Iowa: Groups sue to block Iowa voter purge, fraud rules | Quad City Times

Civil rights activists filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to block Iowa’s Republican secretary of state from enacting rules to purge foreign nationals from Iowa’s voter registration list and make it easier to file allegations of voter fraud. The American Civil Liberties Union and the League of United Latin American Citizens accused Secretary of State Matt Schultz of abusing his power in a plot to disenfranchise Latinos and other voters ahead of the presidential election in Iowa, a key battleground state. “To begin a purge of registered voters so close to the fall elections is unconscionable,” said Joseph Enriquez Henry, state director of LULAC, a Latino and Hispanic civil rights and advocacy group. “We urge Mr. Schultz to cease his political activity and to keep politics out of the elected office that he holds.”

Michigan: 4 GOP Congressional Staffers Indicted in “Blatant and Disgraceful” Election Fraud | Politics365

Four congressional staffers of former Republican Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), who resigned from Congress on July 6, will face criminal felony charges for voter and election fraud in Michigan.  The charges were announced by Michigan’s Attorney General today. The election fraud, described as “blatant,” includes forgery and faking petition signatures including using old signatures from past election forms.  The voting fraud listed in the indictment report would appear to be the type of criminal activity that various voter ID laws recently passed would not have prevented.

Minnesota: Let’s play voter fraud whack-a-mole! | The Washington Post

Voter fraud whack-a-mole continues. Remember the bottom line here: no one has found convincing evidence of any recent, significant level of voter fraud. The cases that have been alleged often turn out to be phony. And the voter suppression “remedies” Republicans like don’t have anything to do with whatever fraud is generally alleged. So: the latest conservative talking point is the claim that there were a bunch of felons who voted improperly in Minnesota in 2008 — perhaps enough to have flipped the very close Senate race in that cycle from Democratic Al Franken to Republican Norm Coleman. Conservative columnist Byron York points out correctly that flipping that seat would have been hugely consequential; the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank, and other legislation might well have failed if Dems had lost just one more Senate seat. But the accusations are old and long ago debunked. The evidence that York discusses is in a new book by a conservative journalist and a former Bush administration lawyer — charges that were pretty convincingly rebutted when they were made back in 2010.

Editorials: A Détente Before the Election – Voter Fraud and Manipulation of Election Rules | Rick Hasen/NYTimes.com

Does voter fraud sometimes happen in the United States? You bet.  But we are dealing with this relatively small problem in an irrational and partisan way. In a 1996 primary in Dodge County, Ga., rival camps for county commissioner set up tables at opposite ends of the county courthouse and bid for voters’ absentee votes in what a county magistrate later called a “flea market” atmosphere. Recently, officials in Cudahy, Calif., admitted intercepting absentee ballots and throwing out ballots not cast for incumbents. Every year we see convictions for absentee ballot fraud. Not a lot, but enough to know it’s a problem. So you might think that Republicans, newly obsessed with voter fraud, would call for eliminating absentee ballots, or at least requiring that voters who use them show some need, like a medical condition. But Republicans don’t talk much about reining in absentee ballots. Eliminating them would inconvenience some voters and would likely cut back on voting by loyal Republican voters, especially elderly and military voters. If only Republicans would apply that same logic to voter-identification laws. The only kind of fraud such ID laws prevent is impersonation: a person registered under a false name or claiming to be someone else on the voter rolls. I have not found a single election over the last few decades in which impersonation fraud had the slightest chance of changing an election outcome — unlike absentee-ballot fraud, which changes election outcomes regularly. (Let’s face it: impersonation fraud is an exceedingly dumb way to try to steal an election.)

Editorials: GOP’s fictional voter fraud charges aim to keeping Democrats from voting | Fox News

At a recent meeting of the Pennsylvania GOP State Committee, the top Republican in the state House of Representatives, Mike Turzai, declared that a new requirement for voters to show identification with a photograph on it “is going to allow Gov. [Mitt] Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” He drew wild applause from Republicans in the crowd. The new law being referred to won approval under the state’s Republican Governor Tom Corbett and the GOP majority in the state legislature. The result is that 9.2 percent of the state’s 8.2 million voters are suddenly at risk of losing their right to vote. Eighteen percent of the registered voters in Philadelphia do not have government issued photographic identification. That means they won’t be able to vote.

