Thinking about Elections

VOTER FRAUD DOES HAPPEN. Americans aren’t immune to it, but it’s rare because of the controls we have. These started coming into place in the 1930s. Before that, elections were a free-for-all of corruption and fraud.

The Heritage Foundation maintains a database of proven instances of US voter fraud. “Proven” means it’s not an allegation. It’s a court case whose decision was the individuals acted “hoping to affect election outcomes” i.e, it was deliberate. That’s different from someone who was mistakenly registered to vote at a Department of Motor Vehicles by flawed software.

I searched 2021, 2022, and 2023 for criminal convictions of voter impersonation and ineligible voting. (I figured it would take that long for court decisions in cases filed about the 2020 elections.) For those three years I found a total of 9 cases of voter impersonation and 28 of ineligible voting for the whole US. Yet the effort to find cases of illegal voting in 2020 was enormous.

The real news is that the controls in our elections processes work. A few people vote illegally each year, not enough to swing an election, not a large-scale plot, and the controls in place catch them, and they are prosecuted.

“The inevitable response is that no illegal vote is acceptable,” says Philip Bump of _The Washington Post_ . That’s true, and that’s why these people face criminal prosecution. “We similarly try to prosecute every homicide that occurs, but we accept that some homicides occur regardless. The standard we apply to our daily lives is not ‘preventing every homicide from occurring in the first place,’ an obviously unobtainable goal.”

For perspective, compare the numbers of homicides to cases of illegal voting. There were more than 16,000 cases of murder or non-negligent manslaughter in the US in 2019 (statistica. com.) There were fewer than 20 cases of criminal prosecutions for illegal voting.

[https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud](https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud)