Spin Control: Pay attention to voter fraud cases, but remember they’re extremely rare

As a young reporter on the cops and courts beat, I developed a pretty jaundiced view of television detective dramas that solved the murder by uncovering a surprise perpetrator in the span of an hour.

Homicide detectives I encountered took longer and did more extensive investigations but often confided to me that it was usually a person closest to the victim. For an adult, it was usually the husband or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend. For a child, a parent or step parent.

Those old cop reporter days came back when I read the story of voter fraud reported by Donald Hartle, a Las Vegas businessman who was shocked last November to find that elections officials had received a signed ballot from his wife, Rosemarie, who had been dead for nearly three years.

Hartle went on television to denounce this voter fraud, and the unknown perp who “took advantage of his grief” by somehow absconding with Rosemarie’s ballot that had been mailed to his home, then apparently signing it and sending it in.

“That is pretty sickening to me to be honest with you,” he told KLAS, the CBS affiliate in Vegas a few days after the election. “It made no sense to me, but it lent some credence to what you’ve been hearing in the media about these possibilities and now it makes me wonder, how pervasive is this?”

The case quickly became a cause célèbre among people and TV talking heads who wanted Nevada’s election results thrown out and Donald Trump declared the winner despite trailing Joe Biden by about 33,000 votes, extrapolating that and a few other reported cases as proof of widespread fraud and corruption.

The case was referred to local prosecutors and an investigation did eventually come up with a likely suspect who was charged last week with felony voter fraud.

Donald Hartle.

The tipoff may have been that the ballot was counted because the signature on the mail-in ballot matched his late wife’s signature, which would be pretty difficult for some random ballot pirate who reached into the Hartle mailbox and made off with Rosemarie’s ballot. There may have also been the “tell” known as Hamlet’s mother rule, who observes that a character on stage “doth protest too much, methinks.” He may have had motive, considering he’s a top executive at a company that hosted President Trump for a late campaign rally in Vegas.

As every good cop reporter knows to emphasize, Hartle is merely charged with voter fraud and is innocent until proven guilty. His attorney has told local reporters he’s looking forward to responding to the charges. Thanks to the attention he helped draw to the case, plenty of others will be looking forward to that, also.

This is not to suggest that voter fraud doesn’t happen. The Washington Secretary of State’s office checked with elections officials across the state, and so far has reports of 175 possible cases from the 2020 election referred to the local county sheriff or prosecutor offices. Ten have been taken to court for prosecution, several settled and many are still under investigation.

In one of the few resolved cases so far, a 77-year-old Randle man was convicted of voting twice by marking his ballot and his wife’s ballot. She died in August, but he told deputies he did it because he knew how she would have voted. Apparently he’s not as accomplished of a forger as whoever voted for Rosemarie Hartle because the signature was rejected at the elections office.

He was fined $600 and temporarily lost his right to vote.

Other cases around the state involve people who received more than one ballot because they’ve registered twice and apparently decided if the state was going to send them two ballots, they were going to vote both. Or people who apparently collected several ballots for people who live in their homes, then marked, signed and mailed them.

The counties that have thus far notified the state counted a total of almost 3.5 million ballots. If all 175 of those referrals were to result in a successful prosecution, that would be a fraud rate of .00005%.

Even if all 175 cases involved votes for the same candidate – unlikely, considering miscreants come in all political persuasions – there’s only one statewide race in the last century they could have changed. That would be the 2004 gubernatorial race in which Christine Gregoire beat Dino Rossi by 129 votes after two recounts. Make that 133 if you count the four illegal votes for Rossi that turned up during the state Republican Party’s challenge to Gregoire’s victory.

Because it’s rare and usually de minimis doesn’t mean it should be ignored. People who get caught doing it should be punished and systems should be improved to make it rarer.

But it also doesn’t mean that an individual case here or there can be used to support a theory of widespread conspiracy by criminal masterminds trying to steal the election.

Because as every young cop reporter also learns – and cases of voter fraud tend to bear out – criminal masterminds only exist in comic books.