New Findings Show Dozens May Have Cast Double Votes In 2012 Election
BALTIMORE (WJZ) -- It's a founding principle of our country--you only get one vote. But election groups say they've found dozens of voters casting ballots in the last presidential elections in both Maryland and Virginia.
Derek Valcourt has more on how the problem was discovered and what's being done about it.
In this computerized age, you would think this wouldn't be happening. But advocacy groups say it turns out tens of thousands of voters are registered in both states. A fraction of those people are breaking the law with double votes.
Mitt Romney and President Obama battled for every vote in the contentious 2012 match-up. But new findings by advocacy groups show a small number of the votes they got may not have been not legal.
Election Integrity Maryland and the Virgina Voters Alliance analyzed registration rolls and found 164 people cast 2012 ballots in both Maryland and Virginia--in violation of federal law.
Nearly 44,000 people were registered to vote in both states--results they call a large scale risk to fair elections.
"In doing this crosscheck, we are doing privately what we assumed the State Boards of Elections has been doing all along," said Cathey Kelleher, Elections Integrity Maryland. "Why aren't they doing it? And why does it take a private organization to bring this to their attention?"
"Anybody who votes twice, to me, that's a major problem," said Rep. Elijah Cumming, (D) Baltimore.
Congressman Elijah Cummings agrees modern technology should be able to detect duplicate registrations from state to state. But:
"I don't want those people who are advocating stricter voter identification to look at this and say now we need to make it even harder for people to vote," Cummings said.
At University of Maryland, election law professor Larry Gibson suggests many election integrity groups are conservative leaning and their election findings are often disproven.
"To the extent there's a voter problem. It's not a problem of people voting twice, it's trying to get people to vote once," Gibson said. "That's the challenge."
Election integrity groups say hey have turned their findings over to the appropriate state and federal agencies for investigation.
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