Virginia: Voter registration records have loopholes but no evidence of widespread fraud | Virginian-Pilot

Can someone who isn’t an American citizen illegally register and vote in Virginia’s elections? Yes. Can a felon whose rights haven’t been restored vote undetected in Virginia? Yes. Can someone be registered to vote in Virginia and another state and illegally cast ballots in both places? Yes. State and local election officials acknowledge all those crimes can happen in the Old Dominion because the state’s voter rolls aren’t airtight. Even with those gaps, the same officials and a prominent election expert argue there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud. They reject President Donald Trump’s often-repeated but unverified claim that millions of noncitizens illegally voted against him in November. “If you want to find thousands or even millions of people who committed voter fraud, good luck with that, because there’s no way that’s true,” said David Becker, lead author of a 2012 Pew Center on The States study of the nation’s voter registration systems. Court records back him up where Virginia’s concerned.

Kansas: Kris Kobach’s “voter fraud” meltdown: Someday he’ll have evidence of a problem that doesn’t exist | Salon

As he blatantly lied on a series of Sunday talk shows about the extent to which illegal voting occurs in American elections, White House aide Stephen Miller told George Stephanopoulos to “invite Kris Kobach onto your show, and he can walk you through some of the evidence of voter fraud in greater detail.” On Monday, three separate networks gave Kobach the chance to do just that. It did not go well for him. A Kansas secretary of state who is a longtime crusader against immigration, Kobach is often credited with having inspired Donald Trump’s proposed border wall. Kobach has also promoted the ludicrous theory that undocumented immigrants are voting in numbers sufficient to swing elections toward the Democrats. You would think the number of elections that Democrats keep losing might dissuade him from this theory. You would be wrong.

New Hampshire: Many In New Hampshire Politics Pan Trump’s Unfounded Voter Fraud Claims | New Hampshire Public Radio

Party leaders on both sides of the aisle are defending New Hampshire’s electoral system in the wake of another unsubstantiated claim by President Donald Trump that there’s massive voter fraud happening in the state. “Let me be as unequivocal as possible: allegations of voter fraud in NH are baseless, without any merit-it’s shameful to spread these fantasies,” wrote former N.H. Attorney General Tom Rath, also a longtime Republican strategist, in a tweet Sunday. Trump made the claim again during a meeting last week with Congressional leaders, telling them that he and former Sen. Kelly Ayotte would have won in New Hampshire were it not for the thousands of Massachusetts residents “brought in on buses” to vote illegally in the state.

Kentucky: Voting Fraud vs. Election Fraud And Claims Of Chicanery In Kentucky | WFPL

In a national television appearance on Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell knocked down claims of wide-scale voting fraud in the presidential election. While tossing cold water on President Trump’s repeated (and unsubstantiated) claims of fraud impacting the election, McConnell did say that vote fraud is real, it happens, and Kentucky has a history of it. “… the Democratic myth that voter fraud is a fiction, is not true,” McConnell said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “We’ve had a series of significant cases in Kentucky over the years. There is voter fraud in the country.” Our reporting pals at WAVE-3 in Louisville asked McConnell’s office for details. His office responded with a link to our newsroom’s August 2016 article on Kentucky’s history of vote buying. So, is McConnell right? Is fraud rampant in Kentucky? No, not really. The answer is complicated, though, and it boils down to semantics.

