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Voter fraud aint what it used to be.

Left-wingers have been deliberately

dumbing down the definition for years.

In all my years as a journalist cover-

ing American politics, I have under-

stood that voter fraud, a phrase coined

by lawyers, was a blanket term that

refers to a host of election-related of-

fenses. Lawyers frequently make up

terms for specialty areas for exam-

ple, elder law, environmental law, pro-

bate law, and wrongful dismissal law.

Voter fraud, also known as vote fraud,

election fraud, and electoral fraud, re-

fers to the specific offenses of fraudu-

lent voting, impersonation, perjury,

voter registration fraud, forgery,

counterfeiting, bribery, destroying al-

ready cast ballots, and a multitude of

crimes related to the electoral process.

A quick internet search reveals a

comparable definition. One on-line reference site counsels:

Electoral fraud is illegal interference with theprocess of an election. Acts of fraud affectvote counts to bring about an election re-sult, whether by increasing the vote share ofthe favored candidate, depressing the voteshare of the rival candidates or both. Alsocalled voter fraud, the mechanisms involvedinclude illegal voter registration, intimida-tion at polls and improper vote counting.

Lawyers say that fraud is the most dif-

ficult crime to prove because show-ing that the act complained of actu-

ally happened is not enough. It must

be proven that the perpetrator had

intent to defraud. Like any fraud,

voter fraud is by its nature generally

very difficult to detect and prosecute.

Voter fraud in the form of actual

fraudulent balloting is especially hard

to demonstrate in court. A prosecutor

must prove beyond a reasonable doubtthat the person voted without having

the right to vote, used fraud (deception)

in the process, and intended to defraud

the victim (in this case, the public).

These facts can be hard to establish af-

ter the voter leaves the polling place.

For years now the left has been trying

to muddy the waters by applying a far

stricter definition of voter fraud, mov-

ing the semantic goalposts in order to

define the problem out of existence.

Fraudulent registrations, of course,

open the door to fraudulent voting,

something the left vehemently denies.

They deny it because the left depends

on voter fraud in order to get left-wing

candidates elected. This helps to ex-

plain why they bent over backwards

in recent years to defend ACORN,

the voter fraud empire that filed for

bankruptcy on Election Day 2010.

Left-wing activists and think-tanks

constantly churn out studies and reports

financed by George Soros, purporting

to prove that voter fraud is as unreal as

Cookie Monster. They claim that thoseon the right want to crack down on vot-

er fraud solely as a means of preventing

the poor and minorities from voting.

Nobody claimed that voter fraud

was a myth until the last couple

of years, my work colleague at

Capital Research Center, Dr. Ste-

ven J. Allen, J.D., Ph.D., told me.

As Allen, who grew up amidst

Alabamas dubious politics

many decades ago, observes:

Everyone in politics openly discussed voterfraud for hundreds of years of American his-tory. Politicians, political reporters, and ev-eryone involved in politics openly discussedhow widespread voter fraud was. Only whenRepublicans took over legislatures in statesthat had long been ruled by Democrats andwhere fraud was prevalent and began todo something about this problem did thismyth emerge that voter fraud was nonexis-

tent. Remember that the Voting Rights Actof 1965 was passed specifically to preventvoter fraud which was endemic back then.

As election law expert and New York

Times bestselling author J. Christian

Adams has explained, [l]iberal founda-

tions, public interest law firms and ad-

vocacy groups have created a permanent

network of experts and organizations

devoted to an arcane but critical task:

monopolizing the narrative on election

laws and procedures. Cloaking their ac-tions in the rhetoric of civil rights and

the right to vote, they seek to affect the

outcome of the election. They challenge

any effort to protect the integrity of the

ballot box by denying the possibility

of vote fraud and crying Jim Crow.

Lets look at some of the more promi-

nent voter fraud deniers on the left.

Ari Berman of the Nation describes

election fraud as an extremely rareoccurrence and argues that only il-

legal voting constitutes voter fraud.

When South Bend, Indiana prosecutors

charged local Democratic officials with

faking 22 petitions to get President

Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Ed-

wards on the 2008 Indiana ballot, Ber-

man dismissed the incident as insignifi-

cant. [T]heres no evidence that the

alleged forgeries played a decisive role

in getting the Democratic candidates

on the Indiana ballot in 2008 or de-

termining the outcome of the primary

or general election, Berman wrote.

