Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens our Democracy

Location: The Heritage Foundation's Van Andel Center

Americans were forced to confront an ugly reality with the Florida Fiasco of 2000: The U.S. has the sloppiest election systems of any industrialized nation, so sloppy that at least eight of the 19 hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11.

In Stealing Elections, John Fund takes the reader on a national tour of voter fraud scandals ranging from rural states like Texas and Mississippi to big cities such as Philadelphia and Milwaukee. He explores dark episodes such as the way "vote brokers" stole a mayoral election in Miami in 1998 by tampering with 4700 absentee ballots. He shows how, in the aftermath of the Motor Voter Law of 1993, Californians used mail-in forms to get absentee ballots for fictitious people and pets, while in St. Louis it was discovered that voter rolls included 13,000 more names than the U.S. Census listed as the total number of adults in the city. Additionally, Fund shows that the computerized voting machines with which election officials are trying to reassure voters come even greater concerns for security and accuracy.

Stealing Elections gives a chilling portrait of our electoral vulnerability - in the 2004 presidential election and on into the future - and shows how a lethal combination of bureaucratic bungling and ballot rigging have put our democracy at risk.

John Fund, a member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, writes the paper's daily "Political Diary." He has written on voter fraud and election irregularities for the last decade in the Wall Street Journal, New Republic, American Spectator and other publications. In the past year, Fund has made over 90 appearances on Fox News, MSNBC, C-Span, and CNBC.