From a continuing  series of articles, Who Can Vote: a News21 investigation of voting rights in America. Read the previous article, Poll: Most favor Voter ID laws, but public awareness of their effect is low.

By Nick Andersen, Kassondra Cloos and Caitlin O’Donnell, News21

Raymond Rutherford has voted for decades. But this year, he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to cast a ballot.

The Sumter, S.C., resident, 59, has never had a government-issued photo ID because a midwife’s error listed him as Ramon Croskey on his birth certificate. It’s wrong on his Social Security card, too.

Rutherford has tried to find the time and money to correct his birth certificate as he waits to see if the photo voter ID law is upheld by a three-judge U.S. District Court panel, scheduled to convene in Washington, D.C., in late September.

In June, South Carolina officials indicated in federal court filings that they will quickly implement the law before the November election if it is upheld. Voters without photo ID by November would be able to sign an affidavit explaining why they could not get an ID in time.

An estimated 81,983 voters in South Carolina do not possess a government-issued photo ID, mainly because of missing or inaccurate personal documents. These are mostly elderly, black longtime residents.

South Carolina’s photo voter ID law is similar to a series of restrictive election measures passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures in states of the former Confederacy, including Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee and Virginia. North Carolina’s General Assembly failed to override Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue’s veto of a photo voter ID bill. 

Thirty-seven states have considered photo voter ID laws since 2010. In November, five states — Georgia, Indiana, Tennessee, Kansas and Pennsylvania — will vote under new strict photo voter ID laws. A judge soon could decide whether the Pennsylvania law violates the state constitution, as voting rights advocates claim.

Pa. judge refuses to block state's voter ID law

Supporters argue the laws are important protections against in-person voter impersonation fraud, but civil rights organizations and election historians see evidence of a more sinister legacy. Obtaining certificates of birth, marriage and divorce needed to get a proper photo ID can be an obstacle for otherwise eligible and longtime voters like Rutherford.

“Today, there are more laws restricting access to polls" than at the time of the "initial passage of the Voting Rights Act,” said J. Morgan Kousser, professor of history and social science at the California Institute of Technology and author of two books on race and voting rights in the South.

The Voting Rights Act requires local governments with a history of voting rights discrimination to get U.S. Department of Justice approval for changes to their election laws. The federal law faces a sustained legal challenge. Voting-rights supporters call those challenges an uncomfortable reminder of the poll taxes and literacy tests that prompted the law in the days of Jim Crow.

States such as Georgia and Indiana point to increased turnouts across all demographic categories in the 2008 election compared to elections immediately before the states passed photo voter ID laws.

Kousser said such comparisons are moot because of the unprecedented enthusiasm that Barack Obama generated among young and minority voters. A July 2012 National Urban League study showed that black voters tipped the election for Obama in North Carolina, Indiana, Virginia and Florida.

“People died for the right to vote — friends of mine, colleagues of mine,” Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., said in a May 9 House floor speech on an amendment to cut federal spending for Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The amendment was withdrawn.

Lewis was a pivotal figure in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. He was beaten severely on March 7, 1965, called Bloody Sunday for the attack by Alabama state troopers on about 600 voting rights marchers after they crossed the Edmund Pettus  Bridge in Selma, Ala., on the way to Montgomery. The attack on the nonviolent protesters was so brutal that historians credit the day with swaying votes in favor of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The fight today is in federal court. The state of Texas and the Department of Justice clashed over that state’s photo voter ID in U.S. District Court and it could go to the Supreme Court. In another case, an Alabama county attorney said he would take his legal challenge of the Voting Rights Act to the highest court possible.

A July report from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, a public policy group that opposed many of the voting rule changes nationally, estimated that more than 10 million eligible voters nationwide live more than 10 miles from a state center that issues IDs.

Seven of the 10 states with photo voter ID are among the lowest-ranked states for public transportation funding. ID centers in many Southern states have limited or reduced hours in rural counties with high concentrations of minority residents.

“I reckon it’s like back during the days when they were slaves and couldn’t do nothing unless their masters signed for it,” Rutherford said. “They didn’t have proof what their name was, they took whatever name their masters gave them. It seems to me they’re trying to send us years back where they can control who we vote for.”

The tide of Southern election changes began in Georgia in 2005. Former state Rep. Sue Burmeister, a Republican, introduced a photo voter ID bill that quickly became the target of Democratic attacks and lawsuits.

“It was never my intent to try to make it harder for people to vote,” Burmeister said in an interview. She had heard stories of fraud in the state from members of both political parties, she said.