Editorials: Making Voting White Again: The Trump administration’s continued repetition of bogus claims of voter fraud has a very specific purpose. | Jamelle Bouie/Slate

Birtherism, the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born abroad and thus ineligible for the presidency, served a very specific purpose. It was a tool of delegitimization, a means to drive xenophobic suspicion and racial hostility. It’s why Donald Trump, its chief advocate, never truly dropped the crusade—not after wide condemnation from critics and fact-checkers; not after wide ridicule from much of the public; and not after Obama released his long-form birth certificate, debunking the charge outright. “A lot of people question it,” said Trump in a 2015 question-and-answer session with Fox News’ Sean Hannity a few months before he announced his bid for the White House. Trump’s birtherism didn’t just feed anti-Obama distrust and paranoia among conservative voters. It helped feed a sense of grievance—a feeling that their country had been hijacked by nefarious forces, and they needed to take it back. And whether Trump realized it or not at the time, it also helped till ground for his eventual presidential campaign and its message of nativist anger and racist hostility. It is now important to remember all of this, as Trump and his backers stoke another conspiracy theory, aimed at delegitimizing a different set of opponents.

Texas: Illegal voter ‘can’t believe’ she got 8 years in prison | The Star-Telegram

Rosa Maria Ortega voted for Republican Ken Paxton for Texas attorney general in 2014. Now, as she sits behind a plate glass window Monday with heavy eyes and wearing a tan Tarrant County Jail jumpsuit, she’s crushed that Paxton and others can celebrate her incarceration as sending a message about illegal voting. Ortega, 37, a permanent resident who arrived in Texas as an infant and has four children, all U.S. citizens, was charged with two counts of illegal voting for voting illegally in elections in 2012 and 2014. On Thursday, a Tarrant County jury handed down a sentence of eight years in prison and a $5,000 fine for each count. After serving her sentence, she will likely face deportation. She believes she is wrongly being used as an example of voter fraud. “I thought I was doing something right for my country. When they gave me the sentence they just broke my heart, and they didn’t just break my heart, but I already knew my family was going to be broken, my kids especially,” Ortega said Monday during an interview at the jail, where she will remain for about a month until being transported to a Texas Department of Criminal Justice facility. “To me, it’s like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe this. I just can’t.’ ”

Arkansas: No non-citizens voted in voter fraud case cited by White House | The Guardian

A case cited by the White House as evidence that non-citizens cast illegal votes in American elections did not actually involve any non-citizens voting, the latest in a series of misleading statements on the subject by the administration. Donald Trump’s deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, referred in a television interview on Sunday to an incident in her native Arkansas, which she said supported Trump’s claims about voter fraud. Trump has repeatedly alleged, without evidence, that he lost the national popular vote to Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, because millions of non-citizens voted illegally. His claim has been widely dismissed as a fabrication. … After the president and a senior aide revived the claims last week, Huckabee Sanders was asked on MSNBC: “Do you think that there are 3 to 5 million undocumented immigrants who cast votes, and that that would have swung the president’s election, in terms of the popular vote, his way?” Huckabee Sanders replied: “Look, I don’t know how many different voters voted illegally, but I do know that it exists. In my home state of Arkansas, there was a judge that was caught with, I think, roughly 180 ballots sitting on his kitchen table. So to pretend like voter fraud isn’t something real and doesn’t exist is laughable.”

Editorials: Meet the creator of ‘alternative facts,’ Kris Kobach | The Hutchison News

When the White House accused the press of actively covering up millions of illegal votes cast in the 2016 election, they suggested a conversation with the country’s most reliable source for overblown fears about illegal voting. America, meet the not-so-illustrious Kris Kobach. While you might come to know him as a Trump fan and a talking head on national news shows, in Kansas we’ve long known the Secretary of State in a quite different capacity: As a questionable administrator of the state’s elections who has an unquenchable thirst for the power to prosecute those who dare run afoul of his enhanced registration and identification requirements for voting. He didn’t really make his case, despite appearances on both CNN and the Kobach-friendly Fox News. Oh, and he’s not so good at the record-keeping required by the office he runs. The Kansas Legislature granted Kobach the power to prosecute people who double voted, or failed to comply with voting laws. And after making so much hay about the issue, Kobach produced a total of nine cases worthy of bringing to court – in most cases elderly voters who misunderstood some of the laws.