Editorials: Repeat After Me: In-Person, In-Person, In-Person | Mother Jones

The court case against Pennsylvania’s new voter ID law is wrapping up, and supporters of the law say it’s necessary in order to reduce voter fraud. However, when you hear the words “voter fraud,” there are three things you need to keep clearly in mind: In-person, In-person, In-person. Got that? There’s only one kind of fraud that voter ID stops: in-person voter fraud. That is, the kind of fraud where someone walks into a polling place and tries to vote under someone else’s name. That’s it. There are plenty of other types of voter fraud, of course. There’s registration fraud, where you send in forms for Mary Poppins and James Bond. There’s insider fraud, where election officials report incorrect tallies. There’s absentee ballot fraud, where you fill in someone else’s absentee ballot and mail it in. But a voter ID law does nothing to stop those kinds of fraud. Even in theory, the only kind of fraud it stops is in-person voter fraud.

Editorials: Dismantling The GOP’s Odious Philosophy Of Voter Suppression | William Galston/The New Republic

Republicans should not be surprised if voter laws becomes a major topic of debate this election season—they will be the ones responsible for making it so. Over the past two years, the GOP has made a concerted attempt in a number of states to tighten voter registration procedures, cut back on alternatives such as early voting, and—most controversially—require would-be voters to show state-issued photo IDs as proof of identity. Because there’s such little evidence that these changes are needed to eliminate widespread voter fraud, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that many Republican legislators want to discourage voting among groups—especially minorities and the poor—that cast their ballots mainly for Democrats.  But it’s worth remarking that beneath these crass political motives are some deeper moral issues. Proponents and opponents of these changes agree on one thing: Voting will be harder, and turnout will be lower. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Proponents think not. Speaking for many others, Florida State Senator Mike Bennett said, “I don’t have a problem making [voting] harder. I want people in Florida to want to vote as bad as that person in Africa who walks 200 miles across the desert. This should be something you do with a passion.”

Pennsylvania: Voter ID on Trial: The Hans von Spakovsky Wars | Slate

Here’s one of the least-understood aspects of the voter ID trial: The missing subject of “voter fraud.” Before hearings began in Applewhite v. Pennsylvania, both parties stipulated that “there have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania.” And yet, and yet… you can’t keep a good voter fraud story down. The petitioners’ final witness of the hearings was Lorriane Minnite, a professor at City College in New York and author of The Myth of Voter Fraud. The states’ attorneys objected as she started to talk about specific fraud prosecutions and indictments. The objection was overuled. “They cited the legislation in their opening brief,” explained Michael Rubin, one of the D.C.-based attorneys who’s helping out the petitioners here. “Voter fraud’s been coming up in testimony.” The petitioners interrogated Minnite for more than 90 minutes, walking through many op-eds worth of fraud myths, fraud facts, fraud definitions, and the real problems with ballot-counting. When they were done, Senior Deputy Attorney General Patrick Crawley promised a “few questions” and started trying to undermine Minnite’s credibility.

Editorials: Reporters Know What the ‘Voter ID’ Push Is Really About. Why Don’t They Just Say So? | Dan Froomkin/Huffington Post

Does any journalist who is not an overt shill for the right actually believe that Republicans are pushing voter ID laws because they’re concerned about voter fraud? No, of course not. And for good reason. Voter fraud simply isn’t a problem in this country. Studies have definitively debunked the voter fraud myth time and again. In Pennsyvlania, which just adopted a tremendously restrictive photo-ID law that could disenfranchise 1 in 10 voters, state officials conceded they have no evidence of voter fraud, nor any reason to believe it could become a problem. By contrast, there is ample evidence that voter ID laws inhibit voting, particularly among minorities and the poor — two major demographic segments that tend to vote Democratic. And that’s hardly a coincidence. Consider the recent bragging by the Pennsylvania House Republican leader that his state’s voter ID bill “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”

