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a person approving it at the local level,
Gorbea says.
Yet, the discussion of the integrity of
the voting system has been garbled, with
threats to an honest result conflated or
mis-assessed. Voter fraud is committed
by a single individual, who may vote twice,
vote when ineligible or impersonate
another. Election fraud is an institutional
corruption of the process committed by
operatives trying to influence the outcome.
Election errors are clerical or machinemade
failures without an interest in
the victor.
Voter fraud has received the majority of
the attention. In May of 2017, Trump established
a Commission on Election Integrity
to ferret out alleged voter fraud. But many
states, including Rhode Island — wary of
the controversial commission’s demands
for voters’ personal information, including
the last four digits of their social security
numbers — refused to turn over any data
that wasn’t already publicly available.
A routine election audit in Cranston
uncovered six who might have voted illegally:
two non-citizens, three who might
have double-voted and one alleged imposter.
The city referred its findings to the Attorney
General’s office, but officials determined
that the evidence was insufficient to meet
the standard of proof and closed the investigation.
Those six votes represented .00016
percent of the 36,796 Cranston votes cast
in the presidential election.
Lawrence Norden, director of the election
reform program at the Brennan Center
for Justice, says voter fraud remains “an
infinitesimal problem.”
“The voter fraud issue has been studied
extensively, and the consensus is that it is
occasional and very rare,” he says. Trump’s
claim of large-scale voter fraud prompted
“a big push back from election officials
from both parties. We need to follow the
facts and avoid the hysterical language.”
Cyber security and voter advocacy
experts are much more rattled by the
prospect of hackers exploiting the vulnerabilities
in electoral computer systems
to change the results, disrupt voting or
undermine our confidence in the system.
States have faced a growing number of
cyber attacks by criminals, state-sponsored
proxies and hacktivists. In 2017
alone, state databases in Washington,
Florida, Illinois, Idaho, Alabama, Michigan
28 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l OCTOBER 2020