While Republicans trying to justify voter suppression bills continue to struggle to find any actual cases of voter fraud, once again a Republican politician may be the exception that proves the rule.

While voter fraud is exceedingly rare — a person is more likely to be hit by lightning than to commit it — then-Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White (R-IN) was convicted of it earlier this year. Now, a candidate for Pinal County Supervisor in Arizona has dropped out amid questions about who cast ballots on behalf of his long-deceased girlfriend.

The Arizona Republic reports:

A Pinal County supervisor candidate has withdrawn from the race in the wake of voter-fraud allegations involving a former companion who, records show, has continued to vote by absentee ballot in the five years since her death. John Enright, 66, had been seeking the Republican nomination for county supervisor of District 5, an area that includes Apache Junction and Gold Canyon. …

His statement made no mention of the scandal unleashed in an anonymous, undated letter sent several weeks ago to the Pinal County Recorder’s Office. As recently as this year, the letter alleged, someone had been filling out and mailing in absentee ballots addressed to a woman who died on Feb. 3, 2007. The woman, Sheila Nassar, and Enright lived together at the time of her death.

Enright has not been charged with any crime and told the Arizona press “I look forward to learning more about these allegations. If they are indeed formal allegations, I will defend myself. I very much look forward to clearing my name.”

But if Enright was indeed casting ballots in his late girlfriend’s name, he would be guilty of what the Pinal County Recorder called “an absolute act of fraudulent voting” — and a Class 6 felony.

Voter identification laws would have done nothing to prevent the sort of absentee ballot fraud alleged here. And the fact that this is already a felony shows that laws already on the books are clearly sufficient to punish this exceedingly rare crime.

Taking a break from defending his state’s restrictive voter ID law in court, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson spoke at a Heritage Foundation panel on Thursday regarding the dire need to prevent the threat of voter fraud. To illustrate, he offered a hypothetical in which a man votes under a stolen identity…by using a fraudulent voter ID card:

WILSON: The ability for someone to come in and, through fraud, dilute the voting pool is very present. I want to be able to give our government the ability to combat that, to give them the tools. It is very difficult to prove a negative. If Alan Wilson goes in and uses a fraudulent voter ID card under the name of John Smith and I vote under John Smith’s name and then leave the polling place, you cannot go back in time and prove the negative. It is impossible. It is very difficult to catch somebody in the act. But I hear countless stories of people who witnessed that.

Watch it:

In Wilson’s imagined scenario, a voter uses a fake ID to cast an extra vote. But his own argument rests on the idea that the requirement to show ID at the polls is necessary to combat rampant voter fraud and identity theft. By this logic, voter ID laws would do nothing to prevent this threat.

In-person voter fraud like the type Wilson claims to prevent is extremely rare. It is so rare, in fact, that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud. Even the Supreme Court could only identify one example of in-person voter fraud in the past 143 years in their 2009 decision upholding a voter ID law.

By contrast, a recent Brennan Center report found that nearly 500,000 voters — mostly low-income and minority individuals — in the ten states with voter ID laws stand to be disenfranchised.

Wilson has sued the Department of Justice for blocking South Carolina’s voter ID law, arguing, “The changes have neither the purpose nor will they have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority.”

According to the ACLU’s estimate, 180,000 voters will be affected by the South Carolina law, with minority voters hit hardest by the new requirements.

This isn’t the first time Wilson’s hypotheticals have fallen flat. After he claimed over 900 dead voters cast ballots in South Carolina, an investigation by the State Election Commission found no evidence to back him up. Wilson has continued to insist that the threat of dead voters is real, and repeated the statistic at the Heritage Foundation on Thursday.

On Thursday, House Republicans criticized the Justice Department for challenging voter ID laws. The critical lawmakers believe that DOJ is acting in a partisan manner and that DOJ’s actions show that the Obama Administration is more concerned with winning in November than protecting against election fraud.

DOJ denies that they are motivated by any partisan concerns. Under the Voting Rights Act, DOJ has challenged voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina.

In both states, Republican-controlled legislatures passed laws requiring voters to show government-issued photo identification in order to vote. The Justice Department indicated this week it also is looking at whether Pennsylvania’s new voter ID law violates the Voting Rights Act, a 1965 law for ensuring minorities’ right to vote.