Editorials: Phantom Menace: The hunt for proof of voting fraud | Philadelphia City Paper

A few days after upstart Republican Al Schmidt clobbered incumbent Joseph Duda and wrenched away the tightly held (by the GOP establishment) position of City Commissioner in last November’s general election, one source said to this reporter something like this: People think Al Schmidt’s some kind of progressive. But just you wait: He’s a snake in the grass. Something about the quotation stuck. Schmidt, after all, is a kind of political enigma here in Philadelphia: a Republican who’s managed to capture the attention, imagination and even votes of both restless Philly Republicans and local progressives, many of whom noticed over the last year that Schmidt had the habit — unusual among the entrenched political establishment of both parties — of answering questions, returning phone calls and engaging in intelligent, nuanced debate about his ideas. Still, he was (and remains) a Republican. And that raised an important question during his campaign, since the three City Commissioners have the incredibly sensitive job of running local elections: What did Schmidt think of laws requiring photo ID at polling places, being pushed by members of his own party in Harrisburg? Schmidt said at the time that he opposed the voter-ID law “as it was written,” noting that it was an “unfunded mandate.” Which meant, if you thought about it, that he didn’t necessarily oppose it because its obvious intent — here and in every state considering such legislation — was to squelch Democratic votes.

Kentucky: Drug money funds voter fraud in Kentucky | Fox News

Voter fraud has a shocking new meaning in eastern Kentucky. That is where in some cases, major cocaine and marijuana dealers admitted to buying votes to steal elections, and the result is the corruption of American democracy. The government continues to mete out justice in the scandal, as two people convicted in April in a vote-buying case face sentencing this week, and another public official pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiracy. “We believe that drug money did buy votes,” Kerry B. Harvey, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky, said of a separate vote-buying case. He described a stunning vote-buying scheme that includes “very extensive, organized criminal activity, involving hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in many cases that involves drug money.”

Editorials: GOP’s voter ID tactics could undermine a Romney win | Harold Meyerson/The Washington Post

Suppose Mitt Romney ekes out a victory in November by a margin smaller than the number of young and minority voters who couldn’t cast ballots because the photo-identification laws enacted by Republican governors and legislators kept them from the polls. What should Democrats do then? What would Republicans do? And how would other nations respond? As suppositions go, this one isn’t actually far-fetched. No one in the Romney camp expects a blowout; if he does prevail, every poll suggests it will be by the skin of his teeth. Numerous states under Republican control have passed strict voter identification laws. Pennsylvania, Texas, Indiana, Kansas, Tennessee and Georgia require specific kinds of ID; the laws in Michigan, Florida, South Dakota, Idaho and Louisiana are only slightly more flexible. Wisconsin’s law was struck down by a state court. Instances of voter fraud are almost nonexistent, but the right-wing media’s harping on the issue has given Republican politicians cover to push these laws through statehouse after statehouse. The laws’ intent, however, is entirely political: By creating restrictions that disproportionately impact minorities, they’re supposed to bolster Republican prospects. Ticking off Republican achievements in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives, their legislative leader, Mike Turzai, extolled in a talk last month that “voter ID . . . is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” How could Turzai be so sure?

Iowa: Voter fraud isn’t a problem, county auditor says | TheGazette

Linn County Auditor Joel Miller feels as strongly about preventing voter fraud as Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz, who has made it his top priority. Where they part company, however, is that Miller believes current registration and election laws have prevented voter fraud problems, while Schultz is convinced that if he keeps “turning over every stone” he’ll find fraud. So far Schultz, a first-term Republican, hasn’t found any cases of voter fraud. Miller’s not surprised. “Where’s your poster child, Matt?” the Democrat asked. If Schultz can find a person who is committing fraud by voting as someone else, Miller added, “I’ll be right there with him.” Through 30 Linn County elections since he took office, Miller has never received a report of someone voting at the polls as anyone other than himself or herself. “I’ve asked my peers and they can’t come up with an example of an impostor either,” he said. “I think he’s trying to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.”

