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Brandon Rickey
tion fraud, which is “any process that corrupts the electoral process by which ballots are obtained, marked, or tabulated; the process by which election results are canvassed and certified; or processed by which voters are registered” (Schultz 2008, 494). When this definition is narrowed to only include fraud committed by voters—and not by election officials, political parties, candidates, and others involved in the administration of the electoral process—the amount of voter fraud committed is even more scant. Schultz notes that many of the other findings by the Carter-Baker report of voter fraud are miniscule. The state of Washington, for example, turned up six cases of double voting and nineteen instances of persons voting in the name of the dead. Assuming these findings are accurate, the twenty-five instances out of 2,812,675 votes cast, equals a 0.0009% rate of voter fraud. The Carter-Baker report also cited the example of fifty-two convictions by the Justice Department. This means that out of 196,139,871 votes cast in federal elections, fifty-two were fraudulent, a rate of .00003% (Shultz 2008). While the state may have an interest in responding to fraud and combating it, the state’s interest is rather small and hardly compelling when one considers studies that show that voter fraud is rare. Therefore, were the state forced to satisfy the compelling state interest requirement of the strict scrutiny standard, it would fail to do so. The Indiana Voter ID Law is Not “Narrowly Tailored” to Further State’s interest in Combating voter Fraud The second reason that Indiana’s Voter ID Law does not withstand strict scrutiny is that it is not narrowly tailored to further the government’s interest in preventing voter fraud. The law only combats in-person voter fraud, but it does nothing to prevent absentee voter fraud. While the Carter-Baker commission was no doubt correct in stating that voter fraud does occur, most examples of voter fraud occur via absentee voting. Voter ID Laws are merely designed to prevent persons attempting to cast a ballot in-person from committing voter fraud (Lang 2010, Kelly 2009). When a person votes via an absentee ballot, they are not required to show any form of identification (Overton 2007). All that is needed when a person votes absentee is a signature, making it relatively easy to commit fraud simply by forgery. Voter ID Laws do not prevent other kinds of voter fraud, such as voting by felons, voters registered at vacant lots, or double voting. Pabey v. Pastrick, 816 N.E.2d 1138 (2004) demonstrates how individuals can commit voter fraud. The case involved the 2004 Democratic Mayoral Primary in East Chicago, in which incumbent Robert Pastrick was running against challenger George Pabey. Pastrick edged out Pabey by 278 votes in