Texas: Murder, rapes have led to lighter sentences in Tarrant County than voter fraud | The Star-Telegram

The eight-year prison sentence given to a Grand Prairie woman for voting illegally has been touted by politicians as a case that sent a message. “In Texas you will pay a price” for voter fraud, tweeted Gov. Greg Abbott. “This case shows how serious Texas is about keeping its elections secure,” state Attorney General Ken Paxton said. But critics argue that Rosa Maria Ortega’s punishment, which was decided by a jury and drew national attention, was too harsh. “Illegal voting should be sanctioned but not like a violent felony,” The Wall Street Journal wrote in an editorial Monday. Sam Jordan, spokeswoman for the Tarrant County district attorney’s office, said the eight-year sentence was the jury’s decision. “Our prosecutors — one from the attorney general’s office and one from our office — made no punishment recommendation,” Jordan said. “We said do what you think is right. We didn’t ask specifically for penitentiary time.”

National: The White House tells media to ask Kris Kobach to prove there’s voter fraud. They do. He doesn’t. | The Washington Post

Stephen Miller, senior policy adviser to President Trump, defended his boss’s continuing insistence on rampant voter fraud in the 2016 election Sunday by offering an expert witness. “I suggest you invite Kris Kobach onto your show,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “and he can walk you through some of the evidence of voter fraud in greater detail.” Kobach is Kansas’s secretary of state and is fighting the ACLU in federal court over his state’s recent voting restrictions. (A law passed in Kansas in 2011 was credited with disproportionately keeping young and black voters from the polls.) On Monday, three networks invited Kobach on. Two pressed the issue. Kobach offered zero proof. At question is not the existence of voter fraud at all. There are certainly instances in which people vote illegally, like the woman in Texas who cast ballots in 2012 and 2014 despite not being a citizen. The question is whether fraud occurs at a large enough scale to affect election results. A teenager stealing a candy bar from a convenience store every three weeks is different than armed men emptying its safe every night. Miller suggested that Kobach could prove the latter. He barely proved the former.

Editorials: The Latest Voter-Fraud Lie | The New York Times

“It is a fact and you will not deny it.” That unnerving remark — made on Sunday by Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser to President Trump — sums up the new administration’s attitude toward the truth: We Decide, You Report. Mr. Miller made the comment at the end of a heated back-and-forth with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, who had asked him to defend Mr. Trump’s latest claim of voter fraud — that his narrow loss in New Hampshire was due to voters who had been bused in illegally from Massachusetts. When Mr. Stephanopoulos pressed him for even a single example of fraud, Mr. Miller responded: “George, go to New Hampshire. Talk to anybody who has worked in politics there for a long time.” O.K., why don’t we? Start with New Hampshire’s secretary of state, Bill Gardner, who has been in office for four decades. “We have never gotten any proof about buses showing up at polling places,” Mr. Gardner told The Boston Globe. Or how about Tom Rath, the state’s former attorney general and a Republican, who tweeted on Sunday that “allegations of voter fraud in NH are baseless, without any merit — it’s shameful to spread these fantasies.” Even New Hampshire’s governor, Chris Sununu, who shortly before the election floated his own evidence-free claim about buses of illegal Democratic voters, has backed off.

Editorials: The Trump Administration’s Lies About Voter Fraud Will Lead to Massive Voter Suppression | Ari Berman/The Nation

After falsely alleging that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally in 2016, Donald Trump debuted a new lie about voter fraud in a meeting with senators on Thursday, saying, according to Politico, that “thousands” of people were “brought in on buses” from Massachusetts to “illegally” vote in New Hampshire. Trump claimed that’s why he and former GOP senator Kelly Ayotte lost their races in the state. White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller repeated Trump’s latest lie in an interview with ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “This issue of busing voters in New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics,” Miller said. “It’s very real. It’s very serious.” When pressed for evidence by George Stephanopoulos, Miller said, “This morning, on this show, is not the venue to lay out all the evidence.” “For the record, you have provided absolutely no evidence,” Stephanopoulos responded. Miller could provide no evidence for Trump’s claim because there is none.  “We have never gotten any proof about buses showing up at polling places,” New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, who’s been in office since 1976, told The Boston Globe. “I will pay $1000 to 1st person proving even 1 outofstate person took bus from MA 2 any NH polling place last ElectionDay,” tweeted former New Hampshire GOP chair Fergus Cullen.