“I just grew up believing that it was very important that all people voted,” she said. “Yet, I didn’t want people voting two or three times to take away the votes.”

Gov. Sonny Perdue signed the bill into law in January 2006. Georgia, which falls under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, adopted changes to the law intended to avoid getting blocked by the Justice Department. Free voter identification cards and an expansive voter education program were among the changes Georgia lawmakers used to win the approval called preclearance. The state increased election education funds from $50,000 to $500,000 in 2008, when the law first took effect, according to the secretary of state’s budget.

The Georgia law was cleared by President George W. Bush’s Justice Department.

News21 is a program of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation that is helping to change the way journalism is taught in the U.S. and train a new generation of journalists capable of reshaping the news industry. It is headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Since 2006, nearly 500 top journalism students in the U.S. have participated in the landmark national initiative.

South Carolina’s 2011 photo voter ID law became the first election law to be blocked in nearly 20 years. The Texas law also was blocked by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department. Hans von Spakovsky, the former Bush Justice Department lawyer who approved Georgia’s law, has become a leading advocate for photo voter ID laws.

“These are laws to protect voters,” said Matt Carrothers, media relations director for the Georgia secretary of state. And voters largely agree. A March 2012 Elon University poll of 534 people showed that nearly 75 percent of North Carolina residents supported the state’s photo voter ID bill.

North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Pat McCrory  has campaigned on photo voter ID. He pledged to enact the failed legislation as a part of his administration.

“The polling is so strong on that issue that it’s easy to build some support when you note that in a long list of issues,” said John Dinan, a political scientist at Wake Forest University. “If you’re in support of voting rights and upset that your party has blocked it, you might look at McCrory.”

Sid Bedingfield, a journalism professor at the University of South Carolina, said the South’s changing demographics tell a different story.

“There is certainly something to be gained from those in power now, especially in states with Republican legislatures, in trying to limit turnout from certain demographic groups,” Bedingfield said.

Most of the states in the South have been sure Republican bets in presidential races since President Richard Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ in the 1972 election. State and local races have been more mixed. The 2010 election placed North Carolina and Alabama legislatures under Republican control for the first time since Reconstruction. Political party caucus shifts moved Louisiana’s House of Representatives to Republican control.

Bedingfield said photo voter ID laws are an attempt to solidify that power shift for years to come in view of an increase in black and Hispanic voters who traditionally vote for the Democratic Party.

“In the long-term, it’s a dead-end strategy that will only cement Democratic Party support among these new groups and create a winning coalition,” Bedingfield said.

Republicans are painting themselves as anti-minority through photo ID laws and demands for citizenship proof to vote, Bedingfield said. That will push even more minorities into the Democratic Party.

Minority voters in the South face additional hurdles this election year.

An extensive purge of suspected ineligible voters that disproportionately targeted minorities in Florida was halted by the Justice Department in June, and a nonpartisan investigator will be appointed to determine why thousands of voters were removed from voting rolls in Tennessee earlier this year.

Florida cut its early voting hours almost in half to save money, state officials said. The state also eliminated early voting on the Sunday before Election Day in November, what had become known as “Souls to the Polls” for the large number of black voters who went straight from church services to vote.

In North Carolina, the Republican-controlled General Assembly used the 2010 congressional and state legislative redistricting process to create controversial minority-majority districts that concentrate black voting power in a reduced number of legislative seats.

“They stacked and packed and bleached black voters out of districts for strictly partisan reasons,” said the Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Courts have intervened 24 times in the last 30 years to alter North Carolina redistricting plans, and new lines this year divided hundreds of voting precincts into different districts. This means that neighbors voting in the same precinct may have different people running on their ballots for state and federal races. In some precincts, there were 30 or more different ballots offered during the May 8 primary.

“One precinct in Wake County has more than 17 different kinds of ballots,” said Carol Hazard, a precinct judge in Orange County, N.C., which includes Chapel Hill.

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp and his office have worked to show opponents that targeted demographic suppression is more talk than reality. According to state records, the 2008 election saw Hispanic turnout increase by 140 percent and black voter turnout up 42 percent over 2004.

“These claims that our law is ‘akin to Jim Crow,’ that there is not voter fraud — these are disgustingly racist claims,” said Carrothers, Kemp’s spokesman.

Kemp has promoted the bill to other Southern states. Carrothers is in regular contact with the secretary of state’s office in Tennessee, he said, where a similar photo voter ID law took effect in January.

Tennessee, which is not subject to Section 5 preclearance, has followed a different path to photo voter ID.

