The Politics of Voter Fraud Report

Here is the latest research regarding voter fraud. The report is entitled, "The Politics of Voter Fraud Report," and takes every argument and dissects the issue with a historical perspective and current statistical data. If you want to make an argument for or against voter fraud, or the need for voter ID, this would be a great primer. I've included a few paragraphs from that report here:

A review of hundreds of news reports on voter fraud appearing over a recent two year period found that with few exceptions, fraud allegations and cases reported in the press were limited to local electoral contests and individual acts, and fell into three basic categories:
1) unsubstantiated or false allegations of voter fraud made by the losers of close elections;18
2) mischief; and,
3) claims that later turn out to be based on cases of voter error or administrative mistakes, not fraud.

Examples of fraud as mischief:
A Ventura County, California woman was arrested and charged with voter fraud when her ex-husband noticed the names of two of their underage children on a list of registered voters in the March 2000 primary and turned her in. The woman was charged with fraudulently registering her 10- and 15-year old daughters, one of her daughter's friends, her ex-husband who was already registered, and a number of fictitious people.

The Late Nineteenth Century and the “Good Government” Defense.

The electoral reforms of the Progressive era dismantled Populist voting majorities and reflected the reformers’ class and anti-immigrant biases. Following the turmoil of the election of 1896 when new immigrants, struggling farmers, and wage workers flooded into the electorate, wealthy elites pressed for tighter regulation of the electoral process. They promoted personal voter registration systems that had the effect of de-mobilizing the poor and working classes.

The reformers’ rhetoric fastened on fraud and the need to eliminate it in order to protect ‘the Democracy.’ The perception of fraud and widespread electoral corruption gave their efforts moral ballast which obscured the class conflict at the center of the struggle for the vote.

For Progressive era elites, voter registration was good government and universal voting was directly associated with corruption and voter fraud. These reforms deliberately privatized and personalized the social act of voting in order to undercut the machine’s capacity to mobilize majorities through ethno-religious and other group-based appeals.

Pre-election news coverage in Wisconsin focused on three controversies: problems associated with some of the voter registration drives; a dispute between county and city officials over the number of ballots to be printed and provided to the city of Milwaukee; and a flap over thousands of alleged “bad addresses” on Milwaukee’s voter registration list. The climate of distrust made it difficult to see clerical mistakes, illegible handwriting, and workload problems leading to backlogged voter registration applications as human error or problems related to resource issues. Instead, foul-ups and mistakes were assumed to be evidence of fraud perpetrated by partisans trying to “steal elections.”

Election fraud is the real problem, the vote count, and should be the major focus. Voter fraud is the straw man, while the ballot counts are ignored or discounted.