Tracking fraudulent voting

[Rideback]

Washington (CNN) — Attempts by conservatives to purge state voter rolls ahead of the November election, including from Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, are ramping up, prompting concern from the Justice Department that those efforts might violate federal rules governing how states can manage their lists of registered voters.
Questioning the accuracy of voter rolls has long been a hallmark of right-wing efforts to raise doubts about the integrity of elections and featured prominently in 2020 when allies of the former president pushed false claims that scores of fraudulently cast votes helped Joe Biden win the presidency.
As of Tuesday, at least three dozen cases related to voter rolls and their maintenance are pending in 19 states, according to the liberal-leaning Democracy Docket, which tracks election litigation.
Some of the lawsuits have been brought by the Republican National Committee against state election officials in the battleground states that are atop both Trump’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’ must-win lists, including Georgia, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The right-wing effort to purge voter rolls has largely centered around claims that noncitizens are casting illegal votes in favor of Democrats. But reports of noncitizen voting in US elections are extremely rare. The right-leaning Heritage Foundation’s database of confirmed fraud cases lists fewer than 100 examples of non-citizens voting between 2002 and 2022, amid more than 1 billion lawfully cast ballots. The left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice analyzed more than 23 million votes from the 2016 election and found an estimated 30 examples.
The total number of lawsuits is a notable increase from previous elections, according to legal experts who say an overwhelming majority are intended to create controversy and undermine confidence in the election.
“There’s always been some litigation about voter rolls and list maintenance. But part of what you’re seeing with this explosion is what appears to be a concerted attempt to generate errors and controversy that can then be used down the road to undermine the election results,” said Uzoma Nkwonta, an attorney representing the New Georgia Project Action Fund, a group working to thwart an effort by two Georgia voters to purge thousands of voters from that state’s voter rolls.
“And that’s what makes this environment different,” Nkwonta added. “Now you are seeing what appears to be an outright assault on the list maintenance practices, outright assault on voter registration practices.”
Justin Levitt, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School who served as a voting rights adviser in the Biden White House, agreed. He said he sees some of the lawsuits as “purely marketing” that weren’t “designed to go anywhere legally.”


So the Conservative Heritage Foundation as well as the Brennan Ceter found only a handful of fraudulent votes, never enough to change an election.