Before he was the chief election officer for his state, Wayne Williams was the El Paso County, Colorado, clerk and saw firsthand how even a small amount of voter fraud can thwart the public will.

“As clerk, I saw two school board races decided by a single vote,” Williams told The Daily Signal. “I oversaw a municipal tax question that failed on a tie vote. So, yes, a single vote can make a difference. If someone is saying, well, it doesn’t happen a lot so it doesn’t matter, they’re just wrong, because it can make a difference. Even a single instance of an illegal vote causes an undermining in the confidence and diminishes turnout.”

Williams, now the Colorado secretary of state, was in the District of Columbia, for the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State, which included a panel on election integrity.

The panel discussed the pending voter fraud commission that President Donald Trump has said he would appoint, to be headed by Vice President Mike Pence.

Trump has alleged that 3 million to 5 million illegal votes could have been cast in the November 2016 election, which he previously said might have cost him the popular vote against Hillary Clinton. In his pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, Trump said he would appoint Pence to head the probe.

Trump administration officials have cited an Old Dominion University study about noncitizens voting, and a Pew Research Center study that found millions of people listed on voter rolls across the country are listed in the wrong address, live in a different state, or in some cases are dead.

Williams, a Republican, thinks state and local election officials will play a major role in assisting in the probe.

“I welcome a process that’s designed to look at how we make the system better,” Williams said. “That’s true as a clerk, as secretary. I believe we ought to have that dialogue and explore ways we can clean up the process.”

Even as several speakers at the conference said that voter fraud doesn’t happen on a massive scale, Williams stressed that’s no reason to ignore it.

“Voter fraud is like bank robbery. It doesn’t happen most of the time, but it’s absolutely critical to take precautions against it,” Williams told The Daily Signal. “So, even though someone doesn’t rob a bank every day, they don’t put the money out in a pile and say, ‘Just take however much you like.’ It’s the same sense for we as elections officials. Most people who are voting accurately. They are eligible. But we have to have processes in place to protect against it. I know most people vote appropriately, but they need to have confidence their vote counts.”

During a panel on election integrity, Miles Rapoport, a senior fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, warned secretaries of state to be ready to answer questions from the Trump administration.

“We don’t know what will happen, but it’s entirely possible there will be a major commission on the subject of voter fraud,” Rapoport, a former head of liberal groups such as Demos and Common Cause, told the assembled secretaries.

Jesse Richman, a political science professor at Old Dominion University, did research extrapolating on a previous study that found 800,000 people may have voted in the 2016 presidential election. That’s significant, though well short of Trump’s alleged 3 million to 5 million illegal votes.

Because voter fraud is such a volatile issue, Richman said the commission must be transparent.

“Any result they find of significant or substantial levels of fraud will almost certainly be attacked,” Richman told The Daily Signal after speaking at a Judicial Watch forum on voter fraud.

Richman continued:

I think they should use the full range of data the federal government already has, as well as soliciting cooperation and collaboration with states, to try to address various aspects of election integrity and try to get a sense of magnitudes because magnitudes are really important. If we are trying to get a sense of a few thousand illegal votes cast by noncitizens across the country, that’s still potentially politically significant in a close race, but it’s not as big a problem as if we are talking about 100,000 or 200,000 or more. So I think it is important to get a sense of magnitude because stopping voter fraud is very costly and we want to figure out the least costly ways in terms of various kinds of cost to go about addressing the challenges.

The nation’s secretaries of state reached out to the administration, but haven’t received any response on details of the commission probe, said Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill, chairwoman of the National Association of Secretaries of State.

“We have very little indication of exactly what they’re going to be doing thus far. I gather it will focus perhaps on lists, the accuracy of lists, the integrity of the eligibility of voters. It’s kind of hard to tell where they are going at this point,” Merrill, a Democrat, told The Daily Signal. (For more from the author of “Here’s Why State Election Officials Think Voter Fraud Is a Serious Problem” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

The year 2016 will be remembered for many headlines: Donald Trump’s insurgent campaign and surprise election, the shocking and crushing collapse of the Clinton dynasty, and—because politics isn’t everything—the nail-biting end of the Cubs’ 108-year World Series drought.

