John Lott writes a column at National Review Online that challenges the popular left-of-center argument that voter fraud is virtually nonexistent.
[V]oter fraud has mattered in plenty of American elections. Take Lyndon Johnson’s election to the U.S. Senate in 1948, when LBJ won by manufacturing enough fake votes to turn a 20,000-vote deficit into an 87-vote win. Others point to voter fraud in Illinois and Texas during the 1960 presidential election; indeed, we may never know whether Kennedy actually “won.” Chicago was infamous for counting the votes of dead people. In 1982, U.S. Attorney Daniel Webb found that at least 100,000 fraudulent votes were cast. In 1994, Democrats obtained control of the Pennsylvania state Senate through large-scale voter fraud using absentee ballots. In 2008, illegal voting made a decisive difference in a U.S. Senate race, giving Al Franken a seat from Minnesota — one could argue that Franken’s vote allowed Obamacare to get through the Senate.
Make no mistake: Voter fraud is still a problem — even in the 2016 election cycle. Take these cases discovered during just the last month and a half:
- San Pedro, Calif.: Eighty-three absentee ballots were sent to different registered voters who all supposedly lived in the same small, two-bedroom apartment.
- Pennsylvania: FieldWorks LLC, a Democratic organization, was raided by Pennsylvania State Police for fraudulently filling out registration forms for thousands of voters.
- Indiana: State police “believe there could be hundreds of fraudulent voter registration records with different combinations of made up names and addresses with people’s real information.”
- Chicago: An investigation by CBS Channel 2 found people who had been registered to vote after their death — a total of 119 dead people who had voted 229 times.
- Virginia: In an examination of just eight out of the Commonwealth’s 133 counties and independent cities, 1,046 illegal aliens were discovered to have illegally registered to vote.