GOP finds little voter fraud

Associated Press

DENVER

Republican election officials who promised to root out voter fraud so far are finding little evidence of a widespread problem.

State officials in key presidential battleground states have found only a tiny fraction of the illegal voters they initially suspected existed. Searches in Colorado and Florida have yielded numbers that amount to less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all registered voters in either state.

Democrats say the searches waste time and, worse, could disenfranchise eligible voters who are swept up in the checks.

Republicans argue that voting fraud is no small affair.

“We have real vulnerabilities in the system,” said Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a Republican.

The different viewpoints underscore a divide between the parties: Are the small numbers of voting fraud evidence that a problem exists? Or do they show that the voter registration system works?

COLORADO

Last year, Gessler estimated that 11,805 noncitizens were on the rolls. But the number kept getting smaller.

After his office sent letters to 3,903 registered voters questioning their status, the number of noncitizens stands at 141, based on checks using a federal immigration database.

FLORIDA

Florida’s search began after the state’s Division of Elections said that as many as 180,000 registered voters weren’t citizens. Like Colorado and other states, Florida relied on driver’s license data showing that people on the rolls at one point showed proof of noncitizenship.

Florida eventually narrowed its list of suspected noncitizens to 2,600 and found that 207 of them weren’t citizens, based on its use of the federal database called SAVE, or the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements.

NORTH CAROLINA

In North Carolina, the nonpartisan state elections board last year sent letters to 637 suspected noncitizens after checking driver’s license data. Of those, 223 responded showing proof they were citizens, and 79 acknowledged they weren’t citizens and were removed from the rolls along with 331 more who didn’t respond to repeated letters, said Veronica Degraffenreid, an elections liaison.

MICHIGAN

Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, a Republican, estimated that as many as 4,000 noncitizens are on the state’s voter roll.

The department said it verified 1,000 registered voters who are noncitizens, based on an analysis of about 20 percent of complete citizenship data.

OTHER STATES

Ohio and Iowa also are negotiating with the federal government to also use the SAVE database to verify citizenship.