Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Iowa elections official becomes latest Republican to claim voter fraud

Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate

Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate alleges nine people voted in Iowa after voting in another state in 2018 and 27 people voted in Iowa before doing so elsewhere.

Courtesy Paul Pate

Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate has joined the chorus of Republican officials who claim to have found evidence of voter fraud.

Pate announced late last week that he had referred nine voters to county attorneys for allegedly voting twice in the 2018 election. They are suspected of voting in Iowa after having voted in another state. Another 27 were identified, Pate said in a news release, of voting in Iowa first and then in another state.

The information was discovered through Iowa's involvement in the multi-state Electronic Registration Information Center, which shares data in order to improve the accuracy of voter rolls.


That is the same method Ohio's Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, used to identify 10 people who appear to have cast ballots in Ohio and another state in the 2018 election. In mid-December, LaRose announced he was referring the names to the state's attorney general.

He said then that "allowing one voter to cast multiple ballots diminishes the value of the legally cast ballot of each voter."

Iowa's Pate used similar language: "One fraudulent vote is too many. It nullifies a legally cast vote."

LaRose had earlier caused a stir when he said he found 354 people who are not U.S. citizens but were registered in the state. Of those, 77 voted in the midterm, he said.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Voting rights advocates had criticized LaRose for that report, saying what he found may have been simple mistakes, people confused about the system or people who got naturalized later than the records he was looking at.

They cited the debacle that occurred in Texas earlier in 2019, when the acting secretary of state claimed nearly 100,000 non-citizens had been found on the voter rolls. Subsequent checks revealed many of those were incorrectly identified as non-citizens and the controversy that ensued ended Republican David Whitely's chance of winning confirmation as secretary of state.

Claims of voter fraud have recently been a mostly Republican cause, starting with President Donald Trump, who claimed "millions and millions of people" voted illegally in the 2016 election and thereby cost him the popular vote. None of those claims have been verified and the commission Trump established to investigate voter fraud disbanded without issuing a report.

This past fall, Republican incumbent Matt Bevin initially claimed voter fraud when he lost a close gubernatorial race to Democrat Andy Beshear. He later dropped those claims.

Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida referred to "rampant voter fraud" in his successful bid to unseat Democrat Sen. Bill Nelson in 2018 but none was found.

Advocates say the constant claims of fraud erode voter confidence in elections. But raising concerns about improper voting is a running theme when Republicans justify removing people from voter registration rolls in the name of keeping them up to date. Federal law does require states to properly maintain voter lists by eliminating people who have moved or died.

GOP voter fraud concerns, which Democrats say are overblown, are also regularly cited when Republicans propose new laws, such as requiring voters to have an ID.

Democrats see these laws as bald attempts to reduce turnout, especially among minorities, who are more likely to vote for Democrats.

Read More

Rainbow sign that reads "All Are Welcome Here"
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

It is time to rethink DEI

In August 2019 I wrote: “Diverse people must be in every room where decisions are made.” Co-author Debilyn Molineaux and I explained that diversity and opportunity in regard to race/ethnicity, sex/gender, social identity, religion, ideology would be an operating system for the Bridge Alliance — and, we believed, for the nation as a whole.

A lot has happened since 2019.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donald Trump
Brandon Bell/Getty Images

How to approach Donald Trump's second presidency

The resistance to Donald Trump has failed. He has now shaped American politics for nearly a decade, with four more years — at least — to go. A hard truth his opponents must accept: Trump is the most dominant American politician since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

This dominance unsettles and destabilizes American democracy. Trump is a would-be authoritarian with a single overriding impulse — to help himself above all else.

Yet somehow he keeps winning.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kamala Harris greeting a large crowd

Vice President Kamala Harris is greeted by staff during her arrival at the White House on Nov. 12.

Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Democrats have work to do to reclaim the mantle of change

“Democrats are like the Yankees,” said one of the most memorable tweets to come across on X after Election Day. “Spent hundreds of millions of dollars to lose the big series and no one got fired or was held accountable.”

Too sad. But that’s politics. The disappointment behind that tweet was widely shared, but no one with any experience in politics truly believes that no one will be held accountable.

Keep ReadingShow less