When Is An Honest Mistake Voter Fraud?

Donald Trump has been claiming there were serious instances of voter fraud in the 2016 election.

He claimed 3 to 5 million illegal aliens voted for Hillary Clinton, although he has been unable to produce any evidence to support his claim nor has anyone else. On his claim of people being registered to vote in more than one state, there is hard evidence of at least five instances. The culprits have been identified. They are:

Trump’s daughter Tiffany is a registered voter in New York and Pennsylvania

First son-in-law Jared Kushner has New Jersey and New York registration.

Press Secretary Sean Spicer is on voter rolls in Virginia and Rhode Island.

White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, New York and Florida

Treasury Secretary-designate Steven Mnuchin, New York and California.

Before you get too upset, it should be noted that it is not illegal to be registered in two states as long is you only vote in one, and there’s no indication any of these people voted more than once.

Multiple registrations like these are rarely intentional but just a simple oversight. When people move from one state to the next they rarely notify the board of elections. It is implausible as a matter of fraud: it’s hard to imagine millions of people registering to vote in multiple states franticly rushing around the country on election day to cast bogus ballots.

Zombies are also mythological voters, notwithstanding claims by the increasingly erratic Rudy Giuliani. He said, “Dead people generally vote for Democrats rather than Republicans.” Trump also has spoken of deceased voters. Old legends of Tammany Hall and Chicago politics aside, neither Giuliani nor Trump offered any evidence to back up claims about dead voters or their party registration, no doubt because none exists and they know it.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t many registered voters who are deceased. That is not fraud, though. When someone dies it is highly unlikely that their survivors will call the Board of Elections to have their names removed from the rolls. It is equally unlikely that the deceased or anyone using their name will be voting, according to nonpartisan election experts. Yes, it would be good to clean up the rolls periodically, but it won’t make any difference on election day. So don’t look for long lines of zombies the next time you go to the polls.