Tennessee state Rep. JoAnne Favors already has heard from several voters who don’t have photo ID. The two-term Chattanooga Democrat, who is black, strongly opposed the bill, which could prevent residents — including Favors’ elderly mother — from voting because they lack a birth certificate or government-issued photo ID.

“Most of the people who began to call me when the law was first enacted were elderly white women,” Favors said. “I think that might cause concern for some of the people who did support that bill. They might not realize what they’ve done.”

A report from the Durham, N.C., Institute for Southern Studies — a nonprofit research group for activists, scholars and policy makers — estimates that more than 380,000 Tennessee residents lack the photo ID required in the law. Many of them are elderly voters who have opted for an older, separate state law allowing residents older than 60 to get driver’s licenses without photos.

Legislators passed that law out of concern for “frail” elderly voters unable to easily renew their driver’s licenses. But the photo voter ID law, which permitted “no questions asked” absentee ballots for voters aged 65 and older, left Tennessee voters between 60 and 65 disadvantaged. The “no question” absentee age was lowered to 60 after the state’s March 6 presidential primary.

“What I’m really concerned about are those folks that don’t ask or don’t call and you don’t know where they are,” said Madeleine C. Taylor, executive director of the NAACP in Memphis. “They just say, ‘Well, hey, I’m not going to all the trouble. I’m not going to vote.’”

Unless Favors and other Democratic activists in Tennessee can prove that voters are facing insurmountable difficulties at the ballot box in November, the state’s law will go unchallenged. This frustrates lawyers such as George Barrett of Nashville. He has worked with the American Civil Liberties Union on civil rights cases. Identifying plaintiffs has been nearly impossible, he said.

“It’s more difficult if you’re not under the Voting Rights Act,” Barrett said. “You’ve almost got a prima facie case if you’re under the Voting Rights Act.”

Hedy Weinberg, executive director of the Tennessee ACLU, said this difficulty stems from the photo ID law’s “chilling effect.” Many people shy away from voting or trying to get an ID because they presume they do not have the correct documents.

“Just because we can’t present the individual to you, doesn’t mean there isn’t a pretty serious problem taking place,” Weinberg said.

Opponents of photo ID warn of potentially hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised voters. Supporters allege there’s a great potential for voter impersonation.

Both Carrothers and Kemp in Georgia said that they were surprised to see so few free photo voter ID card applications — 26,506 as of February.

“When the bill passed, opponents said there were hundreds of thousands of citizens who would be unable to vote,” Carrothers said. “Opponents of photo ID keep changing the way they oppose the law, and now they know they can’t oppose the law in Georgia by claiming ‘disenfranchisement.’”

Those legal and public challenges to voter ID laws might be less frequent very soon if lawsuits against the Voting Rights Act in Alabama and Texas go to the Supreme Court.

Frank Ellis Jr., attorney for Shelby County, outside of Birmingham, Ala., has said that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is outdated and unconstitutional. Although local demographics in many of the municipalities named in the Voting Rights Act have changed in the nearly 50 years since the law passed, few adjustments have been made to Section 5 preclearance.

“To require governments to spend tens of millions of dollars — local governments that need that money for other purposes, for education, for police protection, for facilities and infrastructure — it’s archaic and out of date,” Ellis said.

Brenda Williams, a physician and civil rights activist in Sumter, S.C., has spent thousands of dollars helping more than 100 local voters prepare for the photo ID law.

For the majority of voters who do not have photo ID, applying means they must pay for required personal documents.

Khara Persad/News21

Danita Agee, 53, secures a banner at a voter registration drive in Pratt City, Ala. She handed out flyers: "Democrats! Go get your I.D. to vote. Start working on that right now. The Republicans are using every trick they can to keep Democrats from voting."

Donna Dubose, 63, was delivered at home by a midwife who recorded her name as Baby Girl Kennedy. She attended college for three years, aided by federal grants. Although financial strains prevented her from graduating, Dubose was trained as a nurse’s aide and retired about a decade ago.

“My life wasn’t a pleasant road,” Dubose said. “But in my mind all I wanted to do was take care of people.”

With the help of Williams and attorney Murrell Smith, a Republican state representative who voted in favor of photo voter ID, Dubose obtained a corrected birth certificate and a government-issued photo ID.

Williams is now helping Dubose’s husband, James, who lost his personal documents when his childhood home burned. James Dubose, a former railroad worker who is illiterate, has voted for the majority of his life and said he has never been asked to show a photo ID at the polls.

“It makes me really frustrated to not be able to vote all of a sudden,” James Dubose, 75, said.

