As election season continues to heat up, one issue that keeps popping up is about election fraud. A handful of states have or are pushing requirements to provide photo ID to vote, sparking allegations on both sides of vote manipulation. On the right, the claim is typically that voter fraud is allowing voting by people with no right to vote (including dogs and dead people to name only a few examples). On the right, the claim is that voter ID laws are part of a mass campaign of helping conservatives win elections through mass disenfranchisement. This article looks at all of these claims and finds that both are flawed. Voter fraud is rare, but at the same time, voter ID laws don't tend to discourage many likely voters from going to the polls. Regardless, these facts tend to be ignored in order to use the issue to drum up fundraising dollars. Moreover, even if voter restriction laws don't actually limit a great deal of voting, their very nature is still discriminatory based on the fact that they target specific groups of people that are often already disempowered.
"The Dog That Voted and Other Election Fraud Yarns" by Kevin Drum
Published in Mother Jones, July/August 2012
http://www.motherjones.com/print/178281
Eric
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