Though voter fraud rare, US election offices feature safeguards to catch it

IMPORTANT NOTICE: An external source produced this story. Sources provide us with insights and are an excellent resource for finding the truth and revealing community attitudes and opinions about events. Following this link opens a new browser tab and sends you to a website outside of Africa News Matters. We bear no responsibility for the link and its contents. https://www.voanews.com/a/though-voter-fraud-rare-us-election-offices-feature-safeguards-to-catch-it/7816733.html

https://gdb.voanews.com/8f568b4d-b369-4ac7-a831-fc5b9f62f8fd_w800_h450.jpg

NEW YORK — You’ve heard the hor­ror sto­ries: Some­one cast­ing mul­ti­ple bal­lots, peo­ple vot­ing in the name of dead rel­a­tives, mail-in bal­lots being intercepted. 

Vot­er fraud does hap­pen occa­sion­al­ly. When it does, we tend to hear a lot about it. It also gets caught and prosecuted. 

The nation’s mul­ti­lay­ered elec­tion process­es pro­vide many safe­guards that keep vot­er fraud gen­er­al­ly detectable and rare, accord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer elec­tion admin­is­tra­tors of both parties. 

Amer­i­ca’s elec­tions are decen­tral­ized, with thou­sands of inde­pen­dent vot­ing juris­dic­tions. That makes it vir­tu­al­ly impos­si­ble to pull off a large-scale vote-rig­ging oper­a­tion that could tip a pres­i­den­tial race — or almost any oth­er race. 

“You’re prob­a­bly not going to have a per­fect elec­tion sys­tem,” said Repub­li­can Trey Grayson, a for­mer Ken­tucky sec­re­tary of state and the advi­so­ry board chair of the Secure Elec­tions Project. “But if you’re look­ing for one that you should have con­fi­dence in, you should feel good about that here in America.” 

What’s stop­ping peo­ple from com­mit­ting vot­er fraud? 

Vot­ing more than once, tam­per­ing with bal­lots, lying about your res­i­dence to vote some­where else, or cast­ing some­one else’s bal­lot are crimes that can be pun­ished with hefty fines and prison time. Non‑U.S. cit­i­zens who break elec­tion laws can be deported. 

For any­one still moti­vat­ed to cheat, elec­tion sys­tems in the Unit­ed States are designed with mul­ti­ple lay­ers of pro­tec­tion and trans­paren­cy intend­ed to stand in the way. 

For in-per­son vot­ing, most states either require or request vot­ers pro­vide some sort of ID at the polls. Oth­ers require vot­ers to ver­i­fy who they are in anoth­er way, such as stat­ing their name and address, sign­ing a poll book or sign­ing an affidavit. 

Peo­ple who try to vote in the name of a recent­ly deceased friend or fam­i­ly mem­ber can be caught when elec­tion offi­cials update vot­er lists with death records and obit­u­ar­ies, said Gail Pel­lerin, a Demo­c­ra­t­ic in the Cal­i­for­nia Assem­bly who ran elec­tions in San­ta Cruz Coun­ty for more than 27 years. 

Those who try to imper­son­ate some­one else run the risk that some­one at the polls knows that per­son or that the per­son will lat­er try to cast their own bal­lot, she said. 

What pro­tec­tions exist for absen­tee voting? 

For absen­tee vot­ing, dif­fer­ent states have dif­fer­ent bal­lot ver­i­fi­ca­tion pro­to­cols. All states require a voter’s sig­na­ture. Many states have fur­ther pre­cau­tions, such as hav­ing bipar­ti­san teams com­pare the sig­na­ture with oth­er sig­na­tures on file, requir­ing the sig­na­ture to be nota­rized or requir­ing a wit­ness to sign. 

That means even if a bal­lot is erro­neous­ly sent to some­one’s past address and the cur­rent res­i­dent mails it in, there are checks to alert elec­tion work­ers to the foul play. 

