Voter ID Prevents Election Fraud

Last night's (Tuesday) nail-biter in Iowa marked the beginning of election year 2012. And with Americans heading to the polls -- next in New Hampshire, then South Carolina and beyond -- they will hope to rely on the integrity of the election system to ensure that every legitimate vote counts and that fraud is not the deciding factor on the local, state or national level.


Unfortunately, despite all the technological advances in our modern democracy, voter fraud still occurs, and yet there is still resistance to one very simple tool that could help eradicate it -- voter ID. Some, like The New York Times, say that voting fraud is a myth, that "there is almost no voting fraud in America." But as Heritage senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky explains, voter fraud is all too common in America today:

The fraud denialists also must have missed the recent news coverage of the double voters in North Carolina and the fraudster in Tunica County, Miss. -- a member of the NAACP’s local executive committee -- who was sentenced in April to five years in prison for voting in the names of ten voters, including four who were deceased.

And the story of the former deputy chief of staff for Washington mayor Vincent Gray, who was forced to resign after news broke that she had voted illegally in the District of Columbia even though she was a Maryland resident. Perhaps they would like a copy of an order from a federal immigration court in Florida on a Cuban immigrant who came to the U.S. in April 2004 and promptly registered and voted in the November election.

Even former liberal Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens agrees. Stevens wrote in a 6-3 majority opinion upholding an Indiana voter ID law: "That flagrant examples of [voter] fraud...have been documented throughout this Nation's history by respected historians and journalists...demonstrate[s] that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election."

CONTINUED:http://blog.heritage.org/2012/01/04/morning-bell-voter-id-prevents-election-fraud/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell