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.
Academic and other nonpartisan studies also have concluded that widespread voting fraud simply does not exist. In one of the most comprehensive studies of this issue, law professor and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Justin Levitt found only 31 credible instances of voter impersonation nationwide out of over 1 billion votes cast between 2000 and 2014. In other words, an average voter is much more likely to be struck by lightning than to have someone attempt to defraud them out of a ballot. An analysis of news reports by the Washington Post found only four documented instances of voter fraud during the 2016 election, out of 136 million votes cast nationally. (For comparison, President Trump’s narrow margin of victory states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania involved tens of thousands of votes.) Similarly, researchers at Dartmouth College recently conducted a county-by-county statistical analysis of the 2016 presidential election compared to past national elections and found no evidence of noncitizen voting, dead people voting or tampering by election officials. They concluded that “voter fraud concerns fomented … by the Trump campaign are not grounded in any observable features of the 2016 presidential election.”
State election officials, who are in perhaps the best position to investigate these sorts of claims, also agree that there is no evidence to support the White House’s allegations. And even President Trump’s own lawyers have decisively rejected the existence of alleged voter fraud. In a court filing in the Michigan recount lawsuit brought by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Trump’s lawyers argued a recount was unnecessary because “all available evidence suggests that the 2016 was not tainted by fraud or mistake.”
Full Article: Seaman: The harmful myth of widespread voter fraud – Roanoke Times: Commentary.