In 2001, the voter rolls in many American cities included more names than the U.S. Census listed as the total number of residents over age eighteen. … - John Fund

Some of the sloppiness that makes fraud and foul-ups in election counts possible seems to be built into the system by design. The National Voter Registration Act (‘Motor Voter Law’), the first law signed into law by President Clinton upon entering office, imposed fraud-friendly rules on the states by requiring driver’s license bureaus to register anyone applying for licenses, to offer mail-in registration with no identification needed, and to forbid government workers to challenge new registrants, while making it difficult to purge ‘deadwood’ voters (those who have died or moved away).

Unfortunately, the 2008 election was not an anomaly. In 2006, only 22 percent of nearly 2.6 million military voters cast ballots, compared to 41 percent of the general voting-age population. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that only 16.5 percent of an estimated six million eligible military and overseas civilian voters requested an absentee ballot, and only 5.5 percent of these ballots were returned and counted. Data from 24 states on the 2010 election shows that only 4.6 percent of eligible military voters cast an absentee ballot that was actually counted.

Some registration scandals have been comic. In Broward County, Florida, for example, an eight-year-old girl successfully registered to vote. The error would not have been caught if the girl hadn’t been called for jury duty, whereupon her mother called the election supervisors to report the mistake. More improbably, an elephant at the San Diego zoo was successfully registered to vote.