UPDATE: JMU student sentenced to 100 days in jail for registering 18 dead Virginians to vote

UPDATE: On Tuesday JMU student Andrew Spieles was sentenced to 100 days in prision for committing voter fraud. Back in April, Spieles used the names of 18 dead people and other faulty information in order to register the late persons to vote during the 2016 election.

Spieles will only be spending a limited amount of time in jail, thanks to a plea agreement made with Jeb Terrien, the Assistant U.S. Attorney. Without a plea agreement, Spieles could have been forced to pay a $100,000 fine and spend up to a year in prison.

Some say electoral fraud isn’t an issue. For those who believe so, take JMU student Andrew Spieles for example.

It was recently discovered 19 deceased Virginians were found to be re-registered to vote, specifically to vote for