Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz’s two-year investigation into voter fraud found evidence of 117 illegally cast votes, led to charges against 27 suspected fraudulent voters and has resulted in six criminal convictions, according to a report released Thursday. Those results justified the unprecedented partnership between the state’s top election official and the state’s Division of Criminal Investigation, as well as the nearly $250,000 cost of the effort, Schultz, a Republican, said. “The takeaway is that there are people who voted who weren’t supposed to,” he said. “This is a situation where we tried to do something about it. I think it was the right thing to do and I stand by that.” Critics have called the investigation a misuse of federal funds intended to expand access to voting and charged that the six convictions prove that voter fraud is a miniscule problem in a state where statewide voter turnout frequently exceeds 1 million.
The report was issued Thursday by the Secretary of State’s Office as a kind of final word on the investigation which ran from mid-2012 through February of this year.
Schultz’s office partnered with the DCI to scrutinize possible instances of election misconduct after being failing to gain access to a federal database it believed would help identify non-citizens who had registered to vote.
A DCI investigator was assigned full-time to the effort, and received referrals from the secretary of state as well as county law enforcement agencies. The investigator ultimately looked into 238 cases, and found evidence of misconduct 117 of them.
Full Article: Final report: 117 fraudulent votes found in investgation.