bogarde73
|
By Tom Howell Jr. - The Washington Times - Updated: 7:17 p.m. on Sunday, October 23, 2016
Voter fraud has occurred in recent presidential elections, officials in key swing states say, yet its magnitude falls short of the type of systematic cheating that Donald Trump is prophesying. Ohio’s secretary of state discovered dozens of people who appeared to vote in two states or cast ballots as noncitizens in 2012. Pennsylvania recorded 28 fraud cases from 2000 to 2016, resulting in 17 convictions on charges such as voter impersonation and fraudulent use of absentee ballots.
In Wisconsin, officials said attempts to impersonate other voters are rare, though ex-felons sometimes manage to vote before their rights have been restored. Reid Magney, a spokesman at the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said the agency may get a couple of dozen of such cases out of 3 million votes cast.
Analysts said those kinds of irregularities, while serious, wouldn’t have swung the election in any of those states, each of which Barack Obama won by tens or hundreds of thousands of votes in both of his presidential races.
“I’m not aware of any widespread fraud in any of the key states in 2008 and 2012. Surely there was no fraud that actually made a difference to the outcome,” said Joshua A. Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky who teaches and researches election law.
Questions about whether rigging or fraud could sway an election made news after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump raised fears about it.
|