Findings from an investigation in Ohio disprove claims that voter fraud is a “myth” or a fabrication resulting from Republican racism, as Democrats allege. According to an announcement from Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, “an investigation has uncovered that hundreds of non-US citizens are registered to vote in the state, and dozens of them voted illegally,” NBC News-Columbus reported Monday. “According to a release from Husted, 385 people who are not citizens of the United States are registered to vote in Ohio. Out of those, 82 voted in at least one election in the last year.”
And this is not the first time Husted’s office has found incidents of voting fraud. In 2013, his office uncovered nearly 300 non-citizens who had registered to vote in Ohio, with 17 having voted that year. In 2015, his office found another 145 registered, amongst whom 27 voted.
“I have a responsibility to preserve the integrity of Ohio’s elections system,” Secretary Husted said. “When you consider that in Ohio we have had 112 elections decided by one vote or tied in the last three years, every case of illegal voting must be taken seriously, and elections officials must have every resource available to them to respond accordingly.” (Emphasis added.)
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President Trump has raised questions over whether he did, in fact, lose the popular vote in the presidential election, claiming that three to five million people voted illegally. While there has yet to be proof of voting fraud on that scale, at least one study claims that Clinton received more than 800,000 votes from noncitizens. The investigation in Ohio raises further questions over the integrity of the vote.
It is for that reason that Husted is asking the Department of Homeland Security for access to additional information.
“If we had access to that information we could prevent this in advance and we could find out what the probably bigger number is of people who are on the voter rolls or who have voted and shouldn’t be,” he said.
The findings in the Ohio investigation are just the latest evidence that voter fraud is a very real concern.
Last year, just one month before the presidential election, Project Veritas released an undercover video in which a New York City Democratic election official detailed rampant voter fraud in the state.
In the video, Alan Schulkin, commissioner of the board of elections in New York City, admits that voter fraud is a real problem in New York, which has no voter ID laws. Schulkin said any efforts to hand out ID cards in lieu of driver’s licenses are “absurd” and can lead to “all types of fraud.”
In that same month, the Washington Free Beacon reported that there were over 1,000 illegal immigrants registered to vote in a small sample of eight Virginia counties, according to figures produced by the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
“Even in this small sample, when the voting history of this small sample of alien registrants is examined, nearly 200 verified ballots were cast before they were removed from the rolls,” the organization stated. “Each one of them is likely a felony.”
The group also found that from 2013 to 2015, 86 registrations were canceled in Philadelphia because they were found to be for non-citizens, though 40 of them had already voted in an at least one election.
In a 2013 survey by pollster John McLaughlin of over 800 Hispanic registered voters, 13 percent admitted they were not citizens of the United States.
A 2014 study based on survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election study estimated that 6.4 percent of noncitizens voted illegally in the 2008 presidential election, and 2.2 percent voted in the 2010 midterm elections.
In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the threat of voter fraud and upheld Indiana’s photo ID requirement as a legitimate, non-discriminatory means to prevent voter fraud.
The Pew Research Center found in 2012 that there were nearly 24 million active voter registrations in the United States found to be either invalid or inaccurate, and that almost two million dead Americans were still registered to vote. Meanwhile, 12 million voter records were found to have incorrect information, and another 2.75 million were found to have been registered in more than one state.
And still, despite these findings, any efforts to pass voter ID laws are met with contempt and accusations of racism, mostly by Democrats.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, claimed on MSNBC, “The thing that I worry about with this argument about voter fraud is it gives the Republicans and others another tool and another reason to justify to the public of denying people the right to vote.”
And Sen. Bernie Sanders, who challenged Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, asserted that voter fraud “barely exists,” and that the real problem is “voter suppression and the denial of voting rights,” which he claims is a result of voter ID laws.
Yet the data further disprove those claims, as well. A study of the 2010 and 2012 primaries and general elections by the University of California San Diego found that voter ID laws did not decrease minority turnout.
Furthermore, as observed by Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, “Black voter turnout in 2012 exceeded the rate of white voter turnout, even in the states with the strictest voter ID laws.”
Years ago, the Washington Examiner noted the absurdity of claims that producing an ID is too much of a burden for voters by listing 24 things that require an ID, including alcohol, cigarettes, food stamps, getting on an airplane, buying an “M” rated video game, and purchasing certain over-the-counter cold medications. And while many of these prohibitions are imposed by state governments, some are also imposed by the very federal government that has pushed to stop voter ID laws.
The question is not whether voter fraud is real, but whether Democrats actually pretend not to notice it since it tends to work in their favor.
