What issues is America facing,

and what do the stats say about about them?

Voter Fraud

Voter Fraud is exceptionally rare. There is no data suggesting that voter fraud is a significant issue in the US.

Here is a source from The Brennan Center showing how rare voter fraud actually is.

  • The Brennan Center’s seminal report on this issue, The Truth About Voter Fraud, found that most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices. The report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Given this tiny incident rate for voter impersonation fraud, it is more likely, the report noted, that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

  • Only 105 cases come within the past five years, and 488 within the past 10 years. Thirty-two cases are from the 1980s and 1990s. Indicative of its overreach, the database even includes a case from 1948 (when Harry S. Truman beat Thomas Dewey) and a case from 1972 (when Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern). Over the period considered by Heritage, there have been over 3 billion votes cast in federal elections alone, and many more when you include the state and local elections also covered in the database. The number of cases in the database represent a minuscule portion of the overall number of votes cast during this time span. [source]

Conclusion: There isn’t enough evidence of voter fraud to necessitate changes to our electoral process.

Assault Weapons Ban

Democrats have been pushing for Assault Weapon bans in response to mass shootings. Generally, these are bills where semi-automatic rifles would be banned from possession in the hopes of significantly reducing the deaths of American Citizens. However, data shows that rifles only account for 4% of firearm related homicides, including mass shootings.

In a perfect world, even if you were to ban semi-automatic rifles from possession, you would only be saving a portion of the 500 - 700 of the 13,500 victims of firearm violence per year. Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect world. Those 500 - 700 individuals would have a high likelihood of being killed by a handgun if a rifle weren’t available. So in reality, you’d reduce the number of firearm related deaths by a fraction of that 4%.

These numbers indicate that being in favor of handgun ownership for the public but not rifle ownership isn’t consistent. How can someone argue that the 500 - 700 deaths associated with rifles is too much to allow, but the 7,200 deaths linked to handguns is acceptable?

Let’s imagine the outcome of an idealist. The Assault Weapons Ban passes and 100% of rifle related homicide deaths are somehow prevented. Yearly firearm related homicides drop from 13,500 to 12,800-13,000 deaths. How would Americans feel knowing something they believed they had a right to own was taken away from them to save 0.0002% of the population? What are the implications of setting that precedent? If you can justify banning something so long as you can argue it’s saving 0.0002% of the population, you could justify banning just about anything.

Conclusion: An Assault Weapons Ban would have minimal effect on yearly firearm related deaths. If the democrats were to institute an Assault Weapons Ban they’d anger a large portion of American voters, likely costing Democrats future elections, and in exchange, save a tiny number of people per year. Americans would see the results had minimal impact on firearm related murders and would feel betrayed by the Democrats.