This is the same line of reasoning ad-

opted by Congressman Jesse Jackson,Jr. (D-Ill.) after the names of sev-

eral Dallas Cowboys showed up on

voter rolls in Nevada in 2008. Ob-

viously its not right for a fake Tony

Romo to be registered in Las Vegas

but remember the basic point[:]

its not voter fraud unless someone

shows up at the voting booth on Elec-

tion Day and tries to pass himself off

as Tony Romo. How reassuring.

Adam Serwer ofMother Jones, writ-

ing in the Washington Post, agrees

with Berman that [v]oter fraud is a

virtually nonexistent problem and

blames conservatives for blurring

the distinction between voter regis-

tration fraud which is as easy as

filling out a registration form incor-

rectly and the actual act of casting

a fraudulent ballot. Oh, the irony.

Brentin Mock of Colorlines goes far-ther, denying the very existence of the

problem. Voter fraud as a thing has

been exposed by civil rights watch-

dogs and a wide range of journalists as

pure conspiracy theory, Mock writes.

Of course, all of this leftist rhetoric is

pure sophistry. Even if a person only

commits voter registration fraud, that

is a necessary step along the way to

fraudulent voting, and it should be

prosecuted in order to protect the integ-rity of the electoral system. Registra-

tion fraud is a gateway to fraudulent

balloting, and it must be prosecuted.

Police dont let a bank robber go free

because he forgot to load his gun.

No single group in American history

ever outdid ACORN in terms of voter

registration fraud. At least 52 indi-

viduals who worked for ACORN or

its affi

liates, or who were connected toACORN, have been convicted of voter

registration fraud. ACORN itself was

convicted in Nevada last year of the

crime of compensation. Under the

Voter Fraud RedefinedLeft-wingers have been dumbing down the definition for years.

By Matthew Vadum November 8, 2012

7/30/2019 Voter Fraud Redefined: Left-wingers have been dumbing down the definition for years, By Matthew Vadum (Ameri

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leadership of ACORN official Amy

Adele Busefink, who was also convicted

of the same crime, ACORN paid voter

registration canvassers cash bonuses for

exceeding their quotas. This is illegal

because it gives people an incentive to

commit fraud by adding Mickey Mouse

and Mary Poppins to the voter rolls.

Under Busefinks leadership, ACORN

and its affiliate Project Vote generated

an impressive 1.1 million voter reg-

istration packages across America in

2008. The problem was that election

officials invalidated 400,000 thats

36 percent of the registrations filed.

It is highly unlikely that typographic

and other innocent errors alone gen-

erated so much bogus paperwork.

And this is only one activist groups

fraudulent activities in one election.

It is irresponsible for law enforcement

officials to view those 400,000 regis-

trations as mere mistakes. All 400,000

bogus registrations should be presumed

to constitute individual attempts at

fraudulent voting that got caught early.

The hundreds of thousands of inci-

dents of voter fraud that occur during

every national election should be pros-

ecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Left-wingers and Democrats are

more likely than conservatives and

Republicans to commit voter fraud.

Sometimes they justify the behavior

on so-called social justice grounds.

Republican voters tend to be middle-

class and not easily induced to commit

fraud, while the pool of people who

appear to be available and more vulner-

able to an invitation to participate in votefraud tend to lean Democratic, accord-

ing to Larry Sabato and Glenn Simpson.

Some liberal activists that Sabato and

Simpson interviewed even partly justi-

fied fraudulent electoral behavior on the

grounds that because the poor and dis-

possessed have so little political clout,

extraordinary measures [for example,

stretching the absentee ballot or regis-

tration rules] are required to compen-

sate (Whos Counting, by John Fundand Hans von Spakovsky, pp. 8-9).

Should we not punish bad behavior

just because it is more likely to be

done by someone who is poor? The

left seems to suggest precisely that.

