Voter suppression is a big problem. Voter fraud, not so much

All Presidential elections are important, but this one is among the more divisive. In many ways, the 2024 vote is a mandate on the social character of our country.

Voter suppression

In some states, the election rolls are being purged. Your name may be removed because you didn’t vote in the last election, or you moved, or you changed your name because of marriage or divorce. Do not find out on Election Day. Find out now. Turbovote is reliable and can be used for every state.

Every state has its own office that is tasked with running elections. The Secretary of State’s office has an elections department. There are some Federal laws that set a few basic standards for elections, but each state decides about how registration and voting is done. That’s why some states allow on-line voter registration and some do not. Some allow mail-in ballots, and some do not. Especially during the election in 2020 – during the first year of the Covid-19 outbreak – more states moved to mail-in ballots. This created anxiety about voter fraud from both sides of the political divide.

However, for the most part, it is a Republican rhetoric that is casting doubt on the integrity of our elections.

Voter Fraud

Voter fraud is a serious offense that comes with criminal penalties. A conservative group–the Heritage Foundation–did a survey of proven voter fraud. There were 1,546 proven cases of voter fraud nationwide listed, going back to 2010.

Recently, Virginia election officials found non-citizens within the voter rolls. The Virginia Governor signed off on removing all of those (6,304) names in a state with 6,327,664 registered voters.

Is registering non-citizens a plot to foil the re-election dreams of Donald Trump? Hardly. Were it done on purpose, it would account for .0009962% of registered voters. So roughly 100th of one percent (.001, rounding up) of the vote would be tainted, if every mistaken enrollee voted. Yet sites like the Heritage Foundation are making hay telling people that our election system is being flooded by fraud of this type.

It is not confirmed (and it is unlikely) that any of the people added to the rolls in Virginia in the past 18 months actually voted. The information on how many of those people voted — or not — would be available within the elections office. If they had voted in strong numbers, the number would have been published for propaganda purposes.

Yet the [Virginia’s Republican] governor’s Aug. 7 order didn’t state whether any of the 6,303 people removed from the voter rolls over the past 18 months were noncitizens who actually voted or if there was an error and they later turned out to be citizens. His office didn’t provide that information when asked by NBC News. [source]

The addition of those names to the voter rolls points to problems with the on-line system that links voting rolls with driver’s licenses:

Local Virginia officials who spoke to NBC News attributed much of the presence of possible noncitizens on the voter rolls to errors made when people fill out paper or online forms or when they respond to a question about citizenship on a touchpad device at the department of motor vehicles. [source]

… user and data errors in the DHS system — such as confusing people who share the same name — have led to people being inaccurately flagged on voter rolls, Clapman said. The use of immigrant records under the SAVE system to verify voter rolls has been criticized by voting rights and immigration advocates because it’s not foolproof. 

“If a voter renews their driver’s license or completes another DMV form but neglects to check ‘yes’ to the citizenship question, checks ‘no’ or checks neither box, then this voter is flagged as a possible noncitizen and included in the list,” Tony Castrilli, a spokesman for Fairfax County in northern Virginia, told NBC News in an email.  

Fairfax County canceled 985 voters in the county over the last two years, but Castrilli didn’t know how many subsequently confirmed they were citizens and re-registered. [source]

Remember that the Heritage Foundation is the organization that created Project 2025, which mentions the candidate Donald Trump over 300 times. They are not a neutral organization. They keep a database that shows a mere 1,546 fraudulent voters convicted in the past ten years. That’s the best they can do. They have proved a pretty paltry level of voter fraud, very paltry.