A grow­ing num­ber of states offer online or text-based bal­lot track­ing tools as an extra lay­er of pro­tec­tion, allow­ing vot­ers to see when their bal­lot has been sent out, returned and counted. 

Fed­er­al law requires vot­er list main­te­nance, and elec­tion offi­cials do that through a vari­ety of meth­ods, from check­ing state and fed­er­al data­bas­es to col­lab­o­rat­ing with oth­er states to track vot­ers who have moved. 

Bal­lot drop box­es have secu­ri­ty pro­to­cols, too, said Tam­my Patrick, chief exec­u­tive offi­cer for pro­grams at the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Elec­tion Officials. 

She explained the box­es are often designed to stop hands from steal­ing bal­lots and are sur­veilled by cam­era, bolt­ed to the ground and con­struct­ed with fire-retar­dant cham­bers, so if some­one threw in a lit match, it would­n’t destroy the bal­lots inside. 

Some­times, alleged vot­er fraud isn’t what it seems 

After the 2020 elec­tion, social media surged with claims of dead peo­ple cast­ing bal­lots, dou­ble vot­ing or destroyed piles of bal­lots on the side of the road. 

For­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump pro­mot­ed and has con­tin­ued to ampli­fy these claims. But the vast major­i­ty of them were found to be untrue. 

An Asso­ci­at­ed Press inves­ti­ga­tion that explored every poten­tial case of vot­er fraud in the six bat­tle­ground states dis­put­ed by Trump found there were few­er than 475 out of mil­lions of votes cast. That was not near­ly enough to tip the out­come. Demo­c­rat Joe Biden won the six states by a com­bined 311,257 votes. 

The review also showed no col­lu­sion intend­ed to rig the vot­ing. Vir­tu­al­ly every case was based on an indi­vid­ual act­ing alone to cast addi­tion­al bal­lots. In one case, a man mis­tak­en­ly thought he could vote while on parole. In anoth­er, a woman was sus­pect­ed of send­ing in a bal­lot for her dead mother. 

For­mer elec­tion offi­cials say that even more often, alle­ga­tions of vot­er fraud turn out to result from a cler­i­cal error or a misunderstanding. 

Pel­lerin said she remem­bered when a polit­i­cal can­di­date in her coun­ty raised sus­pi­cion about many peo­ple being reg­is­tered to vote at the same address. It turned out the vot­ers were nuns who all lived in the same home. 

Patrick said that when she worked in elec­tions in Mari­co­pa Coun­ty, Ari­zona, mis­matched sig­na­tures were some­times explained by a bro­ken arm or a recent stroke. In oth­er cas­es, an elder­ly per­son tried to vote twice because they for­got they had already sub­mit­ted a mail ballot. 

“You real­ly have to think about the intent of the vot­er,” Patrick said. “It isn’t always intuitive.” 

Why vot­er fraud is unlike­ly to affect the pres­i­den­tial race 

It would be wrong to sug­gest that vot­er fraud nev­er happens. 

With mil­lions of votes cast in an elec­tion year, it’s almost guar­an­teed there will be a few cas­es of some­one try­ing to game the sys­tem. There also have been more insid­i­ous efforts, such as a vote-buy­ing scheme in 2006 in Kentucky. 

In that case, Grayson said, vot­ers com­plained, and an inves­ti­ga­tion ensued. Then par­tic­i­pants admit­ted what they had done. 

He said the exam­ple shows how impor­tant it is for elec­tion offi­cials to stay vig­i­lant and con­stant­ly improve secu­ri­ty in order to help vot­ers feel confident. 

But, he said, it would be hard to make any such scheme work on a larg­er scale. Fraud­sters would have to nav­i­gate oner­ous nuances in each coun­ty’s elec­tion sys­tem. They also would have to keep a large num­ber of peo­ple qui­et about a crime that could be caught at any moment by offi­cials or observers. 

“This decen­tral­ized nature of the elec­tions is itself a deter­rent,” Grayson said.