NEW YORK, NY -- October 26 -- Today Miles Rapoport, President of the nonpartisan public policy organization Demos and former Secretary of the State of Connecticut, issued the following statement in response to alarmist and inaccurate claims of voter fraud by George Will in an October 24, 2004 column:

"Conservative columnists continue to spread misinformation about voter fraud, and George Will, who wrote about it twice in as many weeks, is a shining example. Most recently, he asserted dubious claims that ‘new' voter registration procedures – some enacted as far back as 1993 – and other measures to ensure greater voter participation have led to an increase in voter fraud. It simply isn't true. But we do face real challenges to fair elections.

"For instance, the facts show that disenfranchisement of rightful voters exceed allegations of fraud by the tens of thousands.

"In the 2000 election in St. Louis, countless minority voters were turned away from the polls after standing in line for hours waiting to cast their votes. With an expedited legal appeal, the courts tried to extend voting hours to allow those standing in line to vote, to no avail. But Will makes a partisan case out of this attempt at fair ballot access, obfuscating a nationwide epidemic of understaffed and overcapacity polling stations.

"Similarly, he mistakenly dismisses concerns about punch card ballots, claiming that voters who fail to register their Presidential preference on such ballots are themselves at fault. He fails to acknowledge that, in counties across the country, the use of punch-card systems resulted in the discarding of thousands of ballots – two to ten times more than other available systems.

"Will's statements are misleading and misdirected. The key findings of our 2003 report Securing the Vote: An Analysis of Past Election Fraud underscored the reality of voter fraud -- that incidents are infrequent and have rarely affected the outcome of an election. Instead, the report found that (or if not in the report "the reality is that ) the gravest problems with our recent elections were procedural errors, that some election officials prevented legitimately registered voters from casting their ballots at the polls, and that thousands of voters were disenfranchised after casting ballots that were later invalidated, thrown out, or simply lost.

"Now this year there could be hundreds of thousands of eligible voters whose votes will not count due to improper and potentially illegal application of our provisional ballot laws or because of erroneous purging of voter rolls. Then there is the continuation of a long tradition of intimidation and harassment at the polls, as The New York Times reported on October 23, with thousands of partisan ‘challengers' mobilized to confront voters in Ohio. The list goes on and on.

"Our election officials should be concerned with making sure that all eligible voters, including the millions that are registered for the first time, have complete ballot access and that their votes will count. Cheating eligible voters out of their voice in this democracy, that's the real fraud, and that's where George Will should focus his attention."

For research about voter fraud and the challenges to the integrity of our elections in 2004, download the "Democracy at Risk" press briefing kit at www.demos-usa.org.

Demos: A Network for Ideas & Action is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy organization based in New York.

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