Amanda Fries reports for the Times Union that instances of voter fraud are extremely rare in New York, and when they do occur, it is usually elected officials or candidates running for office and not the average voter committing the fraud. The conservative Heritage Foundation, for instance, list just 15 cases in New York since 2010. Most of those cases were false registrations of voters by candidates. There were just three cases of "fraudulent use of absentee ballots." Of the 14 convictions since 2010, "nine involved elected or public officials, candidates for office or political operatives; three were local developers accused of attempting to rig an election, and two were New Yorkers who voted twice." Sean Morales-Doyle, deputy director of voting rights and elections at the Brennan Center for Justice, said, “What we’ve seen for years now is that there are some that use the specter of rampant voter fraud to justify all kinds of restrictive practices that do nothing to prevent voter fraud, but do everything to stop people from voting.... It’s a distraction, it’s not helpful and it ends up being used to justify policies that disenfranchise voters and don’t make elections any safer.” The disenfranchisement of voters in New York is a much larger problem. “In New York state, we see a lot more disenfranchisement than fraud. More than 14 percent of absentee ballots get thrown out,” said Jennifer Wilson, deputy director of the New York State League of Women Voters. “We have one of the highest rates of throwing out absentee ballots of any state in the nation.” Officials recommend voters casting ballots by mail do so carefully, reading all instructions completely, so their ballots are not among those election officials throw out instead of count. Read more about this story in the Times Union.