For weeks, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has been telling supporters that voter fraud could undermine the November 8 election and cause him to lose to Democrat Hillary Clinton. “They even want to try to rig the election at polling booths where so many cities are corrupt and voter fraud is all too common,” Trump has said. His campaign cites a 2012 study by the Pew Charitable Trusts that looked at national voter rolls. The study found that nearly 2 million deceased people were still registered. Pew blamed outdated voter rolls, however, and the report found that no ballots had been cast illegally. There are more than 8,000 voting precincts spread across the United States, and each one has local elected officials who are required to regularly update their communities’ rolls. Trump recently told supporters in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that “people who have died 10 years ago are still voting.” Researchers say voter fraud involving ballots cast on behalf of deceased voters is rare, according to FactCheck.org. “This issue of dead people voting is just not substantiated,” Lorraine Minnite, a professor at Rutgers University and author of The Myth of Voter Fraud, said in the FactCheck report.
Josh Douglas, a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law specializing in election law and voting rights, said impersonating anyone, dead or alive, on the voting rolls is not only a federal crime but also hard to do.
“You’d have to go find someone who has died, find that they’re still on the voter registration rolls, and go show up at the polls,” Douglas said. “In states that don’t have a strict voter ID requirement, you still show some sort of verification. … Everywhere you need to show something or sign in, and your signature can be matched with the [one] you provided when you registered to vote.
“When I go to my precinct, I have to sign in to vote before I go to the machine. … So, you’d need to have a mind-boggling ability to predict who hasn’t shown up, whom you can sign for that’s not going to come later in the day, [and] the ability to match your signature perfectly,” he added.
Full Article: Voter Fraud Is Extremely Rare, Hard to Accomplish, Researchers Say.