Hans von Spakovsky, a prominent alarmist about election fraud in America, has posted an essay at the National Review taking issue with my piece about him in the current issue, “The Voter-Fraud Myth.” In essence, von Spakovsky asserts that the peril posed by voters illegally impersonating others at the polls is real, and that to suggest otherwise is a “false narrative” advanced by the “blind” political left.

Von Spakovsky, a legal scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation who will serve this coming Tuesday as an election official in Fairfax County, Virginia—the swing state’s most populous and most liberal county—is worth paying attention to if only because he represents the most vocal element of what may become a bitter, partisan fight over the election returns, should the margins of victory be exceptionally close.

Von Spakovsky is right, of course, that America has a woefully antiquated system of elections, and a history pockmarked by bipartisan fraud. All of this was made clear in the New Yorker piece. But what he and other such fearmongers are stubbornly wrong about, and won’t acknowledge no matter how much evidence piles up, is that there is virtually no modern record of individual voters trying to steal elections by impersonating others at the polls. It is this phantom threat that has fuelled the push for voter-I.D. laws over the past few years. As I wrote in the piece, a nationwide study of legal records undertaken by the reporting consortium News21 found a grand total of only seven convictions for this type of voter fraud since 2000.

Presumably, if The New Yorker were wrong in finding this kind of fraud to be negligible, von Spakovsky would have documented many cases of it. Instead, in his response, he blurs the subject by citing other kinds of recent election fraud. This pivot is a tactic that critics have described as a form of political bait and switch. For instance, von Spakovsky provides an example of a woman in Maryland double-voting in Florida, where she owns a second home. He also cites the case of an Arkansas legislator who, along with several accomplices, bribed and cajoled those casting absentee ballots. And he describes sloppy voter-registration rolls in Florida, where, he says, two hundred “non-citizens” were discovered registered to vote. (How many actually did vote, however, he doesn’t say.) He also tosses in several cases where the allegations have yet to be adjudicated, and an oddball case or two, such as residency infractions in a town with only seventy registered voters and some fifty thousand out-of-town workers. All of this is marginally interesting, and supports what I wrote: “Nearly all scholars of America’s system of locally run elections acknowledge chronic problems, including administrative incompetence, sloppy registration rolls, unreliable machinery, vote buying, and absentee-ballot fraud.”

But where are the examples of individual voters trying to illegally influence election outcomes by casting ballots in other peoples’ names? If they exist, he and the proponents of strict voter-I.D. laws still have yet to provide them. This is why many Democrats suspect that the real motivation for the strict I.D. laws is voter suppression. (My piece quotes one Pennsylvania Republican asserting that such a law would “allow Governor Romney to win the state.”)

Instead, von Spakovsky returns in his rebuttal to a few arguments that he pushed hard when I interviewed him, but which, as I discovered when I did more reporting, didn’t pan out. Von Spakovsky told me that the Georgia Secretary of State had covered up potential evidence of zombie votes, and then refused to turn over the records. When I checked his allegation out, both the former Secretary of State and her former spokesman vehemently denied his allegation. They also said such records are only kept for a couple of years, making it impossible to know what they might have shown. Once again the evidence of impersonation voter fraud dissolved into a speculative mirage.

In the National Review, von Spakovsky also argues that I failed to pursue his point that Jimmy Carter’s early experience with election fraud in Georgia bolstered the argument for voter I.D.s. “Mayer had no interest in reporting any of that,” he asserts. He is mistaken. I contacted Jimmy Carter. He confirmed that there had been an attempt to steal his first election to the Georgia state legislature. But Carter said, in an e-mail, “Voter ID would have had no effect. The man in charge of the election (& the County Democratic Party) was stuffing the box. He was corrupt and watched how each person voted, putting great pressure on the weak ones.” When the people counting the ballots are corrupt, the identification of the voters is not the issue.

Spakovsky suggests I didn’t read a grand-jury report that he claims supported his theories. I did, and it didn’t. He claims that in the 2000 Presidential recount, whites were twice as likely as blacks to have been disenfranchised in Florida, citing a lone dissent written by a conservative member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s majority report. Yet other scholars, such as Allan Lichtman, have found to the contrary that the ballots of black voters in Florida were rejected at a much higher rate than those of whites, and that if the rejection rate had been the same some fifty thousand more votes cast by black Floridians would have been counted.

If reality had been on von Spakovsky’s side, so, too, would have been my story. As we head into what may be a close election, with the outcome possibly subject to argument and even litigation, I hope all sides will make a good-faith effort to sort the hot air from the cold facts.

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.