Voter impersonation a real threat? Really?

'Voter fraud through impersonation ... is frequent and is a very real threat to our towns and cities.” A recent letter writer to The Gazette makes this assertion with no corroborating evidence whatsoever.

I need data from reliable sources to believe this claim. Sources I have read - including consolidated reports of fraudulent voting from every state - suggest that such fraud is so rare as to be almost non-existent.

For example, the right-leaning Heritage Foundation documented 172 cases of all sorts of voter fraud between 2016 and 2019. There were almost 129 million votes cast in the 2016 Presidential election alone. That's 0.000001335 percent of fraudulent votes nationally. There were three cases of fraudulent voting in Iowa between 2016 and the present. Since 2001, Iowa has had 17 such cases. Remember: this is a report from a conservative organization.

When it occurs, voter fraud must be prosecuted to the full extent of our laws, but I still need hard evidence that such fraud is a substantial or pervasive problem in Iowa, or anywhere else in the United States.

John Klaus

Mount Vernon