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In written testimony for a June 6 hearing conducted by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, William Welch, chief of the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, noted that in the almost six years since Ashcroft launched the voter fraud initiative, the department had convicted 111 defendants for fraud offenses out of a total 148 who were charged. Vice Chair Abigail Thernstrom complained of “a lack of really solid data on the dimensions of the voter fraud problem.” When Welch testified in person, Thernstrom, a Republican, and commissioner Todd Gaziano, a conservative independent, pressed for detail.
“I don’t think that anyone can quantify the problem through simply looking at criminal convictions and trying to equate the scope of the problem with the number of convictions,” Welch replied.
How many schemes donÂ’t come to light?
Welch: “It is extremely difficult to quantify or give an estimate on what the scope is.”
Just how large of a problem is noncitizen voting?
Welch: “I really cannot give you an estimate of either how small or how large it is. It simply is an unquantifiable figure as far as we’re concerned.”
Welch did introduce as evidence some figures on multiple registrations. He said that 100,000 Floridians were registered simultaneously in either New York or New Jersey and that 60,000 Kentuckians were also registered across the border in Tennessee. But Welch did note that many such cases can be attributed to messy voter rolls rather than fraudulent behavior. Another witness, Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, referred to a University of Connecticut study that found 8,558 of ConnecticutÂ’s deceased on voter rolls; more than 300 were listed as having voted after they had died. ConnecticutÂ’s secretary of state announced in a press conference that no fraud had occurred, but that 5,000 names have been removed from the Connecticut rolls. Currently, ConnecticutÂ’s separate Elections Enforcement Commission is looking one-by-one into the cases in which votes were actually cast for any signs of voter fraud.
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