https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2 ... -Sparta-Ga
The US has for decades sought to understand the scope of voter fraud. The bottom line has been that while US voter rolls tend to be outdated – Pew has found that some 24 million registrations, or 1 in 8, may be inaccurate – evidence of actual in-person collusion and impersonation at the ballot box is exceedingly rare. One much-cited study found a total of 31 credible reports of voter fraud out of the 1 billion votes cast between 2000 and 2014.
For many African-Americans, however, such hoop-jumping has a familiar feel. Historically, from Reconstruction to the civil rights era, gains in voting rights have been followed by retrenchment, often at the hands of white officials seeking to preserve a demographic and political status quo against the country's growing racial and political diversity. Since the 2013 Supreme Court Shelby v. Holder decision, which invalidated part of the Voting Rights Act, formerly DoJ-supervised states such as Texas, Alabama, and North Carolina have invoked stricter voting rules that courts have found disproportionately affect young people and low-income minorities, who tend to vote Democrat.
The impact of such voter integrity crackdowns can be seen in places like Hancock County. There, voter participation fell by 40 percent after local deputies were deployed to hand out summonses in person to the 187 people whose registrations were being challenged. (Often, such inquiries are mailed.) The Lawyers' Committee accused the county of voter intimidation and filed a lawsuit in 2015, after the mayoral election that saw Sparta get its first white mayor in four decades.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... fraud.html
After the election, he shifted his unsubstantiated fraud talk from rumormongering about voter impersonation to claims of massive noncitizen voting. Trump said repeatedly that 3 to 5 million illegal voters had cast ballots, a claim so outlandish it is hard to know where to start to refute it. (We could start with a Brennan Center report which, so far, has found a total of 30 cases nationwide of possible noncitizen voting. That’s 30, not 300, 3,000, 30,000, 300,000, or 3 million.) He claimed that “none” of the supposed fraudulent votes went to him.
In hindsight, the focus on noncitizen voting makes sense, and the endgame is about passing federal legislation to make it harder for people to register and vote. The noncitizen focus fits in with Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric as well as the rhetoric of Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who has been advising Trump on voter fraud issues. Kobach has repeatedly lost in lawsuits against the American Civil Liberties Union on account of his actions to make it harder for people to register and vote. Just last week, a federal magistrate judge fined him $1,000 for misleading the court by attempting to shield a document regarding his advice to Trump on how to make voter registration harder.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pol ... ef88b93874
Let’s be clear at the outset. There is no evidence of a massive voter fraud problem in the United States. There is no evidence of even a modest voter fraud problem in the United States. There is no statistical evidence. There is no anecdotal evidence. There is no more evidence that we need national protections from voter fraud than there is that we need to wear personal lightning-rod suits so that we avoid the 30-odd deaths each year from electrical storms.
Trump didn’t introduce the idea of targeting voter fraud. It’s been a hobbyhorse for Republicans for some time, offered as a rationale for new voter-registration limits that have the consistent side effect of making it harder for Democratic-voting populations to cast a ballot.
Kobach also demonstrates how the specter of voter fraud is used to affect voting patterns. The state of Kansas implemented a rule requiring new voters to prove that they were citizens, an effort Kobach championed. The effect was to prevent a number of prospective voters from being able to cast ballots — a group that Reuters determined “disproportionately [hit] young voters, who often do not have ready access to the needed documents, as well as unaffiliated and Democratic voters in the Republican-controlled state.” The rule was eventually blocked by the courts.
Yeah, the Republicans didn't suddenly get all patriotic and decide that they had to focus on vote purity to solve a problem that doesn't exist. They found a successful way to keep Democrats, often poor and brown, from voting.