Pennsylvania: Schmidt says fraud, Singer says stunt over report on Philadelphia voting irregularities | Philadelphia City Paper

City Commissioner Al Schmidt released a report today claiming widespread voting “irregularities” and potential “voter fraud,” in Philadelphia. The report is almost sure to attract at least some attention from the national GOP, which has used the specter of voting fraud as a justification for a slew of voter ID laws around the country, even though very few instances of voter fraud have been uncovered nationally.  This spring, both Schmidt, a Republican, and City Commissioners Chairwoman Stephanie discussed findings of voting irregularities, holding a joint press conference to announce that some machines had reported more votes than were recorded in poll logs, and promising to conduct an investigation. But today’s report was produced by solely by Schmidt and his office; minutes before his press conference, Singer told this reporter that her office had just seen the report for the first time. We’ll have more on this soon, but Schmidt essentially reported having found 7 types of voting “irregularities” in Philadelphia’s 2012 primary election. Of those, three or four — notably, “voter impersonation,” “individuals voting more than once,” might, he said, constitute fraud. It’s worth noting here that Schmidt’s investigation found very few instances of these alleged crimes. Schmidt reports one (1) case of voter impersonation, which dates back to 2007 and which has already been reported. The reports cites one (1) example of someone allegedly voting twice. The report also found 7 voters who voted in the last ten years and were subsequently rejected from the rolls because they were not U.S. citizens. It’s also worth noting that recently-passed voter ID laws wouldn’t stop most of the problems (and the most numerous) identified in the report.

Editorials: New voter ID laws carry a political agenda | The Boston Globe

Mike Turzai, the Pennsylvania House majority leader, is honest if nothing else. His exact statement to a crowd of state Republicans — that the new voter ID law “is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania” — was the most truthful accounting of why the party is pushing for allegedly more stringent voting rules across the nation. This is not about voter fraud, a claim that has never been substantiated, but about politics. Pennsylvania’s new rules will require a government photo ID to be able to vote, which disproportionately burdens those without cars: the poor, elderly, and minority voters who trend Democratic. Students without drivers’ licenses will also be stuck.

Iowa: Secretary of State seeks to prove voter fraud | Sioux City Journal

Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz’s push to uncover voter fraud has yet to lead to any criminal charges, but he says investigators still are looking into suspected instances of double-voting and non-citizens casting ballots. Schultz, a Republican serving his first term as the state’s top elections official, has made it his top priority to persuade lawmakers to pass a law requiring voters to show identification at the polls. He says doing so would prevent what he calls cheating. But critics, including the Democratic Party of Iowa, have said the state runs clean elections and the identification requirement would disenfranchise voters. Many local elections officials say fraud is not a problem. Against that backdrop, Schultz has promised in recent months that investigations by his office would prove his assertions. He told the Iowa Republican, an online news site, on Feb. 29: “We will be showing that there are cases of voter fraud in Iowa.” At a Republican Party dinner in May, he told activists he was “turning over every stone.” “I can tell you that, very soon, a clear message will be sent that you can’t cheat in Iowa. We are looking at our records,” he said. “I can tell you that we are coming on to something.” But records released by Schultz’s office last week, in response to a request from The Associated Press, show investigators could not find fraud in three cases involving voters whose qualifications were questioned after November’s elections.

Editorials: Political scientist makes case against Texas voter ID law | The Statesman

The process of electing representatives in the U.S. has always been a contentious one. At its core there are political parties and candidates vying for power. However, the politics of setting election procedures and policy is perhaps even more contentious than the elections themselves. The debate about the integrity of the election process and how to balance it against the basic democratic principle of expanding voter participation is not new; the Founders deliberated over the same concerns we discuss today. The question is, what trade-offs do we consent to in order to protect the integrity of the election process while expanding suffrage? The basis for integrity is honesty and fairness. If we believe that our election processes are fair and honest, we can trust their results. However, if we perceive these processes to be fraught with fraudulent practices or participants we conclude that the results are wrong and an affront to our democratic ideals. Some pundits and elected officials have focused on voter fraud as a real threat, pointing out that thousands of Americans have lost faith in the election process as a result. In this context, voter fraud usually refers to registering voters who are ineligible such as noncitizens, voting “from the grave,” or one person voting multiple times or in multiple jurisdictions (sometimes through absentee ballots).

