“You are hereby notified that your right to vote has been challenged by a qualified elector. The Hamilton County Board of Elections has scheduled a hearing regarding your right to vote on Monday, September 10th, 2012, at 8:30 A.M. . . . You have the right to appear and testify, call witnesses and be represented by counsel.”

--Notice that Teresa Sharp, 53, received from The Hamilton County Board of Elections, as recounted in the article ”The Voter-Fraud Myth: The man who has stoked fear about imposters at the polls“ by Jane Mayer, in the Oct. 29 issue of The New Yorker.

Mayer's piece is scary and worth reading. The Voter ID laws are the new Jim Crow. They target African-Americans and the elderly without saying they target African-Americans and elderly. Meanwhile, the man behind this targeting, Republican lawyer Hans von Spakovsky of Atlanta, Ga., can't cite much evidence of voter fraud given his almost preternatural interest in the subject.

A recent study by the Pew Center found that more than 1.8 million dead people were registered to vote, and 2.5 million people were registered to vote in more than one state (I might be one of those, since I voted in Minnesota in 2006 and in Washington state since 2008), but von Spakovsky has no idea how many of these cases led to actual voter fraud. He cites a 2000 investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in which, in the previous two decades, 5400 dead people were recorded as voting; but he doesn't cite the limp follow-up in which the Georgia Secretary of State's office indicated that most of these were clerical errors. ”Upon closer inspection, the paper admitted, its only specific example of a deceased voter casting a ballot didn’t hold up. The ballot of a living voter had been attributed to a dead man whose name was nearly identical,“ Mayer writes.

So from 1.8 million potential cases of voter fraud to 5400 actual cases of voter fraud in Georgia to ... zero actual cases of voter fraud in Georgia.

Later von Spakovsky gives Mayer the names of two experts who would confirm the peril of voter fraud: Robert Pastor, the director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University, and Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia. Neither did. The opposite. “I don’t think that voter-impersonation fraud is a serious problem,” Pastor said. 

Yet since 2011, pushed by von Spakovsky and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-sponsored, right-wing organization, 37 states have enacted or proposed some form of voter ID law.

Other quotes from the piece:

• “This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate.” — Pres. Bill Clinton
• “[Von Spakovsky] is trying to create a cure where there is no sickness.” — Rep. John Lewis, (D-GA)
• “You can't steal an election one person at a time. You can by stuffing ballot boxes—but voter I.D. won't stop that.” — Robert Brandon, president of the Fair Elections Legal Network
• “It makes no sense for individual voters to impersonate someone. It's like committing a felony at the police station, with virtually no chance of affecting the election outcome.” — Lorraine Minnite, Rutgers professor and author of “The Myth of Voter Fraud”
• “I think they are trying to stop as many black people as they can from voting. I won't even know until Election Day if I got the right to vote. But if they tell me I can't vote—it is over. They are going to have to call the police.” — Teresa Sharp, citizen, Ohio

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