Voter impersonation

Voter impersonation (also sometimes called in-person voter fraud)^[1] is a form of electoral fraud in which one person who is not eligible to vote in an election does so by voting under the name of another eligible voter.

In the United States, voter ID laws have been enacted in a number of states since 2010 with the aim of preventing voter impersonation.^[2]

Studies have shown that voter impersonation is a rare event, and difficult to implement in any widespread fashion, and there is no evidence that it has changed the result of any election. Conversely, claims that voter impersonation has been occurring has been used to disenfranchise voters in large numbers.

Cases of voter impersonation

Various instances of voter impersonation have been reported in the United States. In 2013, 270 of the 6,000 dead people previously registered to vote in Nassau County, NY in 2013, supposedly cast ballots. County officials blamed many of the invalid votes on clerical errors.^[3] In 2013, state election officials found at least 81 dead voters in North Carolina^[4] and 92 dead voters in Oregon.^[5] Other examples include the 1997 Miami ballot fraud, which tainted the city's mayoral election and produced 36 arrests – 18 of these people were charged with absentee ballot fraud (not voter impersonation).^[6]

A 2012 report by the Pew Center showed that over 1.8 million dead people are registered to vote nationwide and over 3 million voters were registered in multiple states.^[7] Registration irregularities do not intrinsically constitute fraud: in most cases the states are simply slow to eliminate ineligible voters. These irregularities have left some concerned that the electoral system is vulnerable to the impersonation of dead voters. However, most states have since worked to address the concerns raised by this report.^[8]

Conservative lawyer Hans von Spakovsky has claimed that significant in-person voter fraud occurred in Brooklyn from 1968 to 1982, but Richard Hasen has argued that this fraud, because it involved election officials colluding with one another, could not have been prevented by a voter ID law.^[9]

Consequences

Critics of voter ID laws have argued that voter impersonation is illogical from the perspective of the perpetrator, as if they are caught, they will face harsh criminal penalties, including up to 5 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000 for citizens and possible deportation for non-citizens. Even if they are not caught, they will have cast only one vote for their candidate.^[2] Similarly, these critics have noted that is would be very difficult for someone to coordinate widespread voter impersonation in order to steal an election, because if they paid people to vote for their preferred candidate, they could not confirm whether the people they paid voted at all, much less the way they were paid to.^[10]

Estimates of frequency

Critics of voter ID laws have argued that voter impersonation, which such laws are designed to prevent, is extremely rare. For instance, ABC News reported in 2012 that only four cases of voter impersonation had led to convictions in Texas over the previous decade.^[2] A study released the same year by News21, an Arizona State University reporting project, identified a total of 10 cases of alleged voter impersonation in the United States since 2000.^[11] The same study found that for every case of voter impersonation, there were 207 cases of other types of election fraud. This analysis has, in turn, been criticized by the executive director of the Republican National Lawyers Association, who has said that the study was "highly flawed in its very approach to the issue."^[12] Also a 2012 study found no evidence that voter impersonation (in the form of people voting under the auspices of a dead voter) occurred in the 2006 Georgia general elections.^[13] In April 2014, Federal District Court Judge Lynn Adelman ruled in Frank v. Walker that Wisconsin's voter ID law was unconstitutional because "virtually no voter impersonation occurs in Wisconsin...".^[14] In August 2014, Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, reported in the Washington Post's Wonkblog that he had identified only 31 credible cases of voter impersonation since 2000.^[15] Levitt has also claimed that of these 31 cases, three of them occurred in Texas, while Lorraine Minnite of Rutgers University–Camden estimates there were actually four during the 2000–2014 period.^[1] The most serious incident identified involved as many as 24 people trying to vote under assumed names in Brooklyn, but even this would not have made a significant difference in almost any American election.^[16] Also that year, a study in the Election Law Journal found that about the same percentage of the U.S. population (about 2.5%) admitted to having been abducted by aliens as admitted to committing voter impersonation. This study also concluded that "strict voter ID requirements address a problem that was certainly not common in the 2012 U.S. election."^[17] In 2016, News21 reviewed cases of possible voter impersonation in five states where politicians had expressed concerns about it. They found 38 successful fraud cases in these states from 2012 to 2016, none of which were for voter impersonation.^[18]

References