New York Times: What are the consequences of voting twice, anyway?

One woman in Dothan, Ala., filled out extra absentee ballots to help elect her boyfriend. A man in Rochester, N.Y., voted twice because a bar was giving free beer to people with “I Voted” stickers. A woman in Des Moines filled out two absentee ballots in 2016, she said, because President Trump had hinted that her first ballot would be altered to count for Hillary Clinton.

Even though voting more than once is rare, a few cases make headlines. Leaning on those, Trump stirred fear and confusion about voter fraud on the campaign trail in 2016, and he’s at it again this year, repeatedly sounding alarms that one of the most fundamental pillars of democracy — voting — will be mired in fraud. …

Our research shows that voting twice, even in states with all-mail balloting, is rare. In Washington, a mail-voting state, only 147 cases were suspected out of 3.1 million votes cast there in 2018.

In Georgia, double voters could face 10 years and a $100,000 fine. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state and a Trump supporter, said this week he had found 1,000 cases in which people voted twice in Georgia’s primary and runoff elections this year, vowing to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law.

Citing all the disarray in Georgia’s elections this year, public interest groups wonder whether it was an accident. “Secretary Raffensperger has been looking for reasons to cast doubt on Georgia’s mail-in ballot system for months,” said Aunna Dennis, the executive director of Common Cause Georgia. “He would have served us all better if he had invested that time and energy into preventing the problems that occurred in June.”