New Hampshire: Sununu says he’s unaware of widespread voter fraud in the Granite State | WMUR

Gov. Chris Sununu said Monday he is unaware of widespread voter fraud in the Granite State, but he said he wants to work with President Donald Trump’s administration to “learn of any evidence they may have.” The governor issued a statement to WMUR.com after several days of a media and social media firestorm over Trump’s assertion – and the assertion of Trump’s senior White House policy adviser – that thousands of people from Massachusetts were bused into New Hampshire to vote illegally in the November election. Neither produced evidence of their claims, and a Federal Election Commission member called on Trump to produce evidence. See WMUR.com’s recent reports here, here and here.

National: Election commissioner to Trump: Show evidence of voter fraud | The Hill

A commissioner on the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) called on President Trump to give proof of voter fraud, after he reportedly made further claims in a meeting with senators. Trump reportedly blamed voter fraud for why both he and former Sen. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) lost in New Hampshire last November during a recent meeting with a bipartisan group of senators. “The scheme the President of the United States alleges would constitute thousands of felony criminal offenses under New Hampshire law,” Commissioner Ellen Weintraub said in a statement Friday. “The President has issued an extraordinarily serious and specific charge,” added Weintraub, who is a Democrat but was appointed by former President George W. Bush in 2002. “Allegations of this magnitude cannot be ignored.” “I therefore call upon President Trump to immediately share his evidence with the public and with the appropriate law-enforcement authorities so that his allegations may be investigated promptly and thoroughly.”

National: Trump’s voter fraud claims are absurd, yet another analysis shows | VICE News

Just under 3 million Americans are registered to vote in two places, but the overwhelming majority of them don’t vote twice, according to a new analysis by TargetSmart, the data firm used by the Democratic National Committee for its national voter file. These findings, discussed in an interview with VICE News, discredit recent assertions by President Donald Trump that there is an epidemic of double-voting and voter fraud. Since it became clear that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in November’s presidential election, Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that he came up 2.9 million ballots short because 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally. (There are 200 million registered voters in the U.S.) Five days into his presidency, Trump called for a “major investigation” into that alleged fraud but then later scaled back his effort to a “commission” led by Vice President Mike Pence to study the problem.

Editorials: Republicans Hold On to a Myth to Hold On to Power | The New York Times

Given the increased political power Republicans won in the last elections, from Washington to red-state legislatures, voters might expect the party to feel that the nation’s voting procedures are working quite well. Yet this is far from the case, as triumphant Republicans are using their enhanced clout to continue their campaign playing up the mythical threat that voter fraud abounds in the nation. The newest and loudest zealot in this cause is, of course, President Trump, with his scurrilous claim that millions of illegal ballots cost him a popular vote majority. His baseless claim only encourages the renewed efforts at voter suppression reported to be underway in a score of Republican-dominated statehouses intent on making it harder for citizens to register or vote. Mr. Trump is trying to sell the false idea that he was fraudulently denied a clear mandate. Republican state legislators, in turn, are no more convincing but just as cynical in insisting that elaborate new ballot protections are needed — protections that effectively target poor people, minorities and students, who tend to favor Democratic candidates.

