Why Republicans Want Voter ID Laws-Truth! & Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
Republicans want voter ID laws because President Obama lost every state with voter ID laws in 2012, and there was widespread election fraud in states without voter ID laws that year.
The Truth:
The idea that there was widespread voter fraud in 2012, and that President Obama lost every state with voter ID laws, are a combination of truth and fiction.
We’ll start with the claim that Obama lost every state with voter ID laws in 2012.
There were 11 states with voter ID laws in effect for the 2012 election, and Obama won four of them: Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire and Hawaii, the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL) reports.
But it’s true that Mitt Romney carried states with “strict” voter ID laws that required a photo ID. Those states were Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee and Indiana. And it’s worth noting that Obama won Indiana in 2008 before a new voter ID law was implemented there for the 2012 election.
Still, that doesn’t mean that photo voter ID laws were behind Obama losing those states. A Democrat hasn’t won Kansas in a presidential contest since 1964, for example, so it’s not exactly a surprise that Romney carried the state in 2012.
Beside the claim that Obama lost states with voter ID laws in 2012, election data from specific districts around the country have been cited to argue that there was widespread voter fraud. We’ll take a look at each of those claims here:
Obama Received 100% of Votes in 59 Districts in Philadelphia Region-Truth!
Obama won 100 percent of votes in a number of districts in the Philadelphia region in both 2008 and 2012. In 2012, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Obama shut out Romney in 59 urban precincts there:
Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia who has studied African American precincts, said he had occasionally seen 100 percent of the vote go for the Democratic candidate. Chicago and Atlanta each had precincts that registered no votes for Republican Sen. John McCain in 2008.
“I’d be surprised if there weren’t a handful of precincts that didn’t cast a vote for Romney,” he said. But the number of zero precincts in Philadelphia deserves examination, Sabato added.
“Not a single vote for Romney or even an error? That’s worth looking into,” he said.
In a city with 1,687 of the ward subsets known as divisions, each with hundreds of voters, 59 is about 3.5 percent of the total.
Overall, Obama won 85 percent of the vote in Philadelphia County. Mitt Romney captured more than 91,000 votes in the Philadelphia region, data shows.
Obama Received 100% of Votes in Wood County, Ohio-Fiction!
Poll results from Wood County, Ohio, show that Obama didn’t receive 100 percent of the votes in any district there. Overall, Obama won about 51 percent of the votes in Wood County.
St. Lucie County Florida Had More Votes Cast than Registered Voters-Fiction!
There weren’t more votes cast than there were registered voters in St. Lucie County, Florida, in 2012.
Official election results show 123,301 votes were cast, and there were 175,554 registered voters. Romney earned 56,202 votes and Obama earned 65,869 in St. Lucie County.
National SEAL Museum in St. Lucie County Had 158% Voter Turnout-Fiction!
Election data shows that there were 2,756 registered voters in the district with the SEAL Museum polling location, and 2,243 votes were cast there. That amounts to an 81 percent voter turnout there — not 158 percent.
Palm Beach County, Florida, Had 141% Voter Turnout-Fiction!
Palm Beach County didn’t record a 141 percent voter turnout in 2012. The county’s supervisor of elections reported that about 70 percent of registered voters casted ballots.
In the end, claims made in the “why Republicans want voter ID laws” commentary are a combination of truth and fiction. Still, the commentary fails to prove the larger point that there was widespread voter fraud in 2012.