East Chicago
The News21 analysis shows 185 election fraud cases linked to campaign officials or politicians involving absentee or mail-in ballots.
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In 2003, for instance, the Indiana Supreme Court invalidated East Chicago Mayor Rob Pastrick’s Democratic primary victory because of widespread fraud. Pastrick, an eight-term incumbent, lost in a 2004 repeat election. Forty-six people, mainly city workers, were found guilty of committing absentee-ballot fraud by giving their ballots to someone else.
Some advocates of voter ID laws say voter fraud is used to steal federal elections.
In one of the few cases in the News21 database explicitly involving federal candidates, four Indiana Democratic Party officials were accused in 2008 of forging signatures on petitions to get Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton on the state primary ballot. No one was convicted.
The News21 analysis shows that 34 states had at least one case of registration fraud — an irregularity that occurred during the registration process, not when someone voted — and that many such cases were associated with third-party voter registration groups.
The solution, some say, is to enact new laws while also making it easier to vote.
Trey Grayson, a former Republican Kentucky secretary of state and now the director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, suggests that voter identification laws could be paired with Election Day registration.
“People who don’t get registered 30 days out could still come in and register on the day of the election,” he said. “And a voter ID, that could give you the confidence that this person really is who she says she is and allow her to vote.”
Grayson criticizes many opponents of voter identification laws, suggesting that their focus on voter suppression may have an adverse effect on turnout.
“One of the criticisms I would have of the attorney general and others who have made this a big deal,” he said, “is, by raising the issue and the way they are raising it, rather than trying to go around and get people IDs, sort of raising the specter of all this, they may also be suppressing the vote with their reaction to it.”
Grayson said there is potential to have comprehensive election reform without partisan politics.
“You could take ideas from the left and the right,” he said. “You could have a better system.”
Alex Remington of News 21 contributed to this report. News21 is a national investigative reporting project involving college journalism students across the country and based at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. News21 is funded by the Carnegie Corp. of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
For more detail about the data-gathering effort, including a state-by-state list of responsiveness and links to the documents the team received, and to explore the database itself, go to the Election Fraud Database. Learn more about the methodology behind the data here.
For the complete Voting Rights in America project, visit votingrights.news21.com.
More information on the voter ID laws investigation:
- Poll: Voter ID laws have support of a majority of Americans
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