Candice Miller Tackles Voter Fraud, Introduces Prevention Legislation in US House

It’s called the Voter Registration Integrity Act and it is one of the newest measures introduced by U.S. legislators to tackle voter fraud. This particular legislation was introduced Wednesday by Republican U.S. Reps. Candice Miller (MI-10) and Todd Rokita (IN-4).

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If passed, the act would require state motor vehicle departments to ask new residents who are seeking a driver's license if he or she intends to register to vote in the new state. If the answer is yes, that department is compelled to notify the former state and allow the removal of that voter from their voter rolls.

“In recent months I have been working with Michigan’s current Secretary of State Ruth Johnson and my House colleague Todd Rokita, a former Secretary of State in Indiana, to look at changes in federal law that would put in place safeguards to make it less likely that any individual would cast ballots in multiple states in the same election,” Miller said in the statement.

The Miller-Rokita act would amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 “to provide state officials with additional tools to keep voter rolls clean,” Miller said.

Miller, who formerly served as Michigan Secretary of State and Chief Elections Officer, said voter fraud “cannot be tolerated” and expressed her belief that action must be taken to prevent it.

“Voter fraud is a proven danger that dilutes honest votes and erodes public confidence in our electoral process – indeed, it threatens the very foundation of our republic,” Rokita said, in a prepared statement. “Preventing ineligible voters from casting ballots depends in large part on having accurate, clean records of eligible voters.”

Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson has also voiced her support of this legislation.

“This is just common sense – if you have voters registered in more than one state you are opening the door to cheating. Accurate voter rolls are critical to integrity in the elections process. That’s why I’ve been pushing so hard to be able to remove those who have moved out of state, died or who are not U.S. citizens.”

Earlier this year, Michigan participated in a joint project with 15 other states to compare and cross-check voter registration records to identify people registered to vote in more than one state.

Although data is still being examined and verified, Johnson calls the initial numbers “troubling,” as some 72,000 Michigan residents are believed to be registered to vote in other states like Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Illinois and Tennessee.

However, a recent public records search conducted by reporters from the investigative reporting project "News21" found only 2,068 cases of alleged election fraud in the U.S. since 2000, which breaks down to only about one in every 15 million prosective voters. 

This same study found only 17 reported cases of election fraud in Michigan since 2000, of which only four were perpetrated by voters. Nine of these cases were traced back to campaign officials and two to election officials.