Voter Fraud Prosecutions by Texas are Infrequent

A new project looking at voting rights around the country finds that in Texas, the attorney general has prosecuted just 15 cases of voter fraud since the 2012 primaries, none of which involved the type of fraud addressed by the state's controversial voter ID law.

Most of the cases involved people hired to harvest mail-in ballots, an activity that happens most often in Hispanic communities. Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said those prosecutions "are very specifically oriented toward South Texas,” an accusation that was denied by the attorney general's office.

The project, which was undertaken by the Carnegie-Knight News21 program, found that voter fraud was not particularly prevalent across the country. From 2000 through 2012, News21 found just 10 instances across the country of voter impersonation, the behavior targeted by voter ID laws, and no cases of voter impersonation over the past four years in Arizona, Ohio, Georgia, Texas or Kansas.

“Voter fraud is not a significant problem in the country,” Jennifer Clark of the Brennan Center, a public policy and law institute, told News21.

Read more: https://www.texastribune.org/2016/08/22/brief/