A survey of nearly all fifty states in the country revealed that voter fraud was virtually non-existent during the 2016 election.
Only Kansas refused to participate in the review, conducted by the New York Times, which showed that out of more than 137 million votes cast around the nation, there was very little evidence of significant fraud.
The results strike a blow to claims often repeated by President-elect Donald Trump and Republican policymakers that millions of people are voting illegally in our elections every year. Those charges have led to a slew of voting restrictions, including ID laws, which make it more difficult for minorities and other Democratic voters to cast their ballots.
The Times’ data showed that twenty-six states plus Washington, DC, found zero cases of voter fraud. In eight other states, officials said they were looking into only one allegation of illegal voting. A few other states, including Tennessee and Georgia, reported a couple dozen allegations of voter fraud—representing just a tiny fraction of the more than 4 million votes cast in each state respectively.
“The old notion that somehow there are all these impostors out there, people not eligible to vote that are voting — it’s a lie,” Thomas E. Mann, a resident scholar University of California’s Institute of Governmental Studies told the Times. “But it’s what’s being used in the states now to impose increased qualifications and restrictions on voting.”
The silence coming from the Sunflower state is telling, considering that its Secretary of State, Kris Kobach, has been one of the most outspoken officials fear mongering about individuals voting illegally.
Kobach went as far as setting up an interstate system known as CrossCheck to root out voter fraud. As journalist Greg Palast discovered, however, CrossCheck was intentionally miscalibrated, and ended up kicking more than 1 million innocent voters off the rolls in 27 states across the country, including in battlegrounds like Michigan, Arizona, and North Carolina.
In some of those states, including Michigan, the number of voters kicked off the rolls ahead of Election Day was greater than the margin of victory of Trump over Hillary Clinton.
Since winning the election, President-elect Trump has specifically charged that millions of non-US citizens voted illegally in last month’s election. But as the New York Times noted on Sunday, there’s only one current investigation underway into a non-citizen casting a ballot, which occurred in Tennessee—a state Trump won.
