“We’ve had 176 restrictive bills regarding voting laws that have been proposed in 41 states. Now understand that we cannot even find an instance of voter fraud. In the last 20-something years, the Justice Department has investigated like two,” Cleaver said during a panel discussion on voter ID laws.
However, according to a Justice Department fact sheet dated July 2, 2008, over 140 individuals have been charged with election fraud offenses and over 100 people have been convicted of voter fraud since the Attorney General’s Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative was launched in 2002.
Cleaver claimed that the voting public has been under attack since 2011.
“We never would have predicted in the 1970s or in the 1980s that in the year 2011 that we would be fighting an attempt to suppress or discourage minority voting power,” he said.
