. . . few cases of election fraud are ever taken to court.
They're right. Election fraud is hard to prove. It's easy, perhaps, to make a case against the homeless man who, for a Big Mac, votes a dead man's ballot. It's next to impossible, however, to identify and prosecute the top-tier political organizer who was responsible for the fraud, usually protected -- like a drug lord -- with several layers of lower-level cutouts.
Who would take investigators and prosecutors off murder and property theft cases to chase shadowy figures who steal nothing more tangible than elections and murder nothing more consequential than the integrity of democracy itself? Very few, as it turns out.
The rarity of criminal cases is not, however, evidence of the rarity of election fraud. We know this because . . .