Could Voter Fraud Steal the Election?

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It has become a rallying cry for some to claim that we need to do more to prevent “voter fraud”. According to those chanting this disturbing chorus, elections are being influenced and sometimes determined, by people who are ineligible to cast a ballot impersonating eligible voters.  

To be sure, the NAACP sees disenfranchising, disturbing instances of “voter fraud” every election cycle. However, the fraud that we witness is different. Every day, we hear of deceptive practices, misinformation and lies that are used to keep registered, legitimate voters away from the polls or to support candidates whom they might not otherwise vote for. Sadly, we also still find ourselves fighting attempts by election officials to disenfranchise the people in communities we represent.  

It is our experience that voter impersonation, which has resulted in passing numerous laws, proposed laws, and court cases, is actually quite rare. Nationwide, between 2002 and 2006, when a crackdown on voter fraud was one of the U.S. Department of Justice’s top priorities and when more than 400 million votes were cast, an average of only 30 federal cases per year were prosecuted.

Regardless of the questionable prevalence of this type of voter fraud, several states have passed troubling photo identification requirements. Sadly, rather than addressing voter fraud, however, the true effect of these laws is to disenfranchise the estimated 20 million Americans who have not purchased government-issued photo IDs. And it should come as no surprise that a disproportionate number of these people are racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly and low-income Americans.

Yet examples of genuine, malicious voter fraud continue to plague us. In Virginia, registered voters received recorded calls stating that they could vote by telephone, by pressing a number for the candidate of their choice. The call ended by fraudulently stating that they had now voted, and did not need to go to the polls.

In 2006 in Orange County, California,14,000 Latino voters got letters in Spanish saying it was a crime for immigrants to vote in a federal election. It didn’t say that immigrants who are citizens have the right to vote.  

In addition to these unscrupulous tactics, the NAACP has seen a dramatic increase in which people have registered to vote, believing or having been told that they have done everything correctly, only to be turned away from the voting booth on Election Day because they have been erroneously purged from the voting rolls, or mistakenly not added. 

We know from Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 that over-zealous, erroneous purging of the rolls, underestimating the number of necessary voting machines, ballots and poll workers, the under-training of poll workers, intimidation of voters and the misuse of photo ID requirements, especially in neighborhoods with heavy concentrations of racial and ethnic minorities, can be a standard trick by unscrupulous election officials trying to suppress a segment of the voting public.  

Voter fraud, inadequately trained election workers, lack of working voting machines and lack of ballots, blocked access to polling sights and intentional deception and voter intimidation lead to disenfranchisement of eligible voters. These are the real problems that should be seriously addressed if we are to realize the promise of our democracy.  These problems are more than just “voter fraud”: These problems are a national travesty.