Williams has been registering voters with her husband, Joe, for the 30 years she has owned the Excelsior Medical Clinic. Many elderly, rural voters in and around Sumter do not have access to photo ID, Williams said. The majority of these voters were born at a time when hospitals refused black patients and babies were delivered at home, and their births were not recorded accurately.

“I know scores of people who have never had government-issued photo identification,” Williams said. “They’re not criminals, never broken any laws, never been incarcerated. They don’t have photo ID because of rules made years, decades ago.”

Williams carries an NAACP membership card issued for $2 to her father, Frederick Chapman, in 1961. A message printed on the back, part of the association’s mission, is particularly close to her heart: “To secure a free ballot for every qualified American citizen.”

Half a century later, Williams said she is still willing to fight for that right.

“It’s so frustrating trying to help poor people, people who are indigent, people who have low self-esteem, people who have a low sense of self-worth,” she said. “The majority of our society and nation couldn’t care less about poor folk.”

Raymond Rutherford, a Sumter, S.C., said he has let checks go uncashed because he didn’t have a photo ID. With Williams’ help, the Sumter, S.C., Walmart store employee, isn’t waiting for courts and legislatures to agree on the legality of photo voter ID.

“As a citizen, I think everyone should vote,” Rutherford said. “If you don’t get out there and vote, who’s going to talk for you? We can’t talk for ourselves because nobody is going to listen, so we have to put someone there to help us.”

Discuss this series of stories on the Facebook page for Open Channel, the NBC News investigative blog.

Or send feedback to News21.

From a continuing  series of articles, Who Can Vote: a News21 investigation of voting rights in America. Read the previous article, New database of US voter fraud finds no evidence that photo ID laws are needed.

By Jack Fitzpatrick and Khara Persad
News21

Despite widespread support for voter IDs, polling experts say the public is poorly informed about the controversial laws and their potential impact on the November presidential election.

A new Washington Post poll found that 74 percent of respondents strongly agreed or somewhat agreed that voters should be required to show a government-issued ID when voting.

However, 51 percent of the randomly selected 2,047 adults surveyed nationally between July 18 and 29 said they had either heard not much or nothing at all about voter ID laws.

“From a public awareness standpoint, it’s pretty low awareness,” said Jon Cohen, The Post’s director of polling. “We’re talking about under half of all American adults who have even heard something of this raging controversy.”

In 2011-12, lawmakers proposed 62 photo-ID bills in 37 states, with multiple bills introduced in some states. Ten states have passed strict photo ID laws since 2008, though several may not be in effect in November because of legal challenges.

Polling expert Phil Meyer, professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said he agrees that the public is not familiar with voter-ID laws, and that how poll questions are worded could determine responses.

When a recent University of Delaware poll, for instance, presented laws as a way to stop voter fraud, there was more support than when the same measures were described as a possible form of discrimination.

University of Delaware political science professor David Wilson, who conducted that national survey from May 20 to June 6, said it showed the 906 randomly selected respondents weren’t familiar with the debate over voter IDs.

Wilson said most people haven’t heard as much about disenfranchisement as they have about alleged voter fraud because the media does not report on voter disenfranchisement.

“Until they see specific media accounts of how these things can disenfranchise voters, people won’t know much about that argument,” Wilson said.

A racial gap
In the Washington Post poll, there was a sizable gap between whites, who were more concerned about the voter fraud that ID laws are supposed to prevent, and blacks, who were more concerned about the disenfranchisement that such laws could cause.

Cohen said these results show a stark racial divide that lines up with partisan divisions based on the questions asked.

News21 is a program of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation that is helping to change the way journalism is taught in the U.S. and train a new generation of journalists capable of reshaping the news industry. It is headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Since 2006, nearly 500 top journalism students in the U.S. have participated in the landmark national initiative.

The Post found that 52 percent of whites were more concerned about voter fraud, compared with 26 percent of blacks; 67 percent of blacks cited more concern about voter disenfranchisement, compared with 40 percent of whites.

Meyer said the public is generally confused about the basic argument for voter-ID laws, which is that they would prevent voter fraud. Advocates for the laws, overwhelmingly Republican and conservative, cite fraud repeatedly, but have offered virtually no evidence to support this claim.

“Voter fraud, if you haven’t thought about it, sounds bad,” said Meyer, a veteran journalist and expert in computer-assisted reporting. “But if you do" think about it, "the probability of a vote being fraudulent, it’s less than your chance of being struck by lightning.”

The Post poll also found a significant partisan divide among racial groups when asked the same fraud versus disenfranchisement question.

