Despite all the rhetoric and voter-suppression laws, actual instances of voter fraud are extremely rare. But every once in a while, an incident pops up, such as this one, as reported by the Des Moines Register.
A Des Moines woman has been arrested on suspicion of voting twice this month in the general election, police and court records show.Terri Lynn Rote, 55, was booked into the Polk County Jail about 3:40 p.m. Thursday on a first-degree election misconduct charge, which is a Class D felony.
Apparently, Rote, an enthusiastic Donald Trump supporter, cast one ballot at a local county election office, and then went to a separate satellite voting location to vote again.The system worked and Rote was caught. The local report added that the Polk County auditor said this was the first time in 12 years his office had to report alleged voter fraud.The part of the story that struck me as most interesting, though, was the part about her motivation.
Rote told Iowa Public Radio that she cast her first ballot for Trump but feared it would be changed to a vote for Hillary Clinton.”The polls are rigged,” Rote told the radio station.
Ah, I see. A Trump supporter who actually believes Trump’s claims was so worried about the legitimacy of the process that she thought it’d be a good idea to deliberately commit voter fraud. It’s a reminder that many of the Republican candidate’s most ardent supporters don’t always realize that his rhetoric is ridiculous — so they accept his falsehoods at face value..But wait, some on the right are saying, didn’t a station in Philadelphia just report on dead people casting votes? The headline may have given that impression, but the details point in a very different direction.
Al Schmidt, a GOP election commissioner, said the station brought 20 cases to his attention. His office investigated and found three types of error: Some voters were alive and mistakenly listed on death rolls; some had the same or similar names to dead people in their voting precinct and erroneously signed in the wrong space at the polls; or poll workers accidently scanned the wrong barcode on the voter rolls.In each case, the person voting did so only once, he said.
“There is no voter fraud in these cases,” he said.
Recommended
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."