Voter fraud

About

Voter fraud is when individual voters attempt to vote illegally in a way that might change the outcome of an election. It is extremely rare, and has never influenced the outcome of a major election. The Wall Street Journal defines it as "a term used to refer to cases in which one voter impersonates another at the poll to cast a fraudulent vote".

Despite this, conservoid politicians and propaganda outlets like to claim that it is rampant and wide-spread, as justification for draconian measures to restrict voting access and reduce voting among disempowered groups who are more likely to vote against them.

Of the few instances of actual voter fraud found, the overwhelming majority were committed by conservoids attempting to prove the existence of voter fraud.

Usage

The term is often used in a way that includes other types of electoral fraud, but this is incorrect. Voter fraud is electoral fraud that is committed specifically through an attempted act of illegal voting – especially where that vote would give the voter more electoral representation than that to which they are entitled, which most often involves voting more than once.

Notes

• Election/2012/US/president/Jim Turner: someone who claims to support Barack Obama votes multiple times (different districts) in order to "save our country from the world envisioned by Mitt Romney". He later claimed to be joking.

Links

• Wikipedia redirects to "electoral fraud", which covers other types of voting-related fraud as well, with emphasis on non-individual action
• Conservapedia "is the crime of a voter submitting a ballot he or she is not entitled to cast." This actually seems accurate. "...it has been estimated at 2,000 cases in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 elections combined. However, it is difficult to gauge the exact number, and many cases may go undiscovered or unreported. It can change the outcome of a close election." This, however, does not.
• RationalWiki "a moral panic weirdly popular in the United States. As genuine cases of voter fraud are almost non-existent, it is almost always a dog whistle term for people of color voting." This.
• SourceWatch "refers to attempts by either individual voters or voting-focused organizations to affect the outcome of an election by casting votes with fraudulent identities or misrepresenting eligibility to vote." The "or misrepresenting..." part of that is a different kind of electoral fraud.

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• 2021-11-15 Nevada Man Featured in GOP Ad on Voter Fraud Admits to Forging Dead Wife's Name on Ballot: Donald Kirk Hartle
• 2021-10-21 Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick paid out his first voter fraud bounty to a progressive poll worker in Pennsylvania who caught a Republican voting illegally