When Americans go to the polls this November, they better have some
ID. If they don’t, millions of them won’t be casting a ballot. Over the
past two years, Republican legislators from Texas to Florida to
Wisconsin and beyond have enacted new restrictions making it
significantly more difficult for citizens to exercise their right to
vote. These laws, which could disenfranchise more voters than at any
time since the 1960s, exist because of one widely held conservative
belief: that our elections are plagued with fraud.
National Republican chairman Reince Priebus echoed this view on MSNBC
recently when discussing the new Wisconsin law that requires citizens
to produce photo ID at the polls or be shown the door. He argued that
the state’s election system was “absolutely riddled with voter fraud.”
Priebus may be correct, but only if his standard for “riddled” is 0.0002 percent.
A nonpartisan study on voter fraud in Wisconsin after the 2004 election
found just seven ineligible votes—all of which were cast by ex-felons
who were ineligible to vote despite being released from prison—out of 3
million ballots cast.
Yet the notion that voter fraud is rampant appears to have become a core belief among conservatives. Since the 2010 election, dozens of anti-voting measures
have been enacted, from requiring photo identification to cutting early
voting periods to mandating that citizens present a birth certificate
or passport in order to register.