“There are two good things at stake,” Cohen said. “People want all eligible voters to vote, and people want no fraud.”

“Concern” for voter fraud was more important among Republicans than Democrats, with 67 percent compared with 32 percent, respectively.

However, 62 percent of Democrats showed more concern for disenfranchisement, compared with 27 percent of Republicans.

Additionally, 59 percent of blacks and 41 percent of whites said support of voter-ID laws is an effort to boost one party by a good amount or a great deal.

Democrats and civil-rights groups say the ID laws are unnecessary and will disenfranchise eligible voters, especially minority groups, adding heat to an already charged partisan debate.

Every state legislature that has enacted a voter-ID law — except Rhode Island’s — was controlled by Republicans when its law was passed.

Bipartisan support
The Post poll shows broad support for ID laws despite party affiliation, with support from 88 percent of Republicans and 60 percent of Democrats.

Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, which opposes strict voter-ID laws, is concerned that polling on the issue misses many of the people most likely to be impacted.

“The people who don’t have ID are less likely to be captured by telephone polls,” she said. “They’re less likely to be people who answer telephone polls and less likely to have landlines.”

Weiser and Wilson say that many people supporting voter ID trust the government to apply the laws fairly.

“People are giving those who are pushing these laws the benefit of the doubt, because there must be a good reason for it,” Wilson said.

According to The Post poll, 48 percent of those surveyed say they believe voter fraud is a major problem; 57 percent of Republicans responded that way.

Wilson’s University of Delaware study found that the laws enjoy more support among those who had high levels of “racial resentment” when answering questions about African Americans receiving “special considerations.”

Racial resentment
For example, Wilson said that those surveyed were more likely to support voter-ID laws if they agreed with the statement, “African Americans bring up race only when they need to make an excuse for their failure.”

The poll found that 34 percent of all respondents strongly agreed or somewhat agreed with that statement.

Wilson said the “racial resentment” response represented an attitude about who deserves the right to vote. “It’s racialized about who might be getting what in society, and deserving it,” he said.

According to Wilson, people who showed high levels of racial resentment probably believe that a “real American” doesn’t have trouble getting an ID, doesn’t need help from the government and doesn’t complain.

“It’s about the identity that Americans have … It’s about working and not complaining — not asking for special favors like Spanish-speaking forms, or having to be politically correct in public conversations,” he said.

Wilson said the lack of knowledge about the laws, along with the racial issues involved, show that many supporters of voter ID cannot see things from the perspective of disenfranchised voters.

“They tend to not be in the position of those who are disenfranchised,” he said. “It’s not 40 or 50 percent of the public — it’s people at the margins. But the margins make a difference in elections.”

Wilson said it is not surprising that Republicans have higher levels of racial resentment and stronger support for voter-ID laws.

“You have to think about the parties that are involved. The Republican Party is much more homogeneous than the Democratic Party,” he said.

Democrats have criticized the laws for having a disproportionate effect on minorities. That, in turn, could mean a drop in turnout, which would hurt Democratic candidates.

Nate Silver, a statistician who writes the FiveThirtyEight election and political blog for the New York Times, raised the stakes in the voter-ID debate in July, when he wrote about the possible impact of the laws on the presidential election.

After Pennsylvania’s strict ID law was passed in March, the Pennsylvania Department of State estimated that 758,939 — or 9 percent — of the state’s registered voters lacked driver’s licenses, and could be ineligible to vote under the new law.

Silver however, was more conservative in his analysis of likely impact. He said he expects Pennsylvania’s new voter-ID law to cause a 2.4 percent drop in turnout and said this would shift 1.2 percent of the vote to the Republican candidate in a traditionally Democratic state.

In a close election, Silver said, the voter-ID law could help likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney beat President Barack Obama in Pennsylvania.

Dispute over effect of disenfranchisement
Silver said that estimates of potential voter disenfranchisement by civil-rights groups are inflated.

“People seize on the most dramatic number without necessarily telling the whole story,” he told News21.

Pennsylvania is not the only state which has had high estimates of potential disenfranchisement.

In a lawsuit over the Texas law, Harvard political science professor Stephen Ansolabehere testified that 1.5 million to 1.9 million voters do not have the state-issued ID required under the law, an estimate lawyers for Texas called flawed.

The Texas voter-ID law was blocked by the Department of Justice under the Voting Rights Act, and the state has sued to enforce the law.

Rulings in the Pennsylvania and Texas cases are expected in August.

Jack Fitzpatrick and Khara Persad were Hearst Foundations fellows this summer for News21.

