Epic Fail

Jon Husted Wastes Everyone’s Time, Finds Virtually No Fraud

Written by SK Ashby

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted's years-long crusade to stop voter fraud has turned up an astonishingly-low number of cases of potential fraud.

via ThinkProgress

After launching an investigation into what he called an “expanding loophole” allowing non-citizens to vote in Ohio and potentially decide elections, he announced Thursday that 145 non-citizens were registered to vote illegally in 2014, amounting to just .0002 percent of the 7.7 million registered voters in the state.

0.0002 percent may not seem like a big deal to you, but consider this: even fewer than that actually voted. According to ThinkProgress, only 44 non-citizens have may voted illegally since the year 2000.

Fewer still have faced prosecution for fraud because the majority of cases are accidental or inadvertent.

“In all of the instances where potential voter fraud has been brought up, even outside of undocumented people who may be voting… the prosecutors have said, ‘this is not a person who was really trying to defraud the system. They made an innocent mistake and this is not what voter fraud really is,'” Ohio ACLU Senior Policy Director Mike Brickner told ThinkProgress.

27 cases of possible fraud in 2014 have been referred to the state attorney general's office.

17 cases of possible fraud were referred to county prosecutors in 2013, but only four of them were actually convicted.

In other words, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has embarked on a campaign that has uncovered so few cases of fraud worthy of prosecution that you could count them on your hands. The number of serious cases he has uncovered wouldn't even be enough to change the outcome of a high school student body election.

Not that it matters in the minds of conservative doomsayers. In their bizarro world, 44 cases of fraud in 14 years is irrefutable proof that the flood gates have opened and President Obama's secret army of immigrant voters is poised to usurp total control.