Hans von Spakovsky and John Fund, who spoke in favor of voter identification requirements during a February 2013 Federalist Society luncheon in Raleigh, share with National Review Online readers this week some inconvenient facts about voter fraud.

Obama-administration officials and their liberal camp-followers who routinely claim there is no reason to worry about election integrity because vote fraud is nonexistent suffered some embarrassing setbacks last week.

Federal law requires states to clean up their voter rolls. In 2009, the Obama Justice Department dismissed, with no explanation, a lawsuit filed by the Bush administration asking Missouri for such a clean-up. It has since taken no action against any other state or jurisdiction since it has an unofficial policy of not enforcing this requirement. But private parties are starting to force changes.

In Mississippi last Wednesday, the American Civil Rights Union won a significant victory for election integrity when a federal judge approved a consent decree in which Walthall County agreed to finally clean up its bloated voter-registration list. The county has more registered voters than the Census says it has eligible voters. The ACRU sued the county (which went for Romney in 2012) under Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which requires election officials to maintain accurate voter rolls through a regular program that removes ineligible voters.

Walthall County will have to remove felons, noncitizens, decedents, and voters who have moved away from its registration list. …

… In North Carolina recently, mounting a criticism of the state’s new voter-ID law, former secretary of state Colin Powell claimed there was no voter fraud. The Voter Integrity Project (VIP), a local citizens’ group concerned with election integrity, released a report on Wednesday that it finally obtained from the North Carolina Board of Elections “after repeated requests.” The report shows that there were 475 cases of election fraud that the Board “believed merited a referral” to prosecutors between 2008 and 2012. The fraud included double voting, impersonation and registration fraud, and illegal voting by noncitizens and felons. Not all of this fraud would have been stopped by voter ID, but there are certainly people willing to engage in fraud and we need to take a comprehensive approach to protect the security of the voting and election process.

As VIP also points out, the report raises the important question of why local district attorneys in North Carolina have been “so negligent in prosecuting” these referrals. That is no surprise to us – we detailed in our book Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk how reluctant local prosecutors often are to prosecute election-fraud cases because of the potential political costs (like, say, being accused of voter suppression).