Discuss this series of stories on the Facebook page for Open Channel, the NBC News investigative blog.

Or send feedback to News21.

First of a series of articles, Who Can Vote: a News21 investigation of voting rights in America

By Natasha Khan and Corbin Carson, News21
A new nationwide analysis of 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases since 2000 shows that while fraud has occurred, the rate is infinitesimal, and in-person voter impersonation on Election Day, which prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider tough voter ID laws, is virtually non-existent.

In an exhaustive public records search, reporters from the investigative reporting projecdt News21 sent thousands of requests to elections officers in all 50 states, asking for every case of fraudulent activity including registration fraud, absentee ballot fraud, vote buying, false election counts, campaign fraud, casting an ineligible vote, voting twice, voter impersonation fraud and intimidation.

Click to search the national database of voter fraud cases compiled by News21.

Analysis of the resulting comprehensive News21 election fraud database turned up 10 cases of voter impersonation. With 146 million registered voters in the United States during that time, those 10 cases represent one out of about every 15 million prospective voters.

“Voter fraud at the polls is an insignificant aspect of American elections,” said elections expert David Schultz, professor of public policy at Hamline University School of Business in St. Paul, Minn.

“There is absolutely no evidence," Schultz said, that voter impersonation fraud "has affected the outcome of any election in the United States, at least any recent election in the United States."

The News21 analysis of its election fraud database shows:

• In-person voter-impersonation fraud is rare. The database shows 207 cases of other types of fraud for every case of voter impersonation. “The fraud that matters is the fraud that is organized. That's why voter impersonation is practically non-existent because it is difficult to do and it is difficult to pull people into conspiracies to do it,” said Lorraine Minnite, professor of public policy and administration at Rutgers University.
• There is more fraud in absentee ballots and voter registration than any other categories. The analysis shows 491 cases of absentee ballot fraud and 400 cases of registration fraud. A required photo ID at the polls would not have prevented these cases. “The one issue I think is potentially important, though more or less ignored, is the overuse of absentee balloting, which provides far more opportunity for fraud and intimidation than on-site voter fraud,” said Daniel Lowenstein, a UCLA School of Law professor.
• Of reported election-fraud allegations in the database whose resolution could be determined, 46 percent resulted in acquittals, dropped charges or decisions not to bring charges. Minnite says prosecutions are rare. “You have to be able to show that people knew what they were doing and they knew it was wrong and they did it anyway,” she said. “It may be in the end" that prosecutors "can't really show that the people who have cast technically illegal ballots did it on purpose.”
• Felons or noncitizens sometimes register to vote or cast votes because they are confused about their eligibility. The database shows 74 cases of felons voting and 56 cases of noncitizens voting.
• Voters make a lot of mistakes, from accidentally voting twice to voting in the wrong precinct.
• Election officials make a lot mistakes, from clerical errors — giving voters ballots when they’ve already voted — to election workers confused about voters’ eligibility requirements.

“I don't think there is a mature democracy that has as bad of an elections system as we do,” said Richard Hasen, a professor of political science and election law expert at the University of California, Irvine. “We have thousands of electoral jurisdictions, we have non-professionals running our elections, we have partisans running our elections, we have lack of uniformity.”

Read more here about how the survey of states was conducted.

Voter-impersonation fraud has attracted intense attention in recent years as conservatives and Republicans argue that strict voter ID laws are needed to prevent widespread fraud.

The case has been made repeatedly by the Republican National Lawyers Association, one of whose missions is to advance “open, fair and honest elections.” It has compiled a list of 375 election fraud cases, based mostly onnews reports of alleged fraud.

News21 examined the RNLA cases in the database and found only 77 were alleged fraud by voters. Of those, News21 could verify convictions or guilty pleas in only 33 cases. The database shows no RNLA cases of voter-impersonation fraud.

Civil-rights and voting-rights activists condemn the ID laws as a way of disenfranchising minorities, students, senior citizens and the disabled.

In a video that went viral in June, Republican Mike Turzai, Pennsylvania’s House majority leader, spoke approvingly at a Republican State Committee meeting of the state’s new voter ID law "which is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania — done."

His spokesman said Turzai meant that Pennsylvania’s election would be fair and free of fraud because of the new ID law. Democrats, however, said Turzai meant the law, signed in March, would suppress Democratic votes.

According to Pennsylvania’s Department of State and the Department of Transportation, as many as 758,000 people, about 9 percent of the state’s 8.2 million registered voters currently don’t have the identification that now will be required at the polling place.

Even if 90 percent of those voters got the correct identification by Nov. 6, that still could leave 75,800 voters disenfranchised. 

