“The very idea of widespread voter fraud is illogical when you stop and think about it. The incentives are strongly against it, as there are serious consequences to whoever gets caught committing it”
To learn in this post that Trump supporters apparently didn’t commit much fraud was a relief. With their Trump must rule America at any cost rhetoric, if they lack the stomach to risk cheating, then we should be safe from an armed insurrection.
@ImProPer:
It’s pretty easy to interpret the apparent lack of cheating on the part of Trump voters as their faith that he would win in a landslide. It also may be that many of them thought that Trump is too smart to be cheated.
@Kurtz:
“Itâs pretty easy to interpret the apparent lack of cheating on the part of Trump voters as their faith that he would win in a landslide.”
For me, only in hindsight though. Beforehand I just didn’t have the imagination to conclude that Trumpâs 4 years in office was anything other than an abject failure, SCOTUS picks aside.
“It also may be that many of them thought that Trump is too smart to be cheated.”
I wonder how they feel now after the very fruitful effort Rudy and Sidney put forth to dispell this notion in the courts.
Did that.
For a database that includes Duplicate Voting, they probably should have taken time to go through it and remove any … duplicates…
Bonnie Nicholson, Brian McDouglar, Carlos Medrano, Margarita Rangel Ozuna, Richard Howard, Adrian Heath, and John Fernandez, all have duplicate items for the same election fraud case. And Gustavo Araujo Lerma appears _thrice_ for the same case.
And I’m not sure if Myron Cowher and Dmitry Kupershmidt should have been included since it was an HOA election that they attemted to rig…
@PJ: So did you get a rough count of types?
And yes: their data needs some cleaning up. I noticed that multiple defendants in the same case are listed as separate cases, which is not appropriate.
I missed the HOA case. Lovely.
@Joe:
Exactly (especially if they included an HOA case, as per above).
Just as a starting spot, if you just say the elections for president/congress we have had 10 since 1982. Being simplistic and saying 51 discrete elections per cycle(50 states plus DC) you get 510. But, of course, double that because of primaries to 1020. But there are more primaries than states (PR, Guam, etc–I forget the number). There have also been 10 mid-term cycless, so add in 500 more (excluding DC who doesn’t have mid-terms, although they have city elections I will exclude for the moment) plus 500 primaries (so we are at 2010). There are states that have off-term state elections (I don’t know the number off the top of my head) plus there are local elections and special elections.
@Steven L. Taylor:
There is a bit of an issue.
There are 968 items in the database, and Heritage lists 1,308, which is due some having more than one person involved, and also some items having more than one fraud type listed.
Just looking at the items as is:
Splitting the fraud types up, there’s this:
That would make it 1019 items.
Then there’s two items listing “63 individuals” and “42 invividuals” which would add another 62 to “False Registrations” and 41 to “Buying Votes”, and the total to 1122, still 186 shy of 1,308.
But there is a number of items listing a number of named inviduals, but I used the printable version to create the dataset, and that had the list of names shortened… So, I’m going to need to redo things.
And then there’s the lines with multiple names and multiple fraud types, and now idea if all the names were added for all fraud types…
@PJ: Thanks.
From Steve Sailer’s blog at UnzDOTcom. Just search for “vote fraud.”
@xcurri: To which I would ask: what point are you trying to make?
And given Sailer’s views on race, he tends not to be a source I would seek out.