Some data on "voter fraud"

Florida, Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Alabama responded to SCOTUS' gutting of the Voting Rights Bill by rushing to pass, or reinstate, laws and regulations to suppress the Democratic vote.   That fact is not in serious dispute, despite the pious protests of the right wing machine about "protecting the sanctity of the vote."

To the rebuttal that fraud at the ballot box is virtually non-existent, they just repeat their mantra as though facts do not exist.

That doesn't mean the data do not exist.  Here is some data from the state of Florida.

In the 2012 attempt to purge the voter registration lists of "ineligible voters,"  the Florida elections office started with a list of 182,000 "potential non-citizens."   This group was checked against some other lists and reduced to 2,600.    With further checking, the list shrank to 198 names on the list that were ineligible to vote.   And of those, fewer than 40 had actually voted illegally.

So thousands and thousands of people were inconvenienced, having to prove their eligibility.   And how much did this cost the state of Florida, which is cutting public services because of budget deficits?

Let me put this in perspective.   In the 2012 presidential election, 8,471,179 Floridians cast a vote;   40 of them were case by someone who shouldn't have voted.

That is a "fraud" rate of 0.000005.

Hardly seems worth it, does it?   Of course not.  Unless your concern is not how many people voted illegally, but the tens of thousands who didn't vote because they couldn't wait 7 hours in line or didn't have the birth certificate required to get a voter ID, or various other obstacles.

This data also proves that SCOTUS' majority opinion, written by the Chief Justice himself, was erroneously reasoned when it said the criteria upon which districts were required to get pre-clearance were outmoded.   This proves that there is good reason for Florida to have extra oversight from the Department of Justice.  Instead, SCOTUS gave them permission to go back to discriminating -- with a free hand.

Ralph