Republican state lawmakers have seized on a recent State Board of Elections report identifying 35,750 NC voters whose first name, last name, and date of birth matched an active voter in another state as evidence of widespread voter fraud and justification for the state’s new voting restrictions.

“This [report] is proof positive that voter fraud has in fact occurred,” House Rules Committee Chair Tim Moore said at a meeting of the Elections Oversight Committee. “If you’ve got a [matching] first name, last name, and date of birth, you’ve got the same person. What are the odds of that?”

The probability of two voters in a population of more than 90 million sharing the same name and date of birth is actually fairly high. In a 2007 study, Michael McDonald and Justin Levitt concluded that in a sufficiently large pool of voters, “two entries listing the same name and birthdate are likely to demonstrate statistical coincidence rather than fraud.” In addition to the number of legitimate “doppelgängers,” voter rolls often include the names of people who have moved to other states without cancelling their old registration, thereby giving the false appearance of duplicate voters.

A new report out of the nonprofit watchdog group Democracy North Carolina clearly illustrates the odds of finding these duplicates — a cross check of the 150 members of North Carolina’s General Assembly shows that four state legislators have a duplicate registration with the same first and last name and exact same date of birth in another state.

“Before legislators get too carried away with their rhetoric, maybe it would help if they know they could be indicting themselves,” said Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy NC, in a press release. “The duplicate voters who legislative leaders and conservative bloggers are going crazy about include themselves, me, and maybe even you.”

By Republican legislative leaders’ standards, Rep. Duane Hall (D-Wake), Rep. Rodney Moore (D-Mecklenburg), Rep. Charles Jeter (R-Mecklenburg), and Sen. Ronald Rabin (R-Harnett) could all be suspected of voter fraud. The legislators each have a duplicate in another state – Florida, South Carolina, New York, and Mississippi respectively.

“Some of these duplicates may actually be the legislator when he lived in another state, but the record shows he has stopped voting there,” Hall said. “This kind of duplicate only proves that people routinely forget to cancel their old registration, not that there’s mass voter fraud. It’s unfortunate that some zealots are using the fear of fraud in a way that can hurt innocent poeple.”

Bob Hall notes that the interstate crosscheck program used by the State Board of Elections to uncover matching records has come under fire for calculating inflated numbers of duplicate voters, in part because it includes the names of people who have moved to and registered in a new state.

Read the full press release here.