We need to investigate election fraud — not dismiss the possibility

The lead story in Nov. 28’s paper says that voter fraud is rare (“Trump claims ‘millions’ of people voted illegally”). On Oct. 24, 2014, The Washington Post (not a conservative source, by any means) published this research, based on a large survey:

“How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.”

Some have disputed these findings. But this should be enough to make us look into this issue and find out for sure, and not just dismiss it out of hand.

This story was originally published December 2, 2016 at 11:15 PM with the headline "We need to investigate election fraud — not dismiss the possibility."