The 2020 U.S. presidential continues to be controversial. About a third of voters - including 61 percent of Republicans — believe Joe Biden didn’t legitimately win according to a September poll from Monmouth University.

The reasons for the skepticism go beyond Donald Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen - even though he often cites evidence that doesn’t hold up.

According to federal data, 1.1 million mail-in ballots were undeliverable in the 2020 election.  That’s a genuine cause for concern.

In 2020, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, analyzed the voter rolls in 42 of the 50 states. It found that nearly 350,000 deceased registrants remained on the voter rolls and millions more had moved.  Every name of someone dead or moved represents an opportunity for fraud by unscrupulous operatives.

Federal Judge Jane M. Beckering, a Biden appointee, has rejected Benson’s demand to dismiss the lawsuit against her over the deceased voter issue.

Contrary to what Democrats claim, voter fraud does happen and can change close elections. The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database has a total of 1,374 proven instances of proven voter fraud, and it has uncovered evidence that call into question the results in several Congressional races.

This past June, Texas political operative Monica Mendez pleaded guilty to 26 voter fraud felonies in a Texas election.  The election for the board of directors of a Victoria, Texas utility district were overturned because three individuals used a hotel address to register to vote, even though none of them lived in the district.

Nonetheless, Mendez will serve no jail time. Like so many of those convicted of voter fraud she will only be required to spend some hours doing “community service.”  Hardly an effective deterrent for her or others not to commit fraud again.

Liberals who oppose ballot-security measures claim that there are few prosecutions for voter fraud, which they take to mean that fraud doesn’t happen. But it is sometimes comically easy, given the sloppy-voter registration records often kept in America, to commit voter fraud in person. Unless someone confesses, in-person voter fraud is very difficult to detect — or stop. New York’s Gothamist news service reported last year that four poll workers in Brooklyn reported they believed people were trying to vote in the name of other registered voters. Police officers observed the problems but did nothing because voter fraud isn’t under the police department’s purview.

The good news is that since the 2020 election, U.S. state legislatures have passed roughly 190 new bills pertaining to elections. Fourteen states have improved in their election integrity rankings, while only two states now have lower scores.

But liberals have fought changes every step of the way. In Michigan, which narrowly voted for Joe Biden in 2020, Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has for a year and a half refused to remove almost 26,000 dead individuals from her state’s voter rolls.

She was sued for not complying with the National Voter Registration Act, which requires election officials to remove deceased voters.  But she refused, calling the effort an attempt to “undermine American democracy.”

Some states remain centers of concern about possible voter fraud this year. Pennsylvania, whose largest city Philadelphia is notorious for sometimes having more registered voters than the number of adults counted by the Census, has seen intense battles since 2020 between its Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, and its Republican legislature. This year, Republicans approved a bill that will
prohibit private non-profit groups from giving money to Pennsylvania election offices to boost local voter turnout.  Nationally, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used that loophole to give $419 million in grants which he claimed were non-partisan, but ended up largely going to boost turnout urban Democratic areas. “Zuck Bucks” may have made the difference in Donald Trump’s narrow losses in Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

This year, Pennsylvania remains a concern for election integrity groups because  Governor Tom Wolf has vetoed a proposal for Pennsylvania to join 30 other states in requiring that voters show some kind of identification before voting.

The last time that both Democrats and Republicans joined together to address voting issues at the national level was in 2002, when a. Democratic Senate and a Republican House both passed the Help America Vote Act.  Its Democratic co-sponsor, Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, explained the purpose of the law was “to make it both easy to vote, and hard to cheat. We are Americans, we can do both at the same time.”

Americans deserve to have an electoral process that they can trust.  As of now there are too many times when the sloppiness of the U.S. election system results in races where you can't tell where the incompetence of election officials ends and where possible fraud begins.
John Fund is columnist with the National Review and coauthor of “Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats put Your Vote at Risk”.