User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/Selected bibliography related to voter fraud

Voter fraud in United States elections a selected bibliography

Gregg Phillips
Mississippi Department of Human Services. He is the author of a tweet, cited by president Donald Trump and retweeted by the conspiracy website InfoWars, purporting that between three and five million non-citizens voted in the U.S. 2016 elections. no evidence for his claims. "under fire from the Legislature for his management of the state welfare programs." A week after leaving Department of Human Services, Phillips was hired by Synesis Corporation, a division of Centec Learning, which had an $878,000 contract to lease mobile learning labs to the University of Mississippi as part of LEAP, a literacy program Phillips backed as head of the Department of Human Services.

Texas Health and Human Services Commission from March 2003 to August 2004. Houston Chronicle found that a company started by Phillips and a company of Britton's received a $670,000 state contract from the Texas Workforce Commission in January 2004. Phillips then ran the health care analytics firm AutoGov. Phillips is described as a "vocal conservative who founded a health-care-data company." $100,000 in unpaid taxes.

Unsubstantiated voter fraud claims
In 2013, Phillips' firm partnered with the organization True the Vote to, according to Phillips, update and analyze voter registration data in the U.S. to supposedly identify indicators of each person voting such as: citizenship or non-citizenship, identity, and felony status. He has asserted that his organization has evidence that between three and five million votes were illegal in the 2016 presidential election. He has, however, not provided the purported evidence for this claim. Philipps made these voter fraud claims even before "data on voter history was available in most jurisdictions", which meant that "it had not even been determined which provisional ballots were valid and would be counted".

Having warned that "duplicate records" and "inactive voters" would contribute to voter fraud, it was later revealed that Philipps was registered to vote in three states.

Steve Miller
Stephen Miller, Trump's Senior Advisor, was Jeff Sessions' communications director when he served as Senator for Alabama. Thirty-one-year old Miller, Bannon, and Andrew Bremberg sent over 200 executive orders to federal agencies for review before January 20. Miller has been an architect behind the inaugural address and the most "contentious executive orders" including Executive Order 13769.

In a February 12 interview with ABC News anchor George Stephanopolous, when asked to provide evidence "for Trump's "unfounded allegations" where former Senator Kelly Ayotte lost his bid for election, and Trump narrowly lost to Clinton in 2016, Miller suggested Stephanopolous interview Kansas Senator, Kris Kobach who relied upon a 2012 Pew Research Center study in his voter fraud claims.  The day before the interview a Federal Election Commission Commissioner called on Trump to provide evidence of what would "constitute thousands of felony criminal offenses under New Hampshire law."

Since November 2016, Trump has repeated voter fraud allegations that thousands of voters were illegally bused from Massachusetts into New Hampshire where former Senator Kelly Ayotte lost his bid for election, and Trump narrowly lost to Clinton in 2016. Trump had announced on January 25 that he was conducting an investigation into voter fraud. He repeated unsubstantiated claims about the number of fraudulent voters and referred to VoteStand founder Gregg Phillips, who could not produce any evidence of voter fraud. In January US News reported that members of Trump's cabinet and family were registered to vote in multiple states. On February 10, Federal Election Commission (FEC) Commissioner, Ellen L. Weintraub, issued a statement calling on Trump, to provide the evidence of what would "constitute thousands of felony criminal offenses under New Hampshire law." By February 12, Steve Miller was still unable to provide concrete evidence to support claims of voter fraud in an interview with Stephanopolous, but he seemed to direct Stephanopolous to the often-cited 2012 Pew Research Center study. In fact, the 2012 PEW report entitled "Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient Evidence That America’s Voter Registration System Needs an Upgrade," that was based on 2008 data, was about "outdated voter rolls, not fraudulent votes" and "makes no mention of noncitizens voting or registering to vote". The report showed that because of inefficiencies in the voter system, 24 percent of eligible citizens were not able to be registered, representing "51 million citizens." Problems related to voter registration often affected "military personnel— especially those deployed overseas and their families—who were almost twice as likely to report registration problems as was the general public in 2008." In November, the "the former director of Pew’s election program" explained that, "We found millions of out of date registration records due to people moving or dying, but found no evidence that voter fraud resulted." On January 25, Spicer confirmed in a press briefing that Trump continued to believe that "millions voted illegally in the election" based on "studies and evidence that people have presented him." This included an often-cited and contested 2014 Old Dominion University study entitled, "Do non-citizens vote in U.S. elections?". Using Cooperative Congressional Election Study data from 2008 and 2010, the researchers had argued that more than 14% of non-citizens "indicated that they were registered to vote".

