Most Americans are at least “somewhat confident” the recent national election was well administered, and that their vote was counted properly. According to the Pew Center, more than 80 percent of U.S. adults surveyed had a high degree of confidence this had occurred. Yet the post-election coverage and blogging gave the impression that people in different parts of the country felt there was a lot of cheating.

The Pew inquiry presumes all the votes that were counted legitimate. This may be a specious assumption. “Count every ballot because every ballot counts” is a nice slogan that hits at core democratic sentiments, but ignores the reality that election fraud exists.

There’s little use denying it. Journalist John Fund, whose book on the subject, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, may be the most accessible available on the subject, has documented how it’s done. Writing in January 2014 for National Review in Voter Fraud: We’ve Got Proof It’s Easy he reported on a New York City Department of Investigations effort that produced, as he put it, “evidence of how easy it is to commit voter fraud that is almost undetectable.”