Voter fraud in North Carolina? Not so fast

04/03/14 03:45 PM
Updated 04/03/14 04:51 PM
By Zachary Roth

... In a report released Wednesday, North Carolina’s elections board said it had found 35,570 people who voted in the state in 2012 and whose names and dates of birth match those of voters in other states. The board said it also found 765 North Carolinians who voted in 2012 and whose names, birthdates, and last four digits of their Social Security number match those of people in other states. The board said it’s looking into all these cases to determine whether people voted twice ...

“N.C. Board of Elections audit finds up to 35,750 instances of ‘double voting’ (voter fraud) in the 2012 election,” tweeted Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer Wednesday ...

... The political scientist Michael McDonald and election law scholar Justin Levitt have shown in a detailed statistical study that the number of people who share a name and birthdate is much higher than it might at first appear. (Just for fun, take the RNC’s Spicer. Though his name is less common than many, online records show 20 different Sean Spicers who were born on September 23rd, his birthday.) That statistical reality, McDonald and Levitt conclude, has big implications for how to treat potential cases of illegal voting ...

Last year, South Carolina’s DMV used Social Security matches to help find more than 900 people listed as dead who had voted in recent years, setting off a spate of hand-wringing about fraud. Attorney General Alan Wilson, a Republican, used the findings to argue for the state’s strict voter ID law—which was later softened after the Justice Department objected. But state law enforcement ultimately found not a single person who deliberately cast a ballot in the name of a dead person ...

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/voter-fraud-north-carolina-not-so-fast-0