My latest column is on the SAVE Act fight. I remain skeptical that the bill is worth passing, much less that it is so valuable as to justify changing how the Senate passes laws. That said, when we are talking about state laws aiming to stop voting and election fraud, including voter ID laws, we should recall that fraud really does happen.

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No, it likely no longer happens on the notorious scale of the 1982 Illinois governor’s race, in which 100,000 fraudulent votes were cast by the Chicago Democratic machine, resulting in more than 60 federal convictions. Or when, “in 1984, Brooklyn’s Democratic district attorney, Elizabeth Holtzman, released a state grand-jury report on a successful 14-year conspiracy that cast thousands of fraudulent votes in local, state, and congressional elections.”

But not only do people still get charged and convicted every year for voting and election fraud — I collected some notorious cases in 2022, including a veteran Democratic operative in Philadelphia pleading guilty to federal charges of rigging fraudulent ballots that “made up 22%, 15%, and 17% of the votes” at his precinct — but fraud can tip very close elections. I noted in a lengthy 2014 roundup some elections that didn’t result in judicial overturnings, which I’ll reprint here. Recount mischief wasn’t the only problem in Florida in 2000:

One of the most comprehensive studies of the 2000 presidential election, “Democracy Held Hostage,” was conducted by the Miami Herald — it found that 400 votes were cast illegally in heavily Democratic Broward County when poll workers allowed voters to vote who were not on the precinct voting rolls. And another 452 were cast illegally by felons in Broward. In Volusia County — which supported Gore — 277 voters voted who were not registered, including 73 voters at predominately black Bethune-Cookman University, which voted heavily for Gore. The Herald review of votes in 22 counties (with 2.3 million ballots) found that 1,241 ballots were cast illegally by felons who had not received clemency. Of these voters, 75% were registered Democrats. And the Herald study counted only those who had been sentenced to prison for more than a year.

One of the most comprehensive........

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