New Hampshire: Comments by senior White House adviser that voter fraud in New Hampshire is ‘widely known’ create firestorm | NH1

Three days after President Donald Trump made unsubstantiated claims that thousands of people bused in from Massachusetts voted illegally in the Granite State in last year’s election, his senior policy adviser repeated the allegations, but didn’t offer any proof. And the new charges, made by White House Policy Adviser Stephen Miller on the Sunday talk shows, once again sparked a massive amount of push back and conversation on social media. In a contentious interview on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos, Miller repeated the President’s claim that he would have won New Hampshire if it were not for “thousands” of people being bused there. Trump lost the fight for the Granite State’s four electoral votes by just under 3,000 votes to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. “Go to New Hampshire. Talk to anybody who’s worked in politics there for a long time. Everybody’s aware of the problem in New Hampshire,” Miller responded when asked by Stephanopoulos to produce evidence of the voter fraud. “Having worked before on a campaign in New Hampshire, I can tell you that this issue of busing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics. It’s very real, it’s very serious,” Miller added.

New Hampshire: Stephen Miller’s bushels of Pinocchios for false voter-fraud claims | The Washington Post

White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller appeared on ABC’s “The Week” on Sunday, spouting a bunch of false talking points on alleged voter fraud. (He also repeated similar claims on other Sunday talk shows.) To his credit, host George Stephanopoulus repeatedly challenged Miller, noting that he had provided no evidence to support his claims. But Miller charged ahead, using the word “fact” three times in a vain effort to bolster his position.

Here’s a guide through the back and forth.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me move on, though, to the question of voter fraud as well. President Trump again this week suggested in a meeting with senators that thousands of illegal voters were bused from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and that’s what caused his defeat in the state of New Hampshire, also the defeat of Senator Kelly Ayotte. That has provoked a response from a member of the Federal Election Commission, Ellen Weintraub, who says, “I call upon the president to immediately share New Hampshire voter fraud evidence so that his allegations may be investigated promptly.” Do you have that evidence?

Texas: Trump voter fraud claim was ‘800lb gorilla in jury box’ at Texas trial | The Guardian

A lawyer has said Donald Trump’s debunked claims of election rigging influenced the outcome of his client’s voter fraud trial, calling the US president’s comments “the 800lb gorilla” in the jury box. Rosa María Ortega, 37, a Mexican national, was jailed for eight years in Fort Worth, Texas, after being convicted of two felony counts of illegal voting over allegations that she improperly cast a ballot five times between 2005 and 2014. Her attorney, Clark Birdsall, said on Friday that Ortega was a permanent resident who was brought to the US as a baby and mistakenly thought she was eligible to vote. He said she voted Republican, including for the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, whose office helped prosecute her. Her sentence was tough: voter fraud convictions, which are rare, often result in probation. As a convicted felon, Ortega is likely to be deported after serving her sentence. Tarrant County prosecutors said jurors made clear they valued voting rights, but Birdsall said he believed Ortega would have fared better in a county with fewer “pro-Trump” attitudes.

Texas: Illegal Voting Gets Texas Woman 8 Years in Prison, and Certain Deportation | The New York Times

Despite repeated statements by Republican political leaders that American elections are rife with illegal voting, credible reports of fraud have been hard to find and convictions rarer still. That may help explain the unusually heavy penalty imposed on Rosa Maria Ortega, 37, a permanent resident and a mother of four who lives outside Dallas. On Thursday, a Fort Worth judge sentenced her to eight years in prison — and almost certainly deportation later — after she voted illegally in elections in 2012 and 2014. The sentence for Ms. Ortega, who was brought to this country by her mother as an infant, “shows how serious Texas is about keeping its elections secure,” Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, said in a statement. Her lawyer called it an egregious overreaction, made to score political points, against someone who wrongly believed she was eligible to vote. “She has a sixth-grade education. She didn’t know she wasn’t legal,” said Ms. Ortega’s lawyer, Clark Birdsall, who once oversaw voter fraud prosecutions in neighboring Dallas County. “She can own property; she can serve in the military; she can get a job; she can pay taxes. But she can’t vote, and she didn’t know that.”

