Editorials: Kobach finally convicts an immigrant, but Kansas is paying a price | The Kansas City Star

Hand out the celebratory cigars. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach finally nabbed himself an immigrant. Pardon if we don’t order the band to play. Kobach announced Wednesday that he’d achieved an elusive goal — catching an immigrant who voted illegally in a Kansas election. Victor David Garcia Bebek of Wichita pleaded guilty to voter fraud. The Peruvian native’s voting record was uncovered after he registered to vote and it was discovered that he’d already voted three times in past elections. It’s a misdemeanor. A cautionary note for those tempted to crow that the case confirms the nonsense about undocumented immigrants committing widespread voter fraud: Bebek was discovered after he gained U.S. citizenship this year. He was legally present in the country when he cast previous votes.

National: Trump Says Voter Fraud Is a Huge Problem. A Top Republican Election Official Disagrees | Time

As voters began selecting their next president, Donald Trump repeatedly warned that Election 2016 was “rigged.” Millions of people, Trump said, are registered in two states and may therefore vote twice. Others would steal identities from the dead. Voting machines would malfunction. In January, less than a week into his presidency, Trump told lawmakers that between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused him to lose the popular vote — though not the election itself — to Democrat Hillary Clinton. He told senators a tale about ineligible voters being bussed into New Hampshire from Massachusetts. Trump then tapped Vice President Mike Pence to lead an investigation into voter fraud. … That’s not how Matthew Masterson sees it. Masterson, the newly minted Republican chairman of the bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission, ranks Election 2016 among the most trouble-free elections ever.

Texas: She voted illegally. But was the punishment too harsh? | The Washington Post

Rosa Ortega stirred herself awake at the sound of a prison guard yelling in her dreams. “It’s just a nightmare,” Oscar Sherman assured her as the pair rested in his low-slung apartment complex in a desolate part of town. “It’s over now.” “My mind’s not right,” Ortega said later that afternoon. “I have nightmares. I can’t combine foods. I’m always on top of everything, but my brain hurts. It can’t stop thinking about the situation.” The situation is that Ortega, 37, voted illegally and has become the national face of voter fraud, a crime that President Trump and other Republicans believe is an epidemic endangering the integrity of American elections, even though no evidence supports the claim.

National: Why Republicans Can’t Find the Big Voter Fraud Conspiracy | Politico

In the fall of 2002, just over a year after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft summoned a group of federal prosecutors to Washington. He had a new mission he wanted them to focus on: voter fraud. “Votes have been bought, voters intimidated and ballot boxes stuffed,” he told the attendees of the Justice Department’s inaugural Voting Integrity Symposium. “Voters have been duped into signing absentee ballots believing they were applications for public relief. And the residents of cemeteries have infamously shown up at the polls on election day.” This might seem an unusually dark portrait of America’s electoral system, coming from the nation’s top prosecutor. But Ashcroft spoke from personal experience. In 2000, as a U.S. Senator from Missouri, he lost his re-election bid to a dead man. His opponent, Democratic Governor Mel Carnahan, died in a plane crash three weeks before Election Day. It was too late to remove the governor’s name from the ballot, so his wife, Jean, announced she would serve his term. Mel Carnahan won by 49,000 votes. Ashcroft and his fellow Missouri Republicans were outraged. Skeptical that voters might simply have preferred any Carnahan to him, Ashcroft and other Republicans accused Democrats in St. Louis of trying to steal the election by keeping the polls open later than usual. They dubbed it a “major criminal enterprise”. That December, George W. Bush nominated the out-of-work Ashcroft to be his first attorney general.

Florida: Bannon won’t face voter fraud charges in Florida | Orlando Sentinel

President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Steve Bannon will not face charges related to his registration to vote in Miami despite spending most of his time elsewhere, South Florida prosecutors said Thursday. The Miami-Dade County State Attorney’s Office concluded in a memo that there was not enough evidence to prove any crime. Bannon registered to vote in the county on April 2, 2014, after leasing the first of two houses in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood, then switched his registration to the Sarasota area last year. Bannon never voted in Miami-Dade County, the prosecutors said. They also said there was insufficient evidence to prove Bannon falsely claimed to reside in Florida on a voter registration form, which is a felony.

New Hampshire: Offices ask Gov. Sununu to investigate voter fraud claims, preserve state reputation | Concord Monitor

Several New Hampshire towns are asking Gov. Chris Sununu to investigate claims of voter fraud made by President Donald Trump. Webster’s select board signed its letter at a meeting Monday evening. “All municipalities, including Webster, take great pride in the integrity of our elections and the way in which they are managed by municipal employees and dedicated volunteers,” the letter reads. Referencing Trump’s claims that both he and Republican U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte lost in New Hampshire because “thousands” of voters were illegally bused in from Massachusetts, the Webster select board said these allegations reflect poorly on New Hampshire and “deserve serious attention.”

