Every time a state tries to enact reasonable voter identification legislation, Democrats (and only Democrats) rush to assure us that vote fraud is very rare.

Unless you look for it, as the Los Angeles CBS affiliate did:

A comparison of records by David Goldstein, investigative reporter for CBS2/KCAL9, has revealed hundreds of so-called dead voters in Southern California, a vast majority of them in Los Angeles County.

“He took a lot of time choosing his candidates,” said Annette Givans of her father, John Cenkner.

Cenkner died in Palmdale in 2003. Despite this, records show that he somehow voted from the grave in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2010.

But he’s not the only one.

CBS2 compared millions of voting records from the California Secretary of State’s office with death records from the Social Security Administration and found hundreds of so-called dead voters.

Specifically, 265 in Southern California and a vast majority of them, 215, in Los Angeles County alone.

A number of these members of the Zombie-American community are very civic-minded:

Goldstein uncovered 32 dead voters who cast ballots in eight elections apiece, including a woman who died in 1988. Records show she somehow voted in 2014, 26 years after she passed away.

Writing at the Daily Signal, Hans von Spakovsky and Jana Minich recall how numbers like this can swing an election:

This report comes 20 years after the contested election of Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif., from this same area. An investigation by a U.S. House committee found that hundreds of illegal ballots were cast by noncitizens and improper absentee ballots.

In that 1996 election, when she defeated incumbent Bob Dornan, a winning margin of 979 votes was whittled down to only 35 votes or fewer when that voter fraud was factored in. In cases like these, where elections are decided by only a small number of votes, the harmful effects of voter fraud are most obvious.

Yet here, two decades later, California has still not taken the necessary steps to ensure the reliability of its electoral system.

It is completely fair to infer that those who resist reasonable electoral safeguards are profiting from vote fraud. 

Hat tip: Clarice Feldman