No one can generate enough fraudulent votes for a candidate to win by 6-10%. The actual number of proven fraudulent votes in the past was actually miniscule, I believe.
As it happens I had a mail on this today. Miniscule is still overemphasising the issue, from the sound of it... microscopic might be closer.
In an interview with Salon, Lori Minnite, a professor of political science at Barnard College who investigated allegations of widespread voter fraud, explained, "From 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty people were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once. That's 26 criminal voters -- voters who vote twice, impersonate other people, vote without being a resident ...
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana's draconian photo ID law that could disenfranchise as many as 400,000 voters, although Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita "conceded the state has never presented a case of 'voter impersonation.'" In his dissent, Justice David Souter compared Indiana's unjustified regulations to a poll tax, "because it correlates with no state interest so well as it does with the object of deterring poorer residents from exercising the franchise."
pr.thinkprogress.org
It's a partisan site, but well-linked.
One other interesting snippet:
In 2002, former attorney general John Ashcroft announced an initiative that required "all components of the Department" to "place a high priority on the investigation and prosecution of election fraud."...
As the Washington Post reported last year, "Nearly half the U.S. attorneys slated for removal by the administration last year were targets of Republican complaints that they were lax on voter fraud, including efforts by presidential adviser Karl Rove to encourage more prosecutions of election-law violations." |