Pennsylvania: Controversial 197th District special election heading to federal court? | Philadelphia Inquirer

Tuesday’s controversial special election to fill the state House’s 197th District seat may be moving from the polling place to federal court, as Philadelphia’s City Commissioners prepare to start tallying the votes Friday morning. Lawyers for Republican nominee Lucinda Little, the only candidate who was listed on the ballot, and Green Party nominee Cheri Honkala, who waged a write-in campaign, sent letters to the Commissioners Thursday, demanding that they seal and preserve the ballots. Both camps alleged widespread voter fraud in the North Philadelphia district. Little won just 198 votes, which was 7.4 percent of the 2,681 ballots cast. In an unusual development, 2,483 write-in votes were cast.

Colorado: Former State GOP leader said only Democrats committed voter fraud. Now he’s charged with voter fraud. | The Washington Post

The 2016 election was just a month away when Steve Curtis, a conservative radio host and former Colorado Republican Party chairman, devoted an entire episode of his morning talk show to the heated topic of voter fraud. “It seems to me,” Curtis said in the 42-minute segment, “that virtually every case of voter fraud I can remember in my lifetime was committed by Democrats.” On Tuesday, Colorado prosecutors threw a wrench into that already dubious theory, accusing Curtis of voter fraud for allegedly filling out and mailing in his ex-wife’s 2016 ballot for president, Denver’s Fox affiliate reported. Curtis, 57, was charged in Weld County District Court with one count of misdemeanor voter fraud and one count of forgery, a Class 5 felony, according to local media. The case is the only voter fraud investigation stemming from the 2016 election that has resulted in criminal charges, the Colorado secretary of state’s office told Denver’s ABC affiliate.

Editorials: Trump’s irresponsible claims are undermining confidence in voting | Mindy Romero/The Sacramento Bee

In today’s surreal political landscape, the president claims that 3-5 million people voted illegally in November and has called for an investigation, but offers no credible evidence for his claims. Just last month, President Donald Trump asserted that thousands of people were bused into New Hampshire from liberal-leaning Massachusetts to vote illegally on Election Day – again with no proof. Many Americans buy the president’s phony storyline. A recent Politico/Morning Consult poll showed 43 percent of registered voters believe voter fraud is somewhat common or very common in a typical presidential election. Voter fraud – voting by the deceased, voting by noncitizens, and voting more than once –is a serious offense. But election officials and leading voting experts find no evidence of significant voter fraud in U.S. elections, including in 2016.

Editorials: The fight over voting rules didn’t start with Trump’s tweets | Michael Waldman/Los Angeles Times

When President Trump said “millions” voted illegally in November, he joined an old American battle. The fight over who can vote in the United States goes back more than two centuries, with one group after another demanding to participate in our democracy, and the Supreme Court often playing referee. This history puts voting rights at the center of this week’s confirmation hearings for Neil M. Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee to fill the ninth seat on the high court. The next justice’s pen, not the president’s tweets, could redefine your right to vote. Nonetheless, Trump has raised the stakes over voting rights. He insists not just that he won the popular vote (he didn’t) but that 3 million people voted illegally in California, Virginia and New Hampshire. That assertion is nonsense. Democratic and Republican election officials confirm that voter fraud is almost nonexistent, and Trump’s own lawyers agree the 2016 election was fair. But even cartoonish claims may have big consequences. Vice President Mike Pence has been tapped to investigate Trump’s charges. National legislation to curb voting rights — in the guise of protecting the franchise — could follow.

North Carolina: Local voters falsely accused of fraud seek changes in election protest process | News & Record

A group of residents have filed a letter with the State Board of Elections asking to change a process that’s used to dispute the validity of someone’s vote. Dozens of people in North Carolina were accused of illegally voting in the 2016 election — either by being a convicted felon who shouldn’t have voted, by voting in multiple states or by another means. Called an election protest, it can be filed by any registered voter or candidate, and simply must be done in writing with the accuser’s name, address, phone number and signature. It also must state the basis for the challenge. Guilford County had nine allegations of people voting in other states, said Charlie Collicutt, Guilford County Board of Elections director. Those protests were dismissed due to lack of evidence. Another eight protests involved allegations of convicted felons who voted, Collicutt said. Four were found to be valid. The other four were not; they involved people convicted of misdemeanors or who had served their sentences and re-registered to vote.

