This election season, voters across the country have been told, yet again, that voter fraud is rampant and that illegal voters routinely rampage through the electoral process, wreaking havoc upon democracy. They routinely cite limited examples of voting fraud that usually turn out to be false or based on inaccurate information. Ironically, a significant amount of those limited examples can also be found among Republican voters.

That's why the majority of studies conducted during the past few years to see just how much voting fraud is out there have discovered that there really isn't a problem with voting fraud. It just doesn't exist in the numbers that conservatives claim and that would do any substantive damage to the electoral process. But that hasn't stopped them from strenuously pushing for new voting regulations, such as requiring all voters to show a government-issued identification card.

Actual Voting Fraud Data

When it comes down to actual information, though, the assertions of voting fraud don't hold up. In 2012, Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, wrote,

"South Carolina recently claimed that over 900 dead people had voted in recent elections. But when election authorities conducted a painstaking study of 207 of those allegations, they discovered nothing more than clerical errors, bad data matching, and stray marks on scanners. They found not one instance of an actual dead person voting."

In addition, according to the Los Angeles Times, "under President George W. Bush, the Justice Department conducted a five-year study of voter fraud. In the end, the study found just 38 violations that could be taken to court. Only one of those cases involved someone impersonating a real voter." A 2012 article in The New Yorker similarly revealed that most of those accused of voting fraud were false accused based on inaccurate data. In a final twist, studies show that when there is voting fraud, it's usually done by Republicans.

Why the Emphasis on Voting Fraud?

Conservatives would have you believe that all they want is to make sure that the U.S. Constitution is followed by making sure that only verified citizens. Good. We can all agree that upholding constitutional requirements is a good idea.

But that's not really what the push for stricter voting eligibility requirements is about. It's about suppressing the votes of those who may not support the conservative Republican agenda.

At least one conservative is moderately honest about the real goal of these voter fraud allegations: the desire to limit the number of votes Democrats get in any election. Writing for the National Review, John Fund cited a study that found that "6.4 percent of all non-citizens voted illegally in the 2008 presidential election, and 2.2 percent in the 2010 midterms." He then wrote, "given that 80 percent of non-citizens lean Democratic, they cite Al Franken 's 312-vote win in the 2008 Minnesota U.S. Senate race as one likely tipped by non-citizen voting. As a senator, Franken cast the 60th vote needed to make Obamacare law."

And that, of course, is what's most important to the Republican and Tea Party agenda: weeding out those Americans who would most likely reject their policies.

That's why they haven't stopped at pushing for ID requirements but have also tried to limit early voting. In Montana, the Montana Late Voter Registration Revision Measure (LR-126) is on the November 4, 2014 ballot. The initiative, if passed, would shorten the time available to register to vote to the Friday before the election, and replace the current registration period, which extends all the way to the close of polls on Election Day.

Stopping the Madness

At least one state is fighting back against the conservative pack of lies and misrepresentations. Residents of Illinois will vote on Election Day to decide on a new state constitutional amendment that "would provide that no person shall be denied the right to register to vote or cast a ballot in an election based on race, color, ethnicity, language, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation or income."

This, of course, is already the law of the nation, embedded into several of the Constitutional amendments. But as current events show, we must be vigilant in protecting the right to vote for everyone.