Voter fraud is not as rampant as Trump claims

As proof that voter fraud is real, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump quotes a report from the Pew Foundation.

“According to the highly-respected Pew, there are 24 million voter registrations in the United States that are either invalid or significantly inaccurate,” he said.

But the report does not claim that those 24 million committed fraud.

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And Mr. Trump always leaves out the very next line of that report, which says, “at least 51 million eligible U.S. citizens are unregistered,” and can’t vote at all. In other words, the report is saying the real problem is not people who vote more than once, but the huge number of people who should be voting, but can’t.

Now, voter fraud does exist as Republican Party Chair Reince Priebus reminded us on “Face The Nation.”

“The Milwaukee Police Department put out a 70-page report on election fraud in Milwaukee…,” he said.

I found the research he was talking about — it turns out that over a six-year period in Wisconsin, 21 people did indeed cast 25 illegal votes.

So yes, the are bad people casting illegal ballots.

But the good news is that they could be easily overwhelmed if just a tiny fraction of the good people who are not registered to vote would just cast legal ballots.

So the way to stop voter fraud is simple. Find an eligible, unregistered voter and get them registered. Because the best defense against a bad person with a ballot is a good person with a ballot.

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