National: Top Election Officials Have No Idea What Trump Is Planning To Do In His Voter Fraud Investigation | The Huffington Post

Despite insistence that widespread voter fraud exists and pledges to investigate the matter fully, it seems the Trump administration has not bothered to contact top state election officials across the country. The Huffington Post asked all 50 secretaries of state and election officials in the District of Columbia if they had been contacted by the White House or Department of Justice regarding the forthcoming investigation. Not a single secretary of state’s office responded to say that it had. Forty-one different secretaries of state and election officials in the District of Columbia said they had not been contacted. Eight states ― Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Tennessee and Wyoming ― did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The Texas Attorney General’s office, which handles investigations into voter fraud in the state, declined to comment. “Not a peep,” Linda Lamone, the state administrator of elections in Maryland wrote in an email.

National: Republicans relieved Trump eased up on voter fraud claims | Politico

Prominent Republicans across the country are breathing a sigh of relief that President Donald Trump has so far not aggressively pursued his pledge for a “major investigation” into his allegations of widespread voter fraud that he claims robbed him the popular vote. Current and former GOP state party chairs and other officials said in interviews that the unverified allegation was at best a distraction and at worst a damaging statement that could erode confidence in elections. And even as Trump continues to make some outrageous claims — including that former President Barack Obama tapped his Trump Tower phones — he’s now directing much of his attention to replacing Obamacare and juicing up the job market.

Wisconsin: 17-year-olds voted illegally in Wisconsin primary | Associated Press

Dozens of 17-year-olds voted illegally across Wisconsin during last spring’s intense presidential primary, apparently wrongly believing they could cast ballots if they turned 18 ahead of the November general election, according to a new state report. Wisconsin Elections Commission staff examined voter fraud referrals municipal clerks said they made to prosecutors following the 2016 spring primary and general elections. The commission is set to approve the findings during a meeting Tuesday and forward a report to the Legislature.

National: Mike Pence’s Investigation Into Voter Fraud Is Off To A Slow Start | NPR

You might be asking yourself, whatever happened to Vice President Mike Pence’s investigation into President Trump’s claim that millions of people voted illegally in November? It’s been over a month since the president said he would ask Pence to lead a “major investigation” into those claims and the overall issue of voter fraud. Well, apparently, not much has happened so far. A spokesman for Pence said in an e-mail this week that they’re “still doing the necessary groundwork.” And White House Spokesman Sean Spicer said Monday that the Vice President has been “talking to folks potentially to serve on” his task force and that several secretaries of state have expressed interest. But a spokesperson for the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) says they’re unaware of any of their members being approached to participate in the investigation. And when NASS representatives went to the White House Tuesday to get an update on the vice president’s plans, they were told there was “no information to share” at this time.

Texas: Bill would make voter fraud claims public information | San Antonio Express-News

The Texas secretary of state’s office has sent 443 allegations of voter fraud to the state attorney general’s office for investigation since 2002. Just don’t ask about them. To the dismay of some state lawmakers, the secretary of state’s office will not release what one Democratic senator called “basic information” on allegations of voter fraud. Just down the road, however, the Attorney General’s office makes much of the information public. Now, an Austin lawmaker has filed a bill to require the secretary of state’s office to divulge additional information about voter fraud allegations. “The idea that you can’t tell the public the number of complaints requires some really contorted logic,” Sen. Kirk Watson said.

Kansas: Kobach Gets Plea Bargain In Seventh Voter Fraud Case | KCUR

A western Kansas man accused of voting in two states has agreed to a plea bargain, saying he “simply made a mistake.” Lincoln Wilson, a 65-year-old Republican from Sherman County, will plead guilty to three misdemeanor counts of voting without being qualified and two misdemeanor counts of false swearing to an affidavit, according to his lawyer, Jerry Fairbanks. The lone African-American charged in Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s voter fraud crusade, Wilson faced the most charges, including three felonies and six misdemeanors. In return for the plea, Kobach’s office will drop three felony charges of election perjury and one misdemeanor count of an unlawful advanced voting, Fairbanks says. Wilson will pay a $6,000 fine, Fairbanks says.

National: Civil rights leaders ask Sessions to scuttle Trump voter fraud probe | Politico

il rights leaders who met with Attorney General Jeff Sessions Tuesday asked him to urge President Donald Trump not to proceed with his plans for a blue-ribbon panel to investigate Trump’s own claims that millions of people voted illegally for his opponent in last year’s presidential race. “I asked him to counsel the president against the creation of such a task force and a commission because that commission will be seen to intimidate our communities,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “In the absence of any evidence of voter fraud, he should be counseling the president away from such a course….We don’t need an investigation into something that doesn’t exist. We should not be crediting the fantasies of this president at the cost of African Americans and Latinos feeling secure that they’re not being intimidated from voting and participating in the process.”

