Download the Status Report on the Voter Fraud-Voter Intimidation Research Project (May 17, 2006)

A report to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) on voter fraud and voter intimidation was released yesterday by USA Today over four months after is had been presented to the commission. The report confirmed that there is little verifiable evidence to support anecdotal accounts of polling place fraud involving voters voting more than once, non-citizens or otherwise ineligible voters voting, or voters voting in the name of deceased voters. Though, the final report of the study has yet to be released, the findings of the preliminary report could have informed the heated debate over restrictive voter ID requirements that has raged in the past months.

At a hearing on September 27, 2005, EAC executive director Tom Wilkey announced that the commission had awarded a $110,000 grant to Tova Wang, an elections expert at the Century Foundation, and Job Serebrov, an Arkansas attorney to provide a comprehensive report on voter fraud and voter intimidation. Section 241 of HAVA requires the EAC to conduct research on election administration issues. Among the tasks listed in the statute is the development of nationwide statistics and methods of identifying, deterring, and investigating voting fraud in elections for Federal office. The EAC's Board of Advisors recommended that the agency make research on these matters a high priority.

The researchers presented a “Status Report on the Voter Fraud-Voter Intimidation Research Project” to the EAC in May 17 and announced at the meeting of the Standards Board and Board of Advisors the following week.  A politically diverse working group of election officials, public interest advocates, and election law specialists first convened on May 18 and a final report of their research was presented to the EAC in July. The EAC has not released the final report and contractual agreements with the  consultants restrict them from releasing it. There are two other completed reports, one on the effect of Voter ID regulations and another on provisional ballots, that the EAC has declined to release to the public.