California: Cudahy officials threw away ballots, manipulated two elections | latimes.com

Cudahy officials at the city’s highest levels tampered with and manipulated the results of at least two city elections, according to federal documents released Thursday. The documents were part of the plea agreements of two Cudahy city officials who agreed to plead guilty Thursday to bribery and extortion. But the documents also shed light on a culture of corruption within City Hall, with examples of widespread bribery and developer payoffs to voter fraud. “The very definition of democracy is that all those qualified as voters have the opportunity to cast their votes and to have those votes counted,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Joseph Akrotirianakis said.

Editorials: UFO sightings are 3,615 times more common than instances of voter fraud | msnbc

Reported UFO sightings happen far more than voter fraud, Mother Jones reports. Republicans legislatures are quick to legislate against supposedly rampant voter fraud, but a new report finds that UFO sightings are far more likely than actual voter fraud.  3,615 times more likely, to be exact. “Voter laws are a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist,” PoliticsNation host Al Sharpton said on Thursday. In 2000 to 2010, just 13 cases of credible, in-person voter fraud were found in the 649 million votes cast in general elections, but the legislative efforts to curb the supposed fraud are huge: in the last ten years, nearly 1,000 bills have been introduced in 46 different states to tighten voting laws. 24 voting restrictions have passed in 17 states in the last year and a half and five important battleground states—Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—will have tighter voter restrictions than they did in 2008.

New York: Rangel’s Rivals Make Allegations Of Voter Fraud And Uncounted Ballots | Politicker

Supporters of State Senator Adriano Espaillat are calling for a federal monitor to step in and oversee the counting of votes in his congressional race against longtime Congressman Charlie Rangel after reports of uncounted votes emerged yesterday. Mr. Rangel was initially declared the victor by the Associated Press and in unofficial totals from the Board of Elections after the election on Tuesday, but the AP subsequently published a report claiming results from 33 of the 506 precincts in the Upper Manhattan district remained uncounted. Mr. Espaillat’s supporters announced their push for a federal monitor at a press conference in front of Mr. Rangel’s office in Harlem where some of the attendees also made allegations of voter fraud at the polls Tuesday. “I’m here today to call for a federal monitor on the Board of Elections. It is unacceptable that 48 hours after the elections took place….we don’t have the outcome of this election,” said Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, a close ally of Mr. Espaillat’s. “We also have a lot of concerns that still the Board of Elections has not received [results from] a number of election districts. We don’t know where they are, they don’t know where they are.” Though Mr. Rodriguez did not provide specific numbers or locations of the precincts where votes remain uncounted, he said most of these precincts are in areas favorable to Mr. Espaillat inside his State Senate district.

Pennsylvania: State GOP Leader: Voter ID Will Help Romney Win State | TPM

Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai (R) said that the voter ID law passed by the legislature would help deliver the state for Mitt Romney in November.

“Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation – abortion facility regulations – in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done,” Turzai said at this weekend’s Republican State Committee meeting , according toPoliticsPA.com.

A spokesman for Turzai confirmed the accuracy of the quote for TPM but argued that people were reading too much into it. “The fact is that while Pennsylvania Democrats don’t like it to be talked about, there is election fraud,” Turzai spokesman Stephen Miskin told TPM. “Protecting the integrity of an individual vote is the purpose of any election reform. So was Turzai suggesting that Democrats had won previous elections through voter fraud?