National: House Oversight Committee Won’t Investigate Trump’s Voter Fraud Claims | NBC

The House Oversight Committee will not investigate President Donald Trump’s unproven claims of wide-spread voter fraud during the 2016 election, Chairman Jason Chaffetz said Tuesday. Speaking on CNN, the Utah representative said he does not see any evidence to back up Trump’s tweets. “We can’t just investigate everything that’s ever thrown out there by the Democrats, by the Republicans. We have to pick and choose,” he said. Trump has repeatedly, and without evidence, pushed claims that millions of ballots were cast illegally in the 2016 election and called for a probe into the issue. Days after his inauguration, Trump tweeted: “I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and even, those registered to vote who are dead.”

National: States find little evidence of voter fraud in months after elections | The Hill

Four months after Election Day, Republican and Democratic administrators have uncovered only a handful of instances of improper or illegal voting despite President Trump’s unfounded allegations of millions of fraudulent ballots. Trump has claimed that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally on Election Day, costing him the popular vote. But numbers from around the country suggest that a few hundred people at most broke voting rules. In some cases, legitimately registered voters cast multiple ballots, either by voting absentee and in person, or by voting more than once in different jurisdictions. In other cases, voters in states that require identification refused to show those documents. Fewer than a hundred noncitizens have been referred to law enforcement officials for alleged voting infractions.

New Hampshire: Dartmouth researchers find no evidence of bused-in voters | Concord Monitor

If crowds of Massachusetts residents came into New Hampshire on Election Day as part of widespread voter fraud – a claim made by President Donald Trump’s administration and others – they managed to do so without creating any spikes in voter turnout and without creating any unusual changes in town-by-town support for Kelly Ayotte. That’s the conclusion of a study from a trio of Dartmouth researchers, whose work follows their previous studies that failed to find evidence of any voter fraud during the 2016 presidential election in six states. “Because of these results and a total lack of photographic evidence of buses infiltrating New Hampshire on Election Day 2016, we believe that Trump’s claims about a tainted election in New Hampshire are at best unsupported and at worst an intentional mistruth,” says the report from two professors and a postdoctoral fellow.

Voting Blogs: A Closer Look at Husted’s Allegations of Non-Citizen Voting in Ohio | Project Vote

Yesterday, Ohio’s secretary of state, Jon Husted, issued a press release congratulating himself for finding 385 non-citizens who were registered to vote in 2016, 82 of whom allegedly voted. Husted then goes on to claim there may be more illegally registered non-citizens on the Ohio voting rolls, but the federal government won’t give him access to their non-citizens database to search. If you’ve been following this issue at all, you can probably guess what we have to say about it.

Scale Matters. Three hundred and eighty-five may sound like a large number in some contexts—bank fees, for example—but not when we’re talking about a state voter file. As Carrie Davis, Executive Director of the Ohio League of Women Voters, noted in a press release yesterday:

“In November 2016, Ohio had 7,861,025 registered voters and, of those, 5,607,641 cast ballots in the November election. Husted’s 385 registered amounts to 0.004898% of total registered voters, and his alleged 82 votes cast amount to 0.001462% of the 5,607,641 total votes cast in November 2016.”

So, while the tone of Husted’s announcement is troubling, the findings of the investigation seem to bear out his own saner words from just one month ago: “While we should always continue to work to improve our election system, we don’t need to perpetuate the myth that voter fraud is in the millions,” he said. “It exists, but only in isolated cases.”

Ohio: Non-citizens are voting illegally in Ohio, but the number is tiny | Columbus Dispatch

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s office has found 82 additional non-U.S. citizens who registered and voted in at least one election in Ohio. Husted announced today that his office discovered a total of 385 non-citizens improperly registered in 2015, including those who voted. Coupled with similar findings in 2013 and 2015, Husted reported a total of 821 non-citizens have been identified, with 126 of them having voted in the period. While the numbers may look significant, a tiny percentage of those discovered in two previous inquiries were pursued and prosecuted for voter fraud. Of 44 people referred for prosecution in two previous elections, Attorney General Mike DeWine’s office said eight were prosecuted and five were convicted. one was reported to a diversion program, and the records were sealed in two cases so the disposition is not known.