Michigan: State audit: No evidence of fraud in Detroit vote | The Detroit Free Press

The state has found no evidence of voter fraud after auditing 136 Detroit precincts that couldn’t be recounted after the November election. Chris Thomas, the Secretary of State’s director of elections, said there were problems with the performance of staff at the precincts where the ballots couldn’t be recounted either because the numbers in poll books didn’t match the number of ballots in the box or because some ballot boxes were improperly sealed. “There was no pervasive fraud found in our audit of Detroit. We did not find widespread voting machine problems,” Thomas said at a news conference Thursday. “We did find widespread performance issues that tracked back to the training by the Detroit city clerk.”

Voting Blogs: The Pence Commission on Voting Fraud | More Soft Money Hard Law

President Trump’s arrangement for an inquiry into election voting fraud is fatally compromised by political self-interest. Before the November election, he insisted that voter fraud might cost him the victory. After he had won, he decided that it robbed him of success in the popular vote. He put the number of illegal voters at 3 to 5 million, all of it allegedly committed at his expense. And having taken this position, he is not only looking back. He is already a candidate for reelection, and this project would serve his purpose of reducing the risk of another popular vote disappointment. So he will establish a presidential commission to look into voting fraud, and he intends to appoint as its chair his Vice President, who was his presidential running mate in the last election and will very probably be on the ticket again 2020. This process has lacked credibility from the start, and if it were only a matter of appreciating the nature and limitations of this political project, then not much more attention would need to be paid to it. But in what happens next, once this Pence Commission is formed and launched, the long-term cost to bipartisanship in voting reform could prove high.

National: Why Voting Rights Advocates Are Worried About a Trump Voter Fraud Probe | NBC

Following up on his false claim that at least 3 million illegal immigrants voted in November’s election, President Donald Trump was all set last Thursday to sign an executive order initiating a federal investigation into voter fraud. But the order never came. A spokesman said Trump got stuck in meetings that ran long. Since then, the White House has moved on to other issues, like banning travel from seven majority Muslim nations and threatening to defund sanctuary cities, without rescheduling the signing. An aide to Trump told NBC News on Friday that there would be no voter inquiry any time soon, although Trump seemed to contradict that in an interview that aired Sunday afternoon. “I’m going to set up a commission to be headed by Mike Pence, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it,” Trump told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, without offering specifics.

National: Trump executive order on voter fraud quietly stalled | Associated Press

President Donald Trump’s heated rush to launch what he said would be a “major investigation” into voter fraud has cooled, leaving White House staff uncertain when it will come to pass or what shape it will take. An executive action commissioning the probe is still planned but could be several weeks away, two senior administration officials said Friday. Although Trump instructed staff to jump on the project last week, he has not discussed the issue in recent days, according to two other people in close touch with the president. All demanded anonymity to discuss private conservations. Asked about the status of the effort, White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said: “I do not have an update at this time.” The indefinite delay comes as some of Trump’s advisers counseled him to abandon the idea, arguing it was a distraction from more pressing issues. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in last November’s election. Trump won the Electoral College vote but lost the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million votes to Democrat Hillary Clinton.

National: Trump walks back false voter fraud claim in interview with Bill O’Reilly | The Washington Post

He certainly did not admit to being wrong, but in his own way President Trump walked back his false claim that 3 million to 5 million illegal ballots were cast in the November election when he sat down with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly for an interview that aired before the Super Bowl. Asked whether it was irresponsible for the president to undermine public confidence in the integrity of the vote without data to back up his assertion, Trump said, “It doesn’t have to do with the vote.” “It has to do with the registration,” he continued. “And when you look at the registration, and you see dead people that have voted, when you see people that are registered in two states — and that voted in two states — when you see other things, when you see illegals, people that are not citizens and they are on the registration rolls. Look, Bill, we can be babies, but you take a look at the registration. You have illegals, you have dead people, you have this — it’s really a bad situation. It’s really bad.”

