Oh My: Audit Finds Evidence of Widespread Voter Fraud in North Carolina

This looks like a very big deal (via WNCN):

State election officials are looking into thousands of cases where registered voters may have voted in two states or after their reported death. A report presented Wednesday by Elections Director Kim Strach to the Joint Legislative Elections Oversight Committee said 81 voters have a voter history later than the date of their death. The audit further identified 13,416 deceased voters on voter rolls in Oct. 13. The audit showed 155,692 registered North Carolina voters whose first and last names, dates of birth and last four digits of their Social Security number match those of voters registered in other states, but who most recently registered or voted elsewhere. A total of 35,750 voters with matching first and last names and date of birth were registered in North Carolina and another state, and voted in both states in the 2012 general election. Another 765 voters with an exact match of first and last name, date of birth and last four digits of their Social Security number were registered and voted in the 2012 general election in North Carolina and another state...A total of 28 states participated in the crosscheck, leaving data missing from 22 other states.

According to this audit by the North Carolina Elections Oversight Committee, at least 81 dead people have been voting from the grave, and more than 35,000 people with matching full names and dates of birth voted in both North Carolina and another state in the 2012 general election. To put that number in context, Barack Obama carried North Carolina by fewer than 15,000 votes in 2008. Double voting, needless to say, is a crime. Furthermore, state officials were only able to cross check their rolls and voter activity records with 28 other states, leaving loads of potential data missing. The above news story ends with statistics that partisan deniers would typically use to dismiss the entire notion of voter fraud:

In 2012, nearly 7 million ballots were cast in the general and two primary elections. Of those 6,947,317 ballots, the state Board of Elections said 121 alleged cases of voter fraud were referred to the appropriate district attorney's office. That means of the nearly 7 million votes cast, voter fraud accounted for 0.00174 percent of the ballots.

Those statistics may be convincing to someone who hadn't just read the rest of the article. Several weeks ago, we highlighted a 2012 report out of Florida in which a local reporter took it upon himself to use a single, extremely narrow method to ferret out voter fraud. By cross-referencing Florida's voter rolls with jury duty cards on which people had checked a box declining to serve due to their non-citizen status, the NBC correspondent pinpointed nearly 100 ineligible voters in his county alone. Several admitted on camera to (a) not being US citizens, and (b) voting in US elections. "I vote every year!" one woman boasted. Last week, the California State Senate voted to suspend three Democratic members, one of whom was recently convicted of eight felonies, including multiple counts of voter fraud. Yet the "myth" of voter fraud remains solidly ensconced within the Left's political catechism. Voter fraud undeniably exists. The extent to which it exists remains unclear, as the stunning results of North Carolina's audit demonstrate. Voter ID laws reflect common sense, are constitutional, and are overwhelmingly popular. I'll leave you with the Democrat Party Chairwoman openly celebrating a court decision that halted a Republican-initiated effort to purge a swing state's voter rolls of ineligible and non-citizen voters. She tweeted this hours before the North Carolina story broke:

UPDATE - A Virginia election official is arguing with me on Twitter, contending that the apparent double voting *may* be the result of clerical errors. That certainly may account for some of the 36,000 apparent double votes -- but all of them? Even if 90 percent of that figures is due to something other than fraud, that still leaves 3,600 illegal votes. How many illegal votes are acceptable?