Virginia: Gov. McAuliffe vetoes bill to investigate possible voter fraud | WRIC

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe vetoed a bill Friday that he said would require local election officials to investigate Virginia voters without a clear standard for how and when such investigations should be undertaken. The bill itself, available here, said that, if passed, it would have required local electoral boards to investigate the list of registered voters when the number of registered voters in a county or city exceeds the population of people old enough to vote. Once the investigation was concluded, the bill would have required the local electoral board to make a report of the findings to the State Board of Elections, which then would make it public.

National: FEC member: I have the right to demand Trump prove voter fraud claims | CNN

A member of the Federal Election Commission was defiant Tuesday after a nonprofit group said her request that President Donald Trump provide proof of voter fraud merited an investigation into whether her comments were inappropriate. Ellen Weintraub’s remarks were in response to a letter sent from the Cause of Action Institute to Lynne A. McFarland, the FEC inspector general, about a statement Weintraub made earlier in February. Weintraub called on the President to substantiate his claim of massive voter fraud in New Hampshire, a call she repeated in her statement Tuesday. Cause of Action’s letter said Weintraub, a Democratic member of the six-member commission, may be in violation of government ethics rules for making the statement as an FEC official and called on the agency’s watchdog to look into the matter. The FEC is tasked with regulating campaign finance, and Cause of Action’s letter said Weintraub could have stepped outside of her authority by commenting about voter fraud.

Texas: Woman fights harsh voter fraud sentence: ‘I just wanted them to hear my voice’ | The Guardian

Rosa Ortega does not deny she made a mistake. What she finds hard to accept is that her error should merit eight years in prison, almost certain deportation to a country she barely knows, separation from her children and notoriety in rightwing circles. “Send me back to Mexico. Get it over with,” she said in an interview with the Guardian on Friday, sitting behind a glass partition in the Tarrant County corrections centre in downtown Fort Worth, Texas. “I’m done, this is already too much, it’s too much and I’m just sitting there, sitting there, sitting there, and I don’t even sleep, I don’t sleep, I don’t do nothing here. On my mind, from day to night, is my kids.” Ortega was brought to the US from Mexico as a baby and lived legally in Texas as a permanent resident. While her green card entitled her to many of the same privileges as an American citizen, it did not confer the right to vote – yet vote she did, repeatedly, in elections in the Dallas area.

Editorials: The harmful myth of widespread voter fraud | Christoper Seaman/Roanoke Times

The 2016 election has been thrust back into the headlines with President Trump’s unsupported claim of “massive” voter fraud and promise to conduct a “major investigation.” But academics who have studied this issue, election administrators, and even President Trump’s own lawyers already agree: There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. We have been down this road before. During the administration of President George W. Bush, the Justice Department conducted a wide ranging, five-year investigation into claims of voter fraud after the hotly contested 2000 election, but ultimately ended up with little to show for it. This inquiry did not turn up any instances of widespread conspiracies of voter fraud, nor did it find any evidence that fraud impacted congressional or statewide elections. Instead, only a few dozen individuals — out of hundreds of millions of votes cast nationwide — were charged with election-related violations, most of which involved mistakes regarding voter registration forms or voter eligibility rules.

Kansas: Douglas County sheriff and his mother under investigation for voter fraud; case reveals quirk in Kansas voting law | Lawrence Journal World

Sheriff Ken McGovern in the last two elections helped his elderly mother obtain a ballot to vote in Douglas County, despite evidence that his mother lives in a Johnson County nursing home. A spokesman with the Kansas Secretary of State’s office confirmed that the matter had been forwarded to state prosecutors for review and possible charges. When questioned by the Journal-World, McGovern confirmed that during the 2016 primary election in August he picked up an advance ballot at the county courthouse for his mother, Lois McGovern. Sheriff McGovern signed a document listing that his mother was registered to vote at 2803 Schwarz Road in Lawrence. County records, however, show that Lois McGovern sold that home more than a year before the primary election. Sheriff McGovern confirmed to the Journal-World that his mother was not living at the house during the primary election. In the November general election, McGovern again went to pick up an advance ballot for his mother. But this time he faced pushback from a county employee who had knowledge that McGovern’s mother did not live at the Schwarz Road address, a source with knowledge of the incident told the Journal-World. But Sheriff McGovern eventually was allowed to take a ballot to his mother, after her address was changed to that of Sheriff McGovern’s west Lawrence home. McGovern, though, confirmed to the Journal-World that his mother does not live with him. Sheriff McGovern declined to say where his mother lived, and he refused to confirm that she lives in Douglas County. “Where she is living doesn’t make a difference,” McGovern said.