Don't know what political party she calls home, but spent some time today with a professor, election analyst, and author who privately assured me, to my repeated concern, that "there is practically zero election fraud in this country."

Peppered with my election "outliers," such as dead people voting repeatedly and miraculously, nonexistent people voting, the too young, the ineligible, the non-citizen, or the non-human, the administrator and analyst responded that there is very little fraud in the mold of people showing up feigning identities of non-present voters.  That leaves open the question of how many non-citizens and incarcerated felons vote in states that deny jailed felons the vote.

No voter fraud?  There are also questions of absentee votes that never arrive – such as military personnel overseas, whose ballots must be sent far in advance of election days as a precaution against their arriving late and therefore not being counted at all – and illicit ballots sent in via the absentee method, which might be critical in swinging elections until such ballots, one way or another, are analyzed, discounted, or tossed.

Not to mention "sunbirds" – those who live in more than one state and may, in a crunch, have both the means and the conviction, to vote in both their domicile venues.  Sometimes, money is less an object than winning.

I doubted what the professor had just said; she repeated her statement.  She said that, yes, Russia meddled, has always meddled, but it made no difference at all in the election.  "Not one vote changed," as the famous assertion goes.

I asked the same question several times in the course of her "class."  There were about 25 of us being spoken to by her, and I stress that I liked her and think she is an expert.  She has five sober books on voting, election science, and the like to her name and is a frequent speaker at election venues and conferences around the country.  She ended up not covering the question after all my reminders.  In the end, she would claim we had not enough time to cover some topics, one of which happened to be my pointed question.

To a question I had not yet asked, she emphasized: "And Russia did not hack anything!"  The exclamation point is a fair mark of her enthusiastic force while expressing this.  Since this discussion took place on the very day that Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, and the president of the United States, Donald Trump, were confabbing in Helsinki, Finland, the declaration was twice interesting.

She did tell me that many states are more strict in their election standards than is New York State, which I had championed as one of the toughest states of the 50.

My concern is the growing popularity of e-registration, or altering one's party affiliation via electronics, and then voting that same day – not a kosher policy in a milieu of potential fraud and misuse of registrations and votes.

When I noted that felons are voting, something not sanctioned before, she stated that yes, it is happening.  However, in some states, felons can now legally vote, even inside – felons not out, having served their court-mandated terms.

Professor Kathleen Hale, J.D., Ph.D., Auburn University, is otherwise impressive, and as I noted, I liked her.

Yet I have grave doubts about voter fraud, which for a conservative poses a huge problem for current and future elections.

Is she a neutral?  Does she affiliate with any party?  Is she unaffiliated?  Or is her viewpoint aerosolized because she is a Democrat, and fraud more heavily impacts – damages – Republican numbers in elections?