Think Voter Fraud Is a Joke? Think Again

WASHINGTON -- You'd think with technological advances, it'd be easier than ever to make sure only those legally authorized to vote end up doing so. 

But former Federal Elections Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky found thousands of cases of illegaly cast ballots doing research for the book Who's Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk. 

Some of those were so serious, in fact, that people faced charges in court.

"We went through case after case after case of it two years ago," he said of his and co-author John Fund's research into voter fraud. "We've had recent reports everywhere from Pennsylvania to Mississippi of cases, of people being indicted."

Some folks cross state borders and vote more than once. Turns out it's not hard to be registered to vote in more than one place at the same time.

The group True the Vote found 6.9 million overlapping voter registrations in 28 states it studied. Virginia Voters Alliance found 44,000 people were registered to vote in both Virginia and next-door Maryland.

That raises the question -- could there be be enough fraudulent votes to influence the outcome of some of this year's extremely tight races, and maybe even determine control of the U.S. Senate?

Writing in a column for The Wall Street Journal called "Here Comes the 2014 Voter Fraud," von Spakovsky highlighted the fact that tens of thousands of non-citizens are casting illegal votes.

And as Election Day draws near, several races for Senate seats have become so tight, just a few hundred votes could decide the winner.

"Many of them are neck and neck in crucial places across the country," Spakovsky, now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said. "And so it's possible that non-citizens could decide who controls the United States Senate."

In North Carolina's super-tight Senate race in which Sen. Kay Hagan and her opponent Thom Tillis may be only hundreds of votes apart, experts estimate anywhere from 1,200 to almost 18,000 non-citizens may be voting.

And studies show enough non-citizens vote that they could have affected super-tight races in the past…like giving Barack Obama his extremely narrow win in North Carolina in 2008 and providing Minnesota's Al Franken the tiny 312-vote margin he needed to go to the Senate -- and become the 60th vote that gave Democrats a filibuster-proof majority just as they needed it to pass Obamacare.
 
Many Democrats, like North Carolina's Lara McKinnon, laugh off charges there's voter fraud in America.

"Voting fraud -- that's a total lie," she told CBN News at a recent rally for Sen. Hagan.

Progressives have fought states' clamping down on voter fraud, saying those usually Republican-led efforts are just a cover to keep racial minorities or the poor from the polls.

"It is your civic duty to go out and vote," McKinnon stated. "But it is something that they're trying to systematically take away and scare people about not being able to vote."

But experts like von Spakovsky say voter fraud is indeed real and that 80 percent of non-citizens who vote lean toward Democratic candidates.

Rigged Voting Machines?

Some people raise the possibility of other types of election fraud, for instance, making it so voting machines change people's votes.

Some machines in Maryland were recently changing early ballots cast for Republicans to votes for Democrats. An official brushed it off as "a calibration issue," but that's a claim hi-tech experts laugh off as ludicrous.

In Chicago, same thing: some early GOP votes suddenly turned Democrat. An Illinois official used almost the same excuse as the Maryland one, calling the problem "a calibration error."

Those who assume that so many millions of Americans decide elections that a few fraudulent votes won't matter should think again. Von Spakovsky gives Ohio as just one example of how tight elections can often be.

"Just this year alone, 2014, they've had more than a dozen races -- local races -- decided by one vote," Spakovsky told CBN News. "Last year in Ohio, they had 35 races decided by just one vote."

He went on to warn non-citizens that if they vote, they could end up behind bars.

"It's a felony under federal law," he said.  "And it's also illegal under the laws in all 50 states for state elections."