Help America Vote Act
The Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, is a United States federal law enacted on October 29, 2002. It was drafted (at least in part) in reaction to the controversy surrounding the 2000 U.S. presidential election, the goals of HAVA are: to replace punchcard and lever-based voting systems; create the Election Assistance Commission to assist in the administration of Federal elections; and establish minimum election administration standards.

Voting Rights Act of 1965
This was the most important federal legislation of the 20th century to protect voting rights, especially of ethnic and language minorities who had been disenfranchised for decades by states' constitutions and practices. Initially it was particularly important for enforcing the constitutional right of African Americans in the South to vote, where millions of people had been mostly disenfranchised since the turn of the 20th century and excluded from politics. The law has also protected other ethnicities, such as Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, and language minorities in other states, who have been discriminated against at various times, especially in the process of voter registration and electoral practices.

Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a landmark piece of legislation in the United States that outlawed major forms of discrimination against African Americans and other minorities.

impersonation voter ID laws have been enacted in a number of states since 2010 with the aim of preventing voter impersonation. . In 2013, 270 of the 6,000 dead people previously registered to vote in Nassau County, NY in 2013, supposedly cast ballots. County officials blamed many of the invalid votes on clerical errors. In 2013, state election officials found at least 81 dead voters in North Carolina and 92 dead voters in Oregon. Other examples include the 1997 Miami ballot fraud, which tainted the city's mayoral election and produced 36 arrests – 18 of these people were charged with absentee ballot fraud (not voter impersonation). A 2012 report by the Pew Center showed that over 1.8 million dead people are registered to vote nationwide and over 3 million voters were registered in multiple states. Registration irregularities do not intrinsically constitute fraud: in most cases the states are simply slow to eliminate ineligible voters. These irregularities have left some concerned that the electoral system is vulnerable to the impersonation of dead voters. However, most states have since worked to address the concerns raised by this report. Conservative lawyer Hans von Spakovsky has claimed that significant in-person voter fraud occurred in Brooklyn from 1968 to 1982, but Richard Hasen has argued that this fraud, because it involved election officials colluding with one another, could not have been prevented by a voter ID law. to steal an election, because if they paid people to vote for their preferred candidate, they could not confirm whether the people they paid voted at all, much less the way they were paid to. For instance, ABC News reported in 2012 that only four cases of voter impersonation had led to convictions in Texas over the previous decade. A study released the same year by News21, an Arizona State University reporting project, identified a total of 10 cases of alleged voter impersonation in the United States since 2000. This analysis has, in turn, been criticized by the executive director of the Republican National Lawyers Association, who has said that the study was "highly flawed in its very approach to the issue." Also a 2012 study found no evidence that voter impersonation (in the form of people voting under the auspices of a dead voter) occurred in the 2006 Georgia general elections. In April 2014, Federal District Court Judge Lynn Adelman ruled in Frank v. Walker that Wisconsin's voter ID law was unconstitutional because "virtually no voter impersonation occurs in Wisconsin...". In August 2014, Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, reported in the Washington Post's Wonkblog that he had identified only 31 credible cases of voter impersonation since 2000. Levitt has also claimed that of these 31 cases, three of them occurred in Texas, while Lorraine Minnite of Rutgers University–Camden estimates there were actually four during the 2000–2014 period. The most serious incident identified involved as many as 24 people trying to vote under assumed names in Brooklyn, but even this would not have made a significant difference in almost any American election. Also that year, a study in the Election Law Journal found that about the same percentage of the U.S. population (about 2.5%) admitted to having been abducted by aliens as admitted to committing voter impersonation. This study also concluded that "strict voter ID requirements address a problem that was certainly not common in the 2012 U.S. election." In 2016, News21 reviewed cases of possible voter impersonation in five states where politicians had expressed concerns about it. They found 38 successful fraud cases in these states from 2012 to 2016, none of which were for voter impersonation. The vast majority of voter ID laws in the United States aim only at voter impersonation, of which there are only 31 documented cases in the United States from the 2000-2014 period. According to PolitiFact, "in-person voter fraud—the kind targeted by the ID law—remains extremely rare". PolitiFact finds the suggestion that "voter fraud is rampant" false, giving it its "Pants on Fire" rating.

