B
y the time you read this column, I — on Aug. 4, along with my immediate family, and many of you — will have driven to my polling location, presented my drivers license to the poll worker, placed my initials on the form confirming my address, stepped into a booth, taken a black sharpie marker to fill in the small ovals and then placed my paper ballot into the scanner for counting.
Since I turned 18 and became eligible to vote, I don’t remember missing an election.
In rural Missouri, we are lucky. The longest wait to vote I have ever had was a couple of minutes. In large cities, voters may have to wait in line for hours for the privilege of voting. This can deter people from voting.
Findings from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and Gallup Democracy for All Project survey recently showed that 73 percent of Americans — both Democrats and Republicans — are concerned about the integrity of this year’s congressional and state elections in November.
That’s not good. Suspicions about the integrity of elections keep people from stepping into the ballot box.
For years, liberal activists have minimized concerns of cheating in our elections. That message is now being refuted. For those who pay attention to the news, there are more and more instances of America’s election system being abused.
The Heritage Foundation has a web page called electionfraud.heritage.org that displays election fraud cases by state that have been proven and have resulted in criminal convictions. Vermont has the fewest fraud cases, at zero; Minnesota the most, at 138; Missouri is at 38, on the lower end.
In May 2025, the U.S. Attorney’s Office charged Haoxiang Gao, a citizen and national of the People’s Republic of China, with illegally voting in the 2024 election while attending the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Also last May, 15 Democrats were indicted and charged in Texas for election fraud, including illegal ballot-harvesting. Among those charged was a former Texas House candidate Cecilia Castellano, former Bexar County Democrat Party Chair Juan Manuel Medina, Frio County Judge Rochelle Camacho and former Frio County Elections Administrator Carlos Segura. These are people with authority.
Last year the Trump Administration gave states access to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ SAVE database. Texas cross-references that with their voter rolls and found 2,7624 possible illegal immigrants registered to vote.
As reported on FoxNews.com, “since April 2025, more than 24,000 potential non-U.S. citizens have been identified on voter rolls through the SAVE program.” Most of those are in red states. Democrat-led states criticized for not removing illegals from their voting rolls include California, New York, Illinois and New Jersey.
This summer, New Jersey discovered its own problem with non-citizens through another route. They use a lax motor-voter process to register voters. Prospective jurors are selected for jury duty from their voting database. Turns out that around 75,000 individuals per year are disqualified from jury service because they admit they are not U.S. citizens.
Navy veteran and GOP Senate candidate Adam Schwarze discovered voter fraud in Minnesota last month. Turns out the Land of 10,000 Lakes shows he voted in person in the 2012 presidential election. That was impossible. Schwarze was in California attending BUD/S, the Navy’s elite training course for SEALs. Minnesota does not require an ID to vote, something the Save America Act, pushed by Donald Trump, would remedy. There are thirteen additional states, plus Washington D.C., that do not require any documentation to vote.
In March, the Department of Justice charged Mahady Sacko, an illegal immigrant living in Pennsylvania, with voting in the last five presidential elections, despite having a deportation order since 2002.
In May, the FBI charged four non-citizens with illegally voting in New Jersey.
Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, 64, of Marina Del Ray, Calif., reached a plea deal on May 18 with federal prosecutors where she admitted to illegally paying homeless people to sign election petitions and to register to vote. She allegedly did this for the last two decades.
The Save America Act, supported by 71 percent of Americans and opposed by almost every Democrat in Congress, will go a long way toward ensuring our elections are free from fraud.
