Voter fraud investigation leaves out lots of cases in Minnesota

A new investigation by News21, an in-depth reporting project, says that Minnesota has only had 10 alleged election fraud cases since 2000. 

It got big play at a variety of national and regional media venues. The Philly Inquirer's headline read: Investigation: election day fraud 'virtually nonexistent'

But they miss tons of cases in the state that I found with a quick Google search.  

On their website, News21 says they sent out more than 2,000 public record requests to officials across the country. They say reporters then tried to fill in blanks left by uncooperative officials with court documents and media reports. 

News21 came up with 10 cases in Minnesota since 2000. Most of those 10 are footnoted by stories in smaller papers or cite the Republican National Lawyers Association.

Here are some of the results I found:

MPR requested voter fraud conviction data for every county in the state in late 2011: "The data, collected by the Minnesota Supreme Court, shows that 144 people have been convicted of voter fraud since 2009." 

And on the page marked 7 in this document is a breakdown of just Ramsey County, 114 convicted or pleaded guilty in cases that arose between 2006-2011 (just in Ramsey County!). 

I don't expect them to have discovered every incident of voter fraud ever (and they don't either, according to their website). But these are easy pickings. 

Maybe it's a mistake, maybe it's a stray algorithm, or maybe Minnesota officials were just very difficult to get information from. I don't know. So, I wrote an email to News21 asking why more cases weren't documented. I didn't receive a response. I'll update this post if I do. 

Does the fact that the investigation leaves out at least 134 voter fraud cases that the state Supreme Court compiled undermine their thesis, which is that Voter ID laws are a solution in search of a problem? Not necessarily, because a brief glance at these cases show that most of them wouldn't be impacted by voter ID laws anyway. But it makes you question their research.