“Our philosophy has been very straight forward,” Perez told a House Judiciary subcommittee that Franks chairs. “We want to enforce laws. There’s a robust debate in this country, and we think we need to continue to have that debate and we do our level best to ensure that every eligible voter casts their vote and has access to the ballot.”

The criticism by Republican lawmakers is misplaced and misguided. Republican Reps. Steve King (IA) and Trent Franks (AZ) both claimed to be worried about voter fraud. King went so far as to say that “[w]e’re seeing voter fraud that’s pretty prevalent out there.” But there is no evidence that voter fraud is a problem. In fact there were only nine instances of possible in-person voter fraud between 2000 and 2007, and it is more likely that an individual will get struck by lightning than they will commit voter fraud. In the lawsuit brought by the ACLU against Pennsylvania’s voter ID law, the state formally acknowledged that no in-person voter fraud has occurred in Pennsylvania and they don’t expect any to occur in November. While voter fraud is a myth, voter ID laws do disenfranchise voters. In Pennsylvania alone, more than 750,000 eligible voters may be disenfranchised by the state’s new law.

While voter fraud is incredibly rare and therefore unlikely to swing the election in the Democrats’ favor, voter ID laws benefit Republicans because they disproportionately affect voters who are more likely to vote democratic. Poor, minority, and elderly voters are especially likely to fall into the 11 percent of eligible American voters who lack sufficient ID. Wisconsin State Senator Glenn Grothman (R) and Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai (R) both have said that voter ID laws will help Mitt Romney win in November. The ten states that have put voter ID requirements in place represent 127 electoral votes and are led by Republicans in both the legislature and the governorship.

–Alex Brown

Over the past few weeks, conservative news outlets have attempted to gin up controversy about dogs and dead people supposedly tainting American elections.

Their evidence: the fact that a mailing list used by a voter registration group contained a handful of out-of-date or incorrect entries. The Richmond Times-Dispatch has more:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign is asking Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to launch an investigation into voter-registration forms that are being sent to Virginia residents and addressed to deceased relatives, children, family pets and others ineligible to vote.

The errant mailings from the Washington-based nonprofit group Voter Participation Center have befuddled many Virginia residents, leading to hundreds of complaints.

The group, which has helped register more than 1.5 million people since 2004, sent out nearly 200,000 registration forms to Virginia addresses last month. Because their list of recipients is culled from a number of different sources, a handful of them were indeed addressed incorrectly.

If someone were to actually register their dog or their dead relative to vote, that would be illegal. If someone were to actually try to impersonate a dog or a dead relative at the polls and cast a ballot, that would also be illegal.

But actual voter fraud like this is extraordinarily minuscule, both in Virginia and everywhere else, and it’s far different from simply mailing out registration forms. There is nothing nefarious about sending people reminders to register to vote.

If mailing inadvertent forms were illegal, by that same standard, most political organizations like the Republican National Committee would be committing a “crime” every time they accidentally send out a campaign contribution solicitation to someone who has recently died. After all, it’s illegal for political parties to raise contributions from dead people.

Mitt Romney’s campaign is now trying to use the issue to disenfranchise people who have registered in the past two months. If he succeeds, more than 15,000 Virginians could have their registrations annulled.

Our Guest Blogger is Billy Corriher, Associate Director of Research for Legal Progress.

Faced with data suggesting over a million eligible voters could be disenfranchised by a new Voter ID law, the state of Texas was grilled on Friday by the three-judge panel hearing its lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The Voting Rights Act of 1965 requires states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to “pre-clear” election law changes with DOJ, and Texas filed suit in a D.C. federal court after DOJ refused to approve the Voter ID law. The judges were skeptical that Texas had met its burden of showing that DOJ should have cleared the Voter ID law as non-discriminatory, with one judge arguing the statute’s “burden falls disproportionately on minorities . . . .”

Studies have shown that millions of Americans may be disenfranchised by new Voter ID measures pushed by Republican state legislators. These laws will have a disproportionate impact on the poor, the elderly, and minorities. As many as 25% of black voters could be disenfranchised by Voter ID laws, and Attorney General Eric Holder has called such measures a “poll tax.” Texas presented expert testimony to counter DOJ’s statistics, but even the one Republican-appointed judge on the panel said the state’s expert “took enormous hits” during cross-examination.

