This material was created by Campus Progress.
Remember when the chair of the Maine Republican Party waved a list of 206 college students’ names in the air, claiming each of them had committed voter fraud despite having no hard evidence?
Well, it turns out the hoopla was just that—inaccurate rhetoric intended to suppress young people’s desire for civic engagement.
Maine Secretary of State Charlie Summers spent two months investigating the students and found that none had committed voter fraud, according to the Bangor Daily News.
Of the 206 students on Webster’s list, 77 had registered in their home state and then again in Maine, but none cast more than one ballot in a single election.
(Read More: GOP Official Tries to Suppress Student Voters—Despite No Evidence of Fraud)
Webster seemed to be a wild goose chase for potentially evil, malicious student voters, as more than a third of the 206 students he claimed were registered in two states simply weren’t.
By law, voters are not required to unregister in one state when registering in another. In fact, being registered in more than one place is common for many Americans, not just students.
As we have pointed out, Webster’s arguments are flawed to begin with. He argues that to vote, citizens should be required to “establish residency” and “register my car and pay taxes in that community.” He added: “You can’t just become a student and vote wherever you want.”
In Maine, students are legally entitled to register where they attend school, so long as they establish citizenship, age, and residency—the latter of which can be with something as simple as a piece of mail or even a verbal oath.
As part of the two month investigation, Summers found one non-citizen who voted; the El Salvadoran has since been deported. Based on the sample size, that’s just .004 percent of voters.
Unfortunately, despite the now crystal-clear evidence that voter fraud simply isn’t occurring in Maine, Summers is still vowing to fix the state’s “fragile and vulnerable” election system, including a proposal to end same-day registration.
Summers shouldn’t be punishing voters, though, as 84 percent of the potential voter fraud cases he investigated where simply “clerical error.” (Read Summers’ full report here.)
David Farmer, from the Protect Maine Votes coalition, says the results make it clear that Summers is “playing politics by tying voter fraud to same-day registration,” according to the Bangor Daily News, and that Webster’s allegations against students were “false outrageous and, perhaps, defamatory.”
Brian Stewart is a journalism network associate at Campus Progress.
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