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether the ID law violates the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act by discriminating against minorities, according to a July 23 letter to Pennsylvania Secretary of State Carol Aichele.

A coalition of civil-rights groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union has sued Pennsylvania in state court, arguing the voter ID law would deprive citizens of their right to vote. The trial began July 25.

In a pretrial document released by the ACLU, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, represented by the state Attorney General’s Office, could not identify any cases of voter impersonation at the polls.

The state said it would offer no evidence that “in-person voter fraud has in fact occurred in Pennsylvania or elsewhere” or that “in-person voter fraud is likely to occur in November 2012 in the absence of a photo ID law.”

Pennsylvania officials, who responded to the News21 public record requests, also reported no cases of Election Day voter-impersonation fraud since 2000.

“This law is a solution solving a problem that does not exist,” Democratic state Sen. Vincent Hughes told an Aug. 1 teleconference hosted by New America Media, a group representing the ethnic media.  Hughes called the law partisan and, echoing Turzai, said its purpose is “to elect Mitt Romney.”

News21 is a program of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation that is helping to change the way journalism is taught in the U.S. and train a new generation of journalists capable of reshaping the news industry. It is headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Since 2006, nearly 500 top journalism students in the U.S. have participated in the landmark national initiative.

The News21 database shows one of the rare instances of voter-impersonation fraud occurred in Londonderry, N. H., in 2004 when 17-year-old Mark Lacasse used his father’s name to vote for George W. Bush in the Republican presidential primary. The case was dismissed after Lacasse performed community service.

The database shows the nine other voter impersonation cases were in Alabama, California, Colorado, Kansas and Texas. All were isolated and showed no coordinated efforts to change election results.

Republican-dominated legislatures — with the exception of Rhode Island where Democrats passed a photo ID law — have considered 62 ID bills since 2010.

Nine states — South Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama — passed strict voter ID laws.

Only the Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Kansas measures are likely to be in effect in November. The Pennsylvania law has been challenged in state court.

Rhode Island’s more lenient law will take effect in 2014. Indiana and Georgia were the first states to pass strict voter-ID laws, enacted in 2007 and 2008, respectively. Few laws regulate absentee ballots, although the News21 analysis shows this is one of the most frequent instances of fraud.

“It makes much more sense if you are trying to steal an election by either manipulating results on the back end through election official misconduct or to use absentee ballots which are easier to control and to maintain,” said Hasen, the UC, Irvine, professor of political science.

The News21 analysis shows 185 election fraud cases linked to campaign officials or politicians involving absentee or mail-in ballots.

In 2003, the Indiana Supreme Court invalidated East Chicago Democratic Mayor Rob Pastrick’s primary victory because of massive fraud. Pastrick, an eight-term incumbent, lost in a 2004 repeat election.

Forty-six people, mainly city workers, were found guilty in a wide-ranging conspiracy to purchase votes through the use of absentee ballots.

John Fortier, a political scientist at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank, said there are “more direct problems” with absentee ballots because the person casting the ballot can be pressured or coerced.

Keesha Gaskins, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, a public policy group that opposed many of the voting-law changes nationally, recognizes that absentee-ballot fraud occurs more than other election fraud, but still doesn’t consider it a threat.

“There are more concerns in terms of absentee fraud but, again, it is easier to catch,” she said.

Minnite, the Rutgers University professor who researched election fraud from 2006-2010 for her book, “The Myth of Voter Fraud,” agrees with Gaskins.

"Corruption works when it’s organized. If we see more cases of absentee-ballot fraud than, say, voter-impersonation fraud, it still doesn't mean that voters individually are motivated to do it,” she explains. “It just means that absentee balloting might present some greater opportunities for people who are organizing conspiracies to corrupt elections."

The News21 analysis shows 34 states had at least one case of registration fraud — many were associated with third-party voter registration groups.

The most noteworthy involved the voter registration group, Association for Community Organization and Reform Now (ACORN).

The group, which endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, became the target of conservative activist James O’Keefe, who produced deceptively edited videos that suggested ACORN employees were encouraging criminal behavior.

Voter-ID supporters often cite ACORN as evidence that voter fraud is a problem. The scandal resulted in at least 22 convictions in seven states and the collapse of the organization in 2010 after Congress and private donors pulled their funding.

Critics of third-party voter-registration say that workers who gather signatures are typically paid for their efforts and that’s an incentive to
write in false names, breaking the law. Defenders of third-party registration say that establishing criteria for the number of signatures workers must gather in a day, for example, is good business practice. These so-called quotas, they say, are simply a way of establishing standards of performance and evaluating employees. Paying workers per signature, as opposed to per hour, is outlawed in several states.

