From Tom Paine
By Barbara Burt and Jonah Goldman

The scandal involving Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, some for alleged lack of vigor in pursuing voter fraud, provides us with a peek into the machinations of politicians who attempt to manipulate the election system for their own benefit. The rapidly unfolding facts highlight how unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud are used as a proxy for political decision-making designed to disenfranchise eligible Americans. It is a shame that some in the Justice Department, an agency with a noble history of defending the rights of all Americans to cast a ballot, are focusing instead on strategies to remove politically undesirable voters from the process.

Unfortunately, it is not just the Department of Justice that is taking advantage of this nefarious strategy. In the past few years, legislation requiring voters to show photo identification or even proof of citizenship has appeared on the docket in two-thirds of our state legislatures. Last year, the U.S. House passed a voter ID law, the justification for which was rampant voter fraud.

The problem is that there is no evidence that voter fraud affects our election outcomes. Do a few voters perpetrate fraud? Yes. But despite its insistence that voter fraud is enough of a problem to embroil otherwise high-performing United States attorneys in a scandal that may bring down the attorney general, the Department of Justice has convicted fewer than 100 people of voter fraud out of more than 275 million votes cast during the past five years.

The number of federal prosecutions is not the only evidence undermining the voter fraud argument. The case has been further weakened by various academic studies and reports. Most recently, Barnard College professor Lorraine Minnite explored the issue in her report, The Politics of Voter Fraud, published by ProjectVote. Minnite found that:

Most voter fraud allegations turn out to be something other than fraud. … Reports of voter fraud were most often limited to local races and individual acts and fell into three categories: unsubstantiated or false claims by the loser of a close race, mischief and administrative or voter error.

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