The current toxic political atmosphere, in which one side is concerned about voter fraud and the other about voter disfranchisement, is largely the p… - John Fund

The Department of Justice prosecuted its largest voter fraud case ever in Chicago—prosecutors estimated that 100,000 fraudulent ballots were cast in the 1982 gubernatorial election. The conspirators came within five thousand votes of changing the race to the losing Democratic candidate, and a federal grand jury found that ‘similar fraudulent activities’ had occurred in prior elections. Ten of thousands of individuals had voted twice; thousands of other bogus votes had been cast in the name of individuals who were dead, in prison, or whose registered addresses were vacant lots. Absent voters were impersonated, voters’ signatures on ballot applications ‘had been forged wholesale in many precincts,’ and votes were fraudulently cast under fictitious voter registrations and in the names of transients, the incapacitated, and senior citizens.

In November 2000, voters in San Francisco and in Pulaski County, Arkansas, learned firsthand about the havoc that malfunctioning machines can bring. In one San Francisco polling place, 362 people signed in to vote, and 357 paper ballots were counted manually, but ES&S machines reported that 416 people had voted there. In Arkansas, nearly thirty voters reported that the machines cast their vote for the wrong candidate—after they pushed the button for their candidate of choice, another name popped up.

The [National Voter Registration Act of 1993] imposed an unfunded mandate on the states by requiring that anyone entering a government office to renew a driver’s license or apply for welfare or unemployment compensation would be offered the chance to register on the spot to vote. Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship. States also had to permit mail-in voter registration, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official. Finally, states were limited in pruning ‘deadwood’—people who had died, moved or been convicted of crimes—from their rolls. Now, people who didn’t vote would be kept on the registration rolls for at least eight years before anyone could remove them.