And then, there was the political left’s apoplectic post-election meltdown and the spectacular failure of Green Party candidate Jill Stein to proffer any evidence for her claims of mass hacking of ballot boxes in the crucial states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

In fact, to date, there remains no evidence that Russian or any other hackers infiltrated voting machines or affected the actual casting or counting of ballots anywhere in the United States.

This is not to say that Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee should not be taken seriously and be fully investigated in an independent and bipartisan manner. But airing the dirty laundry of one political party is a far cry from the left’s preferred narrative: that Hillary Clinton lost to Trump because Russia rigged the election.

The left’s sudden awakening to the possibility that elections can in fact be rigged is welcome. But their epiphany seems limited only to pie-in-the-sky fantasies that would deprive conservatives of their electoral gains.

To our friends on the left, old-fashioned voter fraud—the kind that involves tampering with absentee ballots and buying votes—remains impossible, and efforts to secure against it are merely smoke screens for voter disenfranchisement.

But they are sorely mistaken, and The Heritage Foundation’s “Does Your Vote Count?” project has the data to prove it. This week, we have added 18 new cases of proven election fraud to our voter fraud database. For those keeping track, that’s 742 documented criminal convictions for all manner of election fraud—and this is likely the veritable tip of the iceberg.

Most states lack the tools to detect or prevent voter fraud, and many prosecutors do not prioritize these cases. The sad reality is that most voter fraud goes undetected and unpunished.

Here are a few of the newest entrants to the database.

Kentucky

Wilbur Graves, a former judge-executive for Monroe County, was convicted along with Wanda Moore, Gary Bartley, and Ronald Muse of a vote-buying scheme during the 2006 Monroe County general election.

Moore and Muse both reached plea agreements with prosecutors and testified against Graves. Moore testified that Graves provided her with $20,000 to $30,000, which Moore used to buy votes for Graves. She paid about 140 voters $40 to $60 per vote.

Following his conviction, Graves was sentenced to 12 months and one day in prison followed by two years’ supervised release, and was also ordered to pay a $5,000 fine. Moore was sentenced to two years’ probation and ordered to pay a $400 fine. The judge sentenced Bartley to six months’ probation on home confinement and ordered him to pay a $2,000 fine. Muse was sentenced to time served.

Ohio

During a 2012 campaign for the Voters First Ohio amendment, Working America—a group associated with the AFL-CIO—hired Timothy Zureick to collect petition signatures.

Zureick forged the names of 22 prominent Democrats, including members of the Athens County Board of Elections. The Democrats on the board alerted officials when their signatures appeared on the petitions they were certifying.

Zureick pled guilty and was sentenced to serve a week in jail and to pay all court costs, as well as perform 100 hours of community service.

Michigan

Brandon Hall was convicted of 10 counts of ballot petition fraud stemming from a 2012 election. Chris Houghtaling, who sought to become a candidate for the Ottawa County District Court, hired Hall to acquire the necessary signatures for his candidacy.

Houghtaling reportedly did not care whether the signatures were collected legally or illegally, and even assisted in Hall’s crime by providing him old 2010 petitions to copy.

Hall, realizing he did not collect enough signatures, used a phone book to complete the rest. Hall’s friend, Zachary Savage, assisted with the fraud, but prosecutors granted him immunity in exchange for his testimony.

Hall was sentenced to serve 30 days in jail, 18 months of probation, and was ordered to pay $3,105 in fines and legal fees and to perform 60 hours of community service.

They say the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one, and when it comes to voter fraud, it’s long past time for America’s elected leaders—both on the right and the left—to admit the ugly truth: Voter fraud exists, and we need sensible policies to detect and prevent it. Heritage has proposed several such policies, including voter identification laws and routine checks of voter rolls.

Elections are fundamental to American democracy, and fraud undermines the will of the people and casts doubt over the democratic process. Even one case of voter fraud is too many. (For more from the author of “The Left’s Selective Outrage Over Alleged Voter Fraud” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.