Florida: Voter purge explained | The Washington Post

Laws designed to clamp down on voter fraud have been causing controversy all over the country. But in Florida, an attempt sparked by Gov. Rick Scott (R) to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls has become particularly heated, devolving into dueling lawsuits, with officials refusing to carry out directives from the secretary of state. The Department of Justice is suing the state over the purge. Florida is suing the Department of Homeland Security. What happened? As the Miami Herald reported, Scott became interested in the number of non-citizen voters early in his tenure. The state wanted to use the Department of Homeland Security‘s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, but federal officials denied access. Instead, the state elections board relied on the information from the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to determine citizenship. Then-Secretary of State Kurt Browning abandoned the effort, saying the data was too flawed. (For example, some people gain citizenship after getting a driver’s license. Some names on the list were simply there by mistake.)

Egypt: Presidential election overshadowed by further army power grab and voter fraud claims | Telegraph

Few analysts were willing to predict the outcome of the battle between the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi and Ahmed Shafiq, a former general and aide to ex-President Hosni Mubarak, despite the Islamist movement’s long domination of the Egyptian street. The Brotherhood said opinion polls showed their man would win a free vote comfortably. But they also claimed that “fake voters” were appearing on polling station lists – dead people and members of the security forces, who in Egypt are supposed to remain neutral and are disqualified.

Florida: Statistics show voter fraud is a rare occurrence in Florida | OrlandoSentinel.com

Gov. Rick Scott and his Department of State have been talking about voter fraud in Florida since 2011, shortly after Scott took office. “We need to have fair elections,” Scott said Monday, justifying the identification of more than 2,600 “noncitizens” that the state recently urged county supervisors of elections to purge from the voter rolls. That followed a 2011 legislative rewrite of the election law, again in the name of preventing fraud. “When you go out to vote, you want to make sure that the other individuals that are voting have a right to vote,” Scott added. But notwithstanding the concerns of Scott and Republican legislators, state records show that voter fraud simply hasn’t been a problem for the past decade.

Wisconsin: RNC chairman alleges rampant voter fraud | JSOnline

The chairman of the Republican National Committee said Wednesday GOP candidates have to perform 1 or 2 percentage points better than they otherwise would to overcome voter fraud — claiming that voter fraud is far more pervasive than what official reports have shown. About 2.1 million votes were cast in the 2010 race for governor, and 1 to 2 percent would equate to 21,000 to 42,000 votes. Some law enforcement officials have raised concerns about isolated incidents of voter fraud, but never suggested it approached a scale like that. “I’m always concerned about voter fraud, you know, being from Kenosha, and quite frankly having lived through seeing some of it happen,” said Reince Priebus, the RNC chairman and former state Republican Party chairman. “Certainly in Milwaukee we have seen some of it and I think it’s been documented. Any notion that’s not the case, it certainly is in Wisconsin. I’m always concerned about it which is why I think we need to do a point or two better than where we think we need to be to overcome it.”

Richard Saks, an attorney who has successfully challenged Wisconsin’s new voter ID law, said Priebus can’t back up that claim. “They have zero, zero evidence to substantiate it,” Saks said. “It’s simply demagoguery to whip up fear.” He noted that a 2008 investigation in Milwaukee County by Democratic District Attorney John Chisholm and Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen resulted in 20 prosecutions, mostly for voting by felons who were not qualified to vote. “The notion there’s any kind of large scale fraud is simply not borne out by the facts,” Saks said. “It’s a scare tactic that’s used … to try to claim that primarily vulnerable people shouldn’t have a full opportunity to vote.”

Wisconsin: Stop the presses: Walker uncovers huge voter fraud | The Oshkosh Northwestern

The problem with the radioactive partisanship in Wisconsin is that otherwise intelligent folks who typically choose their words with care occasionally feel the need to launch rhetorical firebombs to stir up their respective political bases. This makes it virtually impossible for government leaders to come together to craft effective solutions to legitimate issues that require their attention. The latest example comes from Gov. Scott Walker, who as politicians go, is a straight talker, no doubt something he’s become more careful about these days since every syllable is scrutinized, inspected and combed for meaning. In an interview with The Weekly Standard, Walker said he was concerned about voter fraud in the coming June 5 recall election in the wake of the state’s controversial voter ID law being suspended by the courts. “I’ve always thought in this state, close elections, presidential elections, it means you probably have to win with at least 53 percent of the vote to account for fraud. One or two points, potentially,” he told the publication.