Texas’s Voter ID law was pushed through the legislature under a streamlined process “against a backdrop of huge Hispanic growth.” Roughly 90 percent of the state’s population growth in the last decade can be attributed to minorities. Attorneys for Texas voters argued this growth in minority voters prompted state legislators to pass the Voter ID bill.

Supporters of Voter ID laws say the requirement to show identification when voting will help prevent voter fraud. But even an investigation by the Texas’ attorney general could not point to any recent examples of proven voter fraud. True voter fraud is extraordinarily rare, and even proponents of Voter ID laws cannot provide examples. This is a solution in search of a problem.

These laws are appear to be motivated by a desire to keep certain groups, which often vote for Democrats, from casting their votes on election day. A Republican legislator in Pennsylvania said that Pennsylvania’s new Voter ID law would allow Mitt Romney to win the state. The political motives behind Texas’ law may be evidenced by the fact that the law designates a gun permit as an acceptable ID, but not a student ID. Whatever the motive, these laws clearly impact certain demographic groups more than others.

The court is expected to rule soon on the Texas statute, and its decision could be appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has hinted that the Voting Rights Act’s “preclearance” requirement could be unconstitutional. But unless the high court is prepared to throw out voting rights protections that have been renewed by Congress several times in the past 50 years, the state of Texas will face a high burden in proving that its Voter ID law does not rob black and Hispanic voters of their right to vote.

Today’s big announcement by the Obama administration that they would suspend all targeted deportations of young undocumented immigrants who would have been eligible under the DREAM Act has touched off a firestorm in conservative circles.

Fox News’ morning program America’s Newsroom invited Rep. Allen West (R-FL) to share his thoughts on the announcement, and he wasted no time floating unfounded conspiracy theories and misinformation:

“I can start to ask questions about what is going to happen as far as their right to vote. Is this one of those backdoor opportunities to allow people in the next five months to get the opportunity to vote? Will we see Janet Napolitano and the president come out with a new edict that says ‘since we allow this people to be here legally, we’re now going to allow them to have the opportunity to vote?’… Why is it being done at this point in time? Why have we not allowed a national debate on this issue to really get a sense about what the American people feel?”

Watch it:

In fact, the DREAM Act has been up for debate for over a decade. Some version of the DREAM Act has been introduced in every Congress since 2001. And despite West’s insistence that the American people have not been heard, polls show that most Americans support the DREAM Act, which goes even further than President Obama’s executive order he will unveil today. That hasn’t stopped West’s fellow Republicans from blocking the passage of the law at every turn, most recently in 2010 when 55 Democrats and Republicans in the Senate voted in favor of the bill only to be blocked by a Republican filibuster.

This is not the first time West has reacted poorly over undocumented immigration. Last year he likened the problem to a military invasion by a foreign country, and his first hire after he won his election in 2010 was a radio host with a history of offensive, xenophobic statements.

In a letter released this afternoon, Congressman Tom Rooney (R-FL) accuses Attorney General Eric Holder of “supporting voter fraud in Florida.” According to Rooney, Holder is assisting in voter fraud, which is a crime, for the purpose of “aiding the President’s reelection campaign.” Rooney claims Holder of “actively working to enable voter fraud and allow illegal immigrants to cast votes in the state of Florida.”

Late last week, the Justice Department informed the State of Florida that the large purge of registered voters ordered by Governor Rick Scott was illegal and should be ended.

More from Rooney’s letter to Eric Holder:

Florida has uncovered a widespread problem of illegal and erroneous voter registration, exposing as many as 182,000 registered voters as non-U.S. citizens. The Department of Justice has an obligation to work with the state to prevent voter fraud and ensure that illegal votes are not cast, yet your department has consistently obstructed Florida’s efforts and has been either unresponsive or outright hostile to legitimate requests for information.

…Your actions further demonstrate that the Department of Justice, under your leadership, is more concerned with protecting the reelection prospects of the President than with upholding justice and enforcing the rule of law.

Rooney’s belief that 182,000 registered voters in Florida have been identified as non-U.S. citizens is not even shared by Scott. Thus far, the governor has only forwarded around 2700 names for county election officials to purge from the rolls.

Among this much smaller list, local election officials have found hundreds of fully eligible U.S. citizens. As a result of the rampant errors — and the Justice Department letter declaring the purge illegal — all 67 county election supervisors, including many Republicans, have decided to suspend the process.