Proponents of voter ID laws cite the registration of dead and out-of-state voters as a vulnerability in the electoral system. A 2012 report by the Pew Center showed that more than 1.8 million deceased people remain registered to vote nationwide. The same report found 3 million voters registered in multiple states, presumably due to changes of residency. David Becker, the director of Election Initiatives for Pew, said this study's results pointed to the need to improve voter registration, rather than to evidence of voter fraud or suppression.

Voter ID
At the federal level, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 requires voter ID for all new voters in federal elections who registered by mail and who did not provide a driver's license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number that was matched against government records. As of September 2016, 33 states have enacted some form of voter ID requirement. Lawsuits have been filed against many of the voter ID requirements on the basis that they are discriminatory with an intent to reduce voting by traditionally Democratic constituencies. Parts of voter ID laws in several states have been overturned by courts.

Old Dominion
Proponents of voter ID laws have pointed to a 2014 study by Old Dominion University professors Jesse Richman and David Earnest as justification. The study, which used data developed by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, concluded that more than 14 percent of self-identified non-citizens in 2008 and 2010 indicated that they were registered to vote, approximately 6.4% of surveyed non-citizens voted in 2008, and 2.2% of surveyed non-citizens voted in 2010. However, the study also concluded that voter ID requirements would be ineffective at reducing non-citizen voting. This study has been criticized by numerous academics. A 2015 study by the managers of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study found that Richman and Earnest's study was "almost certainly flawed" and that, in fact, it was most likely that 0% of non-citizens had voted in recent American elections. Richman and Earnest's findings were the result of measurement error; some individuals who answered the survey checked the wrong boxes in surveys. Richman and Earnest therefore extrapolated from a handful of wrongfully classified cases to achieve an exaggerated number of individuals who appeared to be non-citizen voters. Richman later conceded that "the response error issues... may have biased our numbers". Richman has also rebuked President Trump for claiming that millions voted illegally in 2016. Brian Schaffner, Professor of Political Science at University of Massachesetts, Amherst, who was part of the team that debunked Richman and Earnest's study has said that the study "is not only wrong, it is irresponsible social science and should never have been published in the first place. There is no evidence that non-citizens have voted in recent U.S. elections... It is bad research, because it fails to understand basic facts about the data it uses. Indeed, it took me and my colleagues only a few hours to figure out why the authors’ findings were wrong and to produce the evidence needed to prove as much. The authors were essentially basing their claims on two pieces of data associated with the large survey—a question that asks people whether they are citizens and official vote records to which each respondent has been matched to determine whether he or she had voted. Both these pieces of information include some small amounts of measurement error, as is true of all survey questions. What the authors failed to consider is that measurement error was entirely responsible for their results. In fact, once my colleagues and I accounted for that error, we found that there were essentially zero non-citizens who voted in recent elections.."

2016 United States presidential election recounts
November 9, to petition for a recount in three key states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. fair to all sides." President-elect Trump and his supporters filed legal motions in all three states to prevent the recounts. on November 30, and three Florida citizens filed for a complete hand recount in their state on December 6.

Trump also used Twitter to allege that "serious voter fraud" had occurred in California, New Hampshire, and Virginia, and claimed, without evidence, that "millions of people" voted illegally. On January 25, 2017, President Trump vowed to start a federal investigation into alleged voter fraud.

According to Politico, many of Clinton's closest allies were "irritated with Jill Stein" and did not believe that the recount will change the election's results, though they did feel that they had an obligation to participate.