Wisconsin: Scott Walker: Voter Fraud is Worth “One or Two Points” in Recall Election | Slate

Wisconsin native Steve Hayes offers a long, empathetic take on Scott Walker’s attempt to survive a recall election. The highlight: An interview with Walker, who apologizes for nothing (why should he?) and tries to get inside the heads of the liberals who hate him. Why are they so adamant about reversing a voter ID law?

“I’ve always thought in this state, close elections, presidential elections, it means you probably have to win with at least 53 percent of the vote to account for fraud. One or two points, potentially.” That’s enough to change the outcome of the election. “Absolutely. I mean there’s no question why they went to court and fought [to undo] voter ID.”

There might be some question. The voter fraud issue was investigated in Wisconsin fairly recently, in the form of an Election Fraud Task Force and a deep dive into 2008’s vote results. The yearlong investigation charged 20 people — this in an election with around 3 million ballots. For fraud to equal “one or two points” in that election, you’d have needed 30,000-60,000 phony ballots. The proven fraud actually amounted to 0.0007 percent of all votes.

North Carolina: Sting video about North Carolina voting called incorrect, ‘infuriating’ | The Charlotte Observer

In an undercover “sting” video that has caused a stir since debuting online last week, a national group led by conservative activist James O’Keefe cites the cases of three Wake County voters in an effort to show that it’s easy to commit voter fraud here. The three examples used by Project Veritas, though, turned out to be wrong, according to elections officials and reporting by the News & Observer. And one family is upset that the name of their patriarch, who died in April, is being dragged into a political escapade. “I don’t even know what to say, except that it makes you feel violated,” said Winifred Bolton of Raleigh. She is the widow of Michael G. Bolton, who died of cancer April 23 at age 63. Michael Bolton is cited in the video, posted on YouTube, as an example of what the narrator calls “ballots being offered out in the name of the dead.”

Wisconsin: Report: Voter fraud concerns unfounded as recall election day approaches | WTAQ

Concerns of voter fraud are popping up again, as we get closer to the June 5th recall elections for governor and five other state offices. But the Appleton Post-Crescent says the low numbers of fraud cases in the last two presidential elections don’t support those concerns. The paper said a bi-partisan Election Fraud Task Force only charged 20 people with election fraud in Wisconsin after the 2008 presidential contest. And that represents just seven-thousandths of one percent of all the votes cast. In the 2004 presidential contest, the Brennan Center for Justice found only 7 fraud cases in Milwaukee County – or two-thousandths of one percent of the statewide vote.

California: Voter Fraud or Voter-Fraud Fantasy? | Santa Barbara Independent

Our elections are overwhelmed with voter fraud, or so say Steve Pappas and Nancy Crawford-Hall, the publisher of the Santa Ynez Valley Journal. In her columns over recent months, Crawford-Hall has laid out what she claims is the evidence of this massive fraud. Does voter fraud threaten our system of democracy? Should we be worried? No. Pappas and Crawford-Hall have confused registration fraud, which is a petty crime that threatens nothing of much importance, with voting fraud, which actually is a serious crime. Out of this confusion, they have spun a fantastic story about democracy under attack. It isn’t true. The only threat to democracy came from Steve Pappas, who sought to strip 18,000 American citizens of their voting rights, a threat which the courts dismissed for a complete lack of evidence. Let me explain. Voting fraud is casting ballots illegally. Registering under a thousand different names and voting on behalf of these thousand fictitious people in an attempt to change the outcome of an election is an attempt to subvert democracy. Even a single case of casting a fraudulent vote is a serious crime. In contrast, registration fraud is typically petty theft. Many campaigns pay people to register voters for their side. If a dishonest deputy registrar fills out a few fake registration forms and registers his dog Fido, he gets paid for it. He is stealing from the campaign. But if it is theft, it ends there. A few family pets may end up on the voter rolls, but if they don’t vote, democracy suffers no harm.