Whenever Republicans even mutter the term voter fraud, Democrats go ballistic, pushing it aside as a right-wing conspiracy theory intended to stir up resentment and distrust. In fairness, some Republicans have made too much of the voter fraud issue. But the opposite is also true: Democrats who insist that illegal voter activity doesn’t happen, or that it happens so infrequently it’s therefore irrelevant, are promulgating a lie to cover up a problem that should elicit concern.

For example, The Daily Signal’s Fred Lucas documents at least eight recent cases in which voter fraud was exposed. They include “felony charges of voter registration fraud,” “two felony counts of forging a public record” and the discovery of “19 dead people … re-registered to vote” in Virginia; a serial Trump voter in Iowa; “registering phony or dead voters” and “changing votes on mail-in ballots” in Florida; “dead voters and people voting more than once” in Colorado; an ongoing attempt to siphon a vote from the grave in New York; and “online tampering with voter registration information” and “hundreds of dead voters” in California.

These are serious injustices, because every illegal vote cancels out the vote of an honest citizen. Yet just recently Barack Obama tried to downplay the issue, saying, “One study shows that out of one billion votes cast, there were 31 proven cases of voter fraud — 31 out of one billion. You are … much likelier to get struck by lightning than to have somebody next to you commit voter fraud. You’d win the Powerball.” He’s wrong. Lucas writes, “In just the last week, prosecutors pursued three voter fraud-related charges in three major battleground states — Florida, Iowa, and Virginia [emphasis added].” The bottom line is that Democrats who ignore, and lie about, this growing problem are only serving to incrementally undermine the integrity of our electoral system.