Both sides of the debate agree voter-registration rolls are outdated and should be cleaned up. They disagree on whether problems with the rolls lead to fraudulent votes being cast.

“Mickey Mouse has been registered hundreds of times, but Mickey has never turned up on Election Day to vote,” Hasen said. The News21 database shows 393 cases involving ineligible voters, typically felons, noncitizens or people voting in the wrong jurisdictions. There were guilty verdicts in 159 cases.

Sometimes, felons and non-citizens were not aware that they didn’t have voting rights, as in the case of Derek Little in Wisconsin, as The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. The database shows the case was dismissed because prosecutors learned that Little identified himself at the polls with his prison ID.

Double voting occurs in isolated instances and often involves absentee ballots. However, few cases in the database reveal any coordinated effort to change election results. Often, the double vote was a mistake.

Claudel Gilbert, who had changed his address in Ohio in 2007, received two registration cards in the mail and said he believed he had to vote in both places for his vote to count. In four other cases, people were accused of double voting for filling out their ballot and their spouse’s.

Some advocates of voter-ID laws say voter fraud is used to “steal” federal elections. But the only so-called theft case in the News21 database involved four Indiana Democratic party officials accused in 2008 of forging signatures on petitions to get Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the state primary ballot. No one was convicted.

Many experts agree the elections system is inefficient and that this leads to mistakes and clerical errors that are lumped under “voter fraud.”

The News21 database showed that election-fraud cases often were the result of mistakes by confused voters or elections officials.

For example, Leland Duane Lewis, an 89-year-old from Raleigh, N.C., in 2011, requested — and got — a second ballot after mistakenly turning in his first one and realizing it was only half-completed.

Tom Brett, an election worker from Georgia, was accused in 2009 of not being on duty during early and absentee voting.

Schultz, the Hamline University professor who has written extensively about election fraud, said voting rules could be clarified for voters and there should be better training for election officials.

“If somebody is ineligible to vote because they are a felon, for example, or an ex-felon, making that clear to them, in terms of they can't vote until such and such a time,” Schultz said. “And the same thing with election officials ... making it clear to them regarding what the rules are regarding who is eligible and who is not eligible.”

Many voter-ID supporters continue to argue that the measures are needed to prevent voter-impersonation fraud to ensure the integrity of elections, although fewer than five tenths of one percent of the total cases in the News21 analysis are voter impersonation.

Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington, D.C.-based policy center, is a staunch supporter of voter-ID laws. He said “there’s no way to detect” voter-impersonation fraud unless states have voter-ID laws.

Bill Denny, a Mississippi Republican state representative elected in 1987, sponsored that state’s voter-ID bill — awaiting preclearance by the Justice Department — because he said voter impersonation is a problem even if there have been few prosecutions.

“Whether you have proof of it or not,” he added, “what in the heavens is wrong with showing an ID at polls?”

Minnite, the Rutgers professor, says she is worried that lawmakers could disenfranchise voters who don’t obtain the correct IDs and are prohibited from voting in November based on a problem that barely exists. 

“Voter fraud is not a problem" so "the solution should not be to address voter fraud,” Minnite said.

She said it could be especially burdensome for poor people to obtain the correct documents to get an ID — even for a free ID that some states with new ID laws are providing.

Minnite asked whether voting rights for "thousands of people should be sacrificed ... where there is absolutely no basis" for voter ID "in the first place.”

Civil-rights groups compare the voter-ID laws to Jim Crow laws, poll taxes and literacy tests designed to keep blacks from voting in the past.

“It's simply a new big burden on the backs of people who just want to have their voices heard during elections,” said Eddie Hailes, managing director and general counsel of the Advancement Project, a civil-rights group challenging voter-ID laws in Texas, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

The Justice Department denied the Texas voter-ID law — which U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder likened to a poll tax— on the ground that it would disproportionately affect minorities and the poor.

The state pre-emptively sued the Justice Department for the right to implement the law and arguments were heard by a three-judge panel in Washington, D.C., in July. A verdict is expected within the next month.

Not all supporters of the laws say voter-impersonation fraud is a major problem. Not all opponents say the laws will suppress millions of votes.

Trey Grayson, the former Republican Kentucky secretary of state who is director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, supports voter ID but also says election reform should “make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”

He suggests 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," Eric Holder, "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 News21 contributed to this article. Natasha Khan was an Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation fellow this summer at News21.

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