Official: Voting fraud rare in NC

By: Jim McNally | Hickory Daily Record
Published: September 10, 2012
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To say there is no voter fraud going on in North Carolina is technically not true.
Over the past decade, hundreds of such cases have come across the desk of Marshall Tutor, the lone investigator for the North Carolina Board of Elections.

But with only a relative handful of exceptions, the majority of these cases have been those in which convicted felons have cast votes in violation of state law.

According to a report supplied by Marshall to the R&L, 447 cases of various types of voter fraud reached the level of meriting further investigation by county district attorney offices throughout the state.
But 291 of those cases – more than 65 percent – involved voting by convicted felons.
Also, 310 voter fraud cases that were recommended to district attorneys (nearly 70 percent of cases for the entire decade) occurred during one voting cycle: 2008. And 235 of that year’s cases – 76 percent – involved felons illegally voting.
In North Carolina, convicted felons have their voting rights rescinded during the time of their active sentence, which includes parole and probation obligations.
However, once their sentences are completed, felons must re-register to vote because their prior voter registrations were cancelled by the boards of election in the counties in which they lived.
Many of the felon cases handled by the state Board of Elections, Tutor said, are by people who are not aware of the law.
“Some of them just don’t know,” he said.
In the report, which was produced last year at the request of state Sen. Josh Stein (D-Wake County), Board of Elections officials wrote that the office, “to the greatest extent permitted by resources, investigates all allegations of voter fraud.”
The report further found that “most allegations prove to be unfounded, lack criminal intent or cannot be substantiated…”
Only one of the 447 cases that were found to have some merit involved impersonation, which is at the heart of moves by several state legislatures to beef up voter identification requirements.
Impersonation would also be the category into which would fall the act of attempting to use the voter registration information of a deceased person.
Last week, Tutor said that he had not come across a single case of that happening in the state in the past 10 years, despite the finding by a private organization that the names of some 30,000 dead people had been found on voter rolls covering that time period.

Official: Voting fraud rare in NC | Hickory Daily Record