By Hans von Spakovsky

In a May 17 commencement speech at Morgan State University, Attorney General Eric H. Holder once again dismissed the problem of voter fraud as being inconsequential. Efforts to curb it, he claimed, are merely attempts to deprive minorities of their right to vote.

It's not just that Holder personally persists in ignoring the many cases of such fraud that have been documented by historians and journalists. His entire Justice Department studiously ignores evidence of possible fraud and steadfastly refuses to do anything about it. I know this from experience.

From 2010 until 2013, I served on the Fairfax County Electoral Board in Virginia. In August 2011, we notified the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria, as well as the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department (which coordinates election-crime prosecutions) in Washington, D.C., of possible voter fraud by non-citizens. In checking with the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, the board discovered 278 registered voters who, when they got their driver's licenses, told the DMV they were not U.S. citizens. Before we canceled any of the seemingly illegal registrations, we gave all of these voters the opportunity to confirm their citizenship. None of them did so. Almost half of them (117) not only had registered to vote, they had voted in state and federal elections.