This is usually how these things turn out. I’ll note that nearly the same results turned up when Matt Blunt, as Secretary of State, tried to investigate ‘massive voter fraud’ in Missouri. He identified a fairly high number of initial problems. It turned out then that his staff did not understand the property coding system in the City of Saint Louis and it came down to less than a dozen cases of potential fraud.
But Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman told TPMMuckraker that conservative groups have exaggerated the threat of voter fraud. He also said that their investigation revealed that there was no coordinated campaign to commit voter fraud. Freeman said that 43 of the cases involve felons who were ineligible to vote and four cases involve double voting.
The conservative group Minnesota Majority first alleged that 1,250 people, including over 800 felons, were illegally voting. But the vast majority of those claims didn’t pan out.
“They claimed in November 2009 to have 800 additional individuals who were illegal felon voters,” Freeman said. “When they summited names to us in late February 2010, it was down to 451. We have processed that 451, and more than half of them were either not felons or not on probation when they voted. The rest of them we investigated more fully, and today we reported that the remaining cases presented sufficient support to charge, so we charged them.”
The felon cases are interesting too because those are cases that cannot be caught at the precinct level, but at the registration level. That’s also true with double voting where the people aren’t pretending to be someone else, they are voting under the own name in two different places.
Voters with previous felonies are also irrelevant in Illinois since the law allows all, but those currently incarcerated to vote. Voting integrity projects wouldn’t have prevented any of the fraud cases in Minnesota. What would improve the issue is better list maintenance, though that is difficult.