Further Rooney’s assertion that voter fraud is a widespread problem is contradicted by Florida election officials and law enforcement data.

The State of Florida has until today to formally respond to the Justice Department. All indications, however, are that they plan to defy the DOJ and press forward with disenfranchising voters.

You can read the Department of Justice letter detailing the legal problems with Florida’s voter purge here.

Florida authorities claim that they’re purging thousands of voters from the rolls in order to protect the integrity and fairness of the democratic system, but according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, voting fraud is not a widespread problem in the state:

According to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, 178 cases of alleged voter fraud have been referred to the department since 2000. [...]

Fraud, [Ion Sancho, the 24-year veteran election supervisor in Leon County] said, simply isn’t much of an issue. “You are more likely to walk out of your office and get hit by a bolt of lightning,” he said.

Since a 2004 law removed a signature requirement for absentee ballots, the state has not prosecuted anyone for absentee-ballot fraud. Similarly, reforms adopted in the wake of the state’s 2000 recount “required counties to use optical-scan voting machines, created statewide standards for recounts and provided $2 million for a centralized voter database” — further reducing instances of abuse. There are more than 11 million registered voters in Florida.

The Department of Justice has asked Florida to end its current voter purging operation, but state officials — who are expected to respond on Wednesday to DOJ’s request — are likely to continue removing voters from the rolls. “We’ve been acting responsibly through this process,” an official told the Miami Herald. “And our letter will reiterate that while addressing the concerns raised by DOJ. We have continued our efforts to identify ineligible voters.”

In an interview with Chuck Todd on MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown this morning, Heritage Foundation senior fellow Brian Darling argued for the importance of Florida-style voter suppression laws in order to stop potential voter fraud. But when pressed by Todd to identify any actual examples of voter fraud, Darling appeared stumped:

DARLING: And there’ve been examples of voter fraud… in Florida. Look at ACORN.
TODD: Where is this voter fraud? I mean it is not this giant…
DARLING: We’ve had recent examples.
TODD: We’re talking about one or two people here, one or two people… and we’re not even a hundred percent sure.
DARLING: We just had a Michigan Congressman [Republican Thaddeus McCotter] resign… not run for re-election because he gathered signatures… his campaign gathered signatures that couldn’t be validated.
TODD: Yeah, but that’s a case of petition signatures being valid. I mean that’s a different law here.
DARLING: Yeah, but it’s very hard to catch voter fraud. Look at what James O’Keefe did. He walked into DC, he didn’t have any ID. One of his guy video…
TODD: Did he vote?
DARLING: No, he didn’t vote.
TODD: See?
DARLING: He didn’t vote. But he asked for a ballot and they were gonna give it to him.
TODD: Right, but you’re actually proving the point here. That the fraud didn’t take place because they prevented it.
DARLING: But it’s very hard to catch the fraud. That’s why you have to do it before Election Day. If you try to do it on Election Day, you’ll never catch any of the fraud.

Watch the video:

Stricter voter ID laws would do nothing to stop candidates like McCotter from submitting invalid ballot petitions. Nor would they stop cases like the ACORN example, in which a few individuals plead guilty to submitting bogus voter registration forms in hopes of getting paid more for voter registration. In both instances, the existing laws proved more than sufficient to address the problems.

The one example of the sort of fraud these strict voter ID laws allegedly aim to stop that Darling could cite was conservative filmmaker and convicted law-breaker James O’Keefe. O’Keefe’s approach was to break a law intentionally to prove how easy it is to break a law and to then claim that the law is insufficient because he could break it. This strategy is similar to going into a convenience store, pretending to shoplift a candy bar, and citing that as evidence that the store needs to do a background check of every customer before they come into the store. And, as Darling concedes, even O’Keefe didn’t actually vote.

And, as ThinkProgress reported previously, in the one instance O’Keefe recently claimed to identify voter fraud, the two alleged non-citizens who he claimed should not registered voters both proved to be naturalized citizens.

It is very hard to catch voter fraud because it is exceptionally rare. In fact, studies have shown individuals are more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit it. People generally don’t commit voter fraud because they realize that it is immoral, because it is illegal and they fear being punished, and because it is an extremely inefficient way of affecting an election.