Liberal Forum

The Voter-Fraud Myth - The Man Who Has Stoked Fear About Impostors At The Polls.[...]True the Vote, which was founded in 2009 and is based in Houston, describes itself as a nonprofit organization, created by citizens for citizens, that aims to protect the rights of legitimate voters, regardless of their political party. Although the group has a spontaneous grassroots aura, it was founded by a local Tea Party activist, Catherine Engelbrecht, and from the start it has received guidance from intensely partisan election lawyers and political operatives, who have spent years stoking fear about election fraud. This cohortwhich Roll Call has called the voter fraud brain trusthas filed lawsuits, released studies, testified before Congress, and written op-ed columns and books. Since 2011, the effort has spurred legislative initiatives in thirty-seven states to require photo identification to vote. Engelbrecht has received especially valuable counsel from one member of the group: Hans von Spakovsky. A Republican lawyer who served in the Bush Administration, he is now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. Hans is very, very helpful, Engelbrecht said. Hes one of the senior advisers on our advisory council. Von Spakovsky, who frequently appears on Fox News, is the co-author, with the columnist John Fund, of the recent book Whos Counting?, which argues that America is facing an electoral-security crisis. Election fraud, whether its phony voter registrations, illegal absentee ballots, vote-buying, shady recounts, or old-fashioned ballot-box stuffing, can be found in every part of the United States, they write. The book connects these modern threats with sordid episodes from the American past: crooked inner-city machines, corrupt black bosses in the Deep South. Von Spakovsky and Fund conclude that electoral fraud is a spreading danger, and declare that True the Vote serves an obvious need. Mainstream election experts say that Spakovsky has had an improbably large impact. Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, and the author of a recent book, The Voting Wars, says, Before 2000, there were some rumblings about Democratic voter fraud, but it really wasnt part of the main discourse. But thanks to von Spakovsky and the flame-fanning of a few others, the myth that Democratic voter fraud is common, and that it helps Democrats win elections, has become part of the Republican orthodoxy. In December, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, wrote, Election fraud is a real and persistent threat to our electoral system. He accused Democrats of standing up for potential fraudpresumably because ending it would disenfranchise at least two of its core constituencies: the deceased and double-voters. Hasen believes that Democrats, for their part, have made exaggerated claims about the number of voters who may be disenfranchised by Republican election-security measures. But he regards the conservative alarmists as more successful. Their job is really done, Hasen says. Its common now to assert that there is a need for voter I.D.s, even without any evidence. [...]Richard L. Hasen (a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, and the author of a recent book 'The Voting Wars') says that while researching 'The Voting Wars', he tried to find a single case since 1980 when an election outcome could plausibly have turned on voter-impersonation fraud. He couldnt find one. News21, an investigative-journalism group, has reported that voter impersonation at the polls is a virtually non-existent problem. After conducting an exhaustive analysis of election-crime prosecutions since 2000, it identified only seven convictions for impersonation fraud. None of those cases involved conspiracy. Lorraine Minnite, a public-policy professor at Rutgers, collated decades of electoral data for her 2010 book, The Myth of Voter Fraud, and came up with some striking statistics. In 2005, for example, the federal government charged many more Americans with violating migratory-bird statutes than with perpetrating election fraud, which has long been a felony. She told me, It makes no sense for individual voters to impersonate someone. Its like committing a felony at the police station, with virtually no chance of affecting the election outcome. A report by the Times in 2007 also found election fraud to be rare. During the Bush Administration, the Justice Department initiated a five-year crackdown on voter fraud, but only eighty-six people were convicted of any kind of election crime.Hasen, who calls von Spakovsky a leading member of the Fraudulent Fraud Squad, told me that he respects many other conservative advocates in his area of expertise, but dismisses scholars who allege widespread voter-impersonation fraud. I see them as foot soldiers in the Republican army, he says. Its just a way to excite the base. They are hucksters. Theyre providing fake scholarly support. Theyre not playing fairly with the facts. And I think they know it. Read more http://www.newyorker...r#ixzz2AbrYM3PjHans Von Spakovsky's Rebuttal - National Review Online