Even using the excruciatingly nar-

row definition the left prefers, in

which only fraudulent voting is con-

sidered voter fraud, there are plentyof instances of voter fraud. Here are

examples of fraudulent voting from

John Funds book, Stealing Elections:

Four Democratic officials and political

operatives in New York State pleaded

guilty a year ago to voter fraud-re-

lated felony charges. The prosecu-

tion said that signatures were forged

on absentee ballots which were then

cast. The phrase they use is: mak-

ing sure they vote the right way, a

source close to the case told reporters.

A Tunica, Mississippi jury sent Mis-

sissippi NAACP official Lessadolla

Sowers to prison for five years in

2011. She was convicted of voting

10 times using the names of other

people, some of whom were dead.

Colorado Secretary of State Scott

Gessler (R) unveiled a study last

year showing that almost 5,000 il-

legal aliens cast votes in the U.S.Senate election in that state in 2010.

A conservative watchdog group, Min-

nesota Majority, claims that felons

illegally cast votes may have put Al

Franken (D) over the top in the bitterly

contested Minnesota Senate race. The

group reported that at least 1,099 felons

voted in that 2008 election, which is far

larger than Frankensfinal, official, post-

recount margin of victory over then-

incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman (R).

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a police

department report found that in the

2004 election, as many as 5,300 more

ballots were cast than voters who

showed up at polling stations to vote.

This is not an exhaustive list.

But why do we have all this voter

fraud? The answer is the Nation-al Voter Registration Act* of 1993,

also known as the Motor Voter law.

As John Fund writes at pag-

es 27-8 of Stealing Elections:

Perhaps no piece of legislation in the lastgeneration better captures the incentiviz-ing of fraud than the 1993 National VoterRegistration Act[.] Examiners were underorders not to ask anyone for identificationor proof of citizenship. States also had topermit mail-in voter registrations, which al-

lowed anyone to register without any per-sonal contact with a registrar or electionofficial. Finally, states were limited in prun-ing dead wood people who had died,moved or been convicted of crimes fromtheir rolls. Since its implementation, Mo-tor Voter has worked in one sense: it has

fueled an explosion of phantom voters.

And who pushed Motor Voter?

Marxists Richard Cloward and Fran-

ces Fox Piven were instrumental in the

passage of the law by Congress. Theybelieved that poor people and radical

agitators had every moral right to game

the electoral system in order to bring

about change. Cloward didnt worry

about fraud, either. Its better to have

a little bit of fraud than to leave peo-

ple off the rolls who belong there, he

said. Bill Clinton gave a shout-out to

Cloward and Piven at the bill-signing

ceremony in 1993 that both attended.

Republicans knew that the measurewas a bad idea. On final passage,

the Senate vote was 62 to 36, with

only seven Republicans voting yea.

(None of the Republicans voting in

the affirmative remains in the Senate.)

The House vote was 259 to 164, with

only 20 Republicans voting yea.

Between 1994 and 1998, nearly 26

million names were added to the voter

rolls nationwide, almost a 20 percent in-crease, according to Fund. Motor Voter

has been registering illegal aliens, since

anyone who receives a government ben-

efit [including welfare] may also regis-

ter to vote with no questions asked.

In the end, whether vote fraud has

the power to affect electoral out-

comes is a separate question.

Although some claim voter fraud isa myth as common as unicorns and

Sasquatch and others insist fraud rou-

tinely affects election outcomes, [t]

he truth lies somewhere in between,

according to J. Christian Adams.

The truth is that voter fraud occurs

frequently, and it determines who

wins elections infrequently. He ar-

gues that the integrity of the elec-

toral process is perhaps more im-

portant than who wins and loses an

election. Lawlessness in elections cor-

rodes the entire democratic process.

A recognition that voter fraud ac-

tually exists and that it can con-

sist of something less serious than

fraudulent voting needs to be the

starting point in any informed dis-

cussion about electoral integrity.

Matthew Vadum is senior editor at

Capital Research Center in Washing-

ton, D.C. His book on ACORN and

President Obama, Subversion Inc.,

was published last year.

*A typo in the original version of

this article misidentified the relevant

statute. It has been corrected here.

The article is available online at

h t t p : / / w w w . a m e r i c a n t h i n k e r .

com/2012/11/voter_fraud_redefined.

html.