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1 Rudy Mehrbani, Heritage Fraud Database: An Assessment 1 (2017)

handle is hein.brennan/hertaudb0001 and id is 1 raw text is: BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE TWENTY HERITAGE FRAUD DATABASE: AN ASSESSMENT By Rudy Mehrbani President Donald Trump's Fraud Commission members are relying on a Heritage Foundation database that claims to contain almost 1.,100 instances of voter fraud. But a close review of the database reveals that it substantially inflates and exaggerates the occurrence of voter fraud. Hans von Spakovsky, one of the Commission's members and a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, distributed a copy of the Foundation's database - A SamplinE of Election Fraud Cases from Across the Caountr - at the panel's first meeting. Since its release, the database has been touted by von Spakovsky and others as widespread evidence of misconduct. Von Spakovsky said that it included almost 1,100 proven cases ofvoter fraud. Indeed, it has become its main piece of supposed evidence of voter fraud. The Commission's Vice Chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, was photographed with a copy of the database the day of the panel's first meeting. He later referred to the database in justifying the Commission's existence by claiming the commission presented 938 cases of convictions for voter fraud, though the Commission did not review or even discuss a single case at the meeting. The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law has conducted an analysis of the Heritage database and here's our conclusion: There is nothing in the database to confirm claims of rampant voter fraud. In fact, it shows just the opposite. The database includes an assortment of cases, many unrelated or tangentially related, going back decades, with only a handful pertaining to non-citizens voting or impersonation at the polls. They add up to a molecular fraction of the total votes cast nationwide. Inadvertently, the Heritage Foundation's database undermines its claim of widespread voter fraud. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS The database includes 749 cases involving almost 1,100 individuals.' A closer examination reveals: Only 105 cases come within the past five years, and 488 within the past 10 years. Thirty-two cases are from the 1980s and 1990s. Indicative of its overreach, the database even includes a case from 1948 (when Harry S. Truman beat Thomas Dewey) and a case from 1972 (when HERITAGE FRAUD DATABASE: AN ANALYSIS 1 The database lists 754 cases involving 1072 individuals engaged in the alleged activity, but five cases are duplicates involving the same individual and the same allegations. In several instances, multiple cases are included for separate defendants part of the same conspiracy (see, e.g., James Vadella and Michael Vadella); these cases are included in our final count of 749.

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