National: McConnell: No federal money for voter fraud probe | The Hill

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Sunday said he doesn’t want to spend federal funds to investigate what President Trump claimed was massive voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election. While McConnell says there is voter fraud, he doesn’t believe it’s as widespread as Trump claims or requires federal intervention. He says that cleaning up voter rolls is best left to the states. “Election fraud does occur,” he told CNN’s “State of the Union.” But he added that “there’s no evidence that occurred in such a significant number that it would have changed the presidential election. I don’t think we ought to spend any federal money investigating that. I think the states can take a look at this issue. Many of them have tried to tighten their voter rolls, tried to purge people who are dead,” he added.

National: Still no executive order on voter fraud, as Trump moves on | CNN

A full week has passed since President Donald Trump said he would sign an executive order opening a Justice Department investigation into his unsubstantiated claim that millions of people voted illegally in November. The Oval Office signing was abruptly canceled last Thursday and never rescheduled. The White House hasn’t talked about it since. The President has moved on to other subjects. A senior administration official told CNN that the voter fraud investigation is no longer a top priority for the President, insisting it’s not off the table, but not expected anytime soon.

National: Trump says its illegal to be registered to vote in two states. He’s wrong. | Chicago Tribune

It was a forceful condemnation — a vow to wipe out a serious crime. “I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states,” President Trump boomed on Twitter last week. But Trump’s social media decree missed a crucial fact: It’s not illegal to be registered to vote in multiple states. It is, however, a felony to cast ballots in more than one state — yet it rarely happens. Trump’s tweet storm about voter registration — and his unfounded claim that millions of illegal votes were cast for Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in November — has cast a spotlight on voting procedures nationwide. That spotlight has revealed some ironies. Trump’s son-in-law and advisor, Jared Kushner, is registered in more than one state. The same is true for some of the president’s senior officials, including his pick to lead the Treasury Department, Steven Mnuchin, along with senior advisor Stephen K. Bannon and Press Secretary Sean Spicer. Even Gregg Phillips, creator of the app VoteStand — which helps Americans report perceived voter fraud — and who Trump has boasted is a guru on the issue, appears to be registered in Alabama, Mississippi and Texas, according to the Associated Press.

National: Who believes in voter fraud? Americans who are hostile to immigrants | The Washington Post

Donald Trump has prominently promoted the idea that there are widespread conspiracies to commit voter fraud, and has recently called for a major investigation. That’s despite the fact that peer-reviewed studies have convincingly shown that voter fraud is extremely rare and difficult to prove (here, here, here and here). So who is likely to believe him? The answer: Americans who are hostile toward nonwhite immigrants. That hostility strongly influences estimates of how frequently voter fraud occurs. In a national survey of 1,000 adult Americans through the 2015 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we asked people to estimate how often voter fraud occurs. Like other researchers, we define voter fraud perceptions as how much people think that U.S. elections include noncitizen voting, voting more than once, and voting while pretending to be someone else.

Editorials: How ‘voter fraud’ crusades undermine voting rights | Jesse Rhodes/The Conversation

President Donald Trump has “voter fraud” on the brain. Bizarrely, after winning the 2016 presidential election, Trump has raised questions about the legitimacy of his own victory by claiming that the election was tainted by widespread voter fraud. Indeed, the president recently suggested that as many as 3,000,000 people voted illegally in the election. Reports suggest that Trump’s obsession with voter fraud is due to his outrage at losing the popular vote to Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. As Trump himself alleged in a recent interview, “of those [illegal] votes cast, none of ‘em come to me. None of ‘em come to me. They would all be for the other side.” … Trump’s comments are extraordinary – and, at best, profoundly misinformed. I’ve studied voting rights politics for years and have recently finished writing a book on the political erosion of the Voting Rights Act. My book – and the research of many other social scientists outlined below – flatly contradicts Trump’s claims about the prevalence of fraud in American elections. Put bluntly, there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud by impersonation in the United States. “Impersonation” is what we call the deliberate misrepresentation of identity by individuals in order to manipulate election outcomes.