Of course, voter fraud has been with us for many years, but generally only in specific races, but with the upsurge in illegal immigration, the potential and the opportunity for fraud has ballooned, and the biggest influence on the phenomenon is the "Motor Voter law" passed by the Democrat majority Congress in 1995 and signed by President Clinton. Voter registration and eligibility historically (and Constitutionally) was something left to the individual states, until Motor Voter effectively federalized the system, requiring registration at motor vehicle bureaux and given that citizenship is required for voter eligibility but is not required for holders of driver's licenses, the likelihood of non citizens voting certainly is augmented by the law.
A recent article compares numbers from the US Census Bureau and the Federal Election Commission and reports that from 2011 to 2015, there were 3.5 million more people registered to vote than there were adult citizens.
462 US counties had voter registration totals in excess of 100 per cent of the number of adult citizens, topped by San Diego county, California which had 810,966 more voters than adult citizens. Los Angeles county had 707,745 more voters. Again, we emphasize that this does not mean that there were that many illegal votes cast - or even that there were any illegal votes cast, only that the potential for fraud exists. And let's remember that for most of the 20th century, in most places, somewhere between 60 per cent and 75 percent of legal adults registered to vote. It would be great if every legal adult registered to vote, but in practice it would be very unlikely that 100 percent of the adults in any given district would register to vote.
The Election Studies Journal, on online publication, reports that as many as 2.8 million illegal votes were cast in 2008. True the Vote says there were as many as 3 million in 2016. Just Facts, a think tank, used data from Harvard/you.gov and calculated that as many as 5.7 non citizens voted in 2008 and 3.6 million in 2012.
Dozens of people have been found guilty of voter fraud, but the solution is pretty simple: turn the matter back to the states, trusting them to police their own voter rolls. Allow the states to purge non voters. Peruse the obituary columns and death records and check them against voter rolls. Improper registrations are the ingredient of voter fraud. States should be free to require secure identification of voters, and they should be free to control their own voter registration systems as they did prior to Motor Voter. We should encourage all citizens to register and vote. We should prevent voter fraud. Those two are not mutually exclusive, and they should be supported by everyone who believes in honest elections. Every illegal vote effectively cancels one legal vote.
Republican claims of fraud and Democrat claims that there is no significant fraud each perhaps may be exaggerated, but there is a simple method to check their accuracy: make sure that each registered voter is alive, is a citizen, and lives within the district in which he or she is registered. That is not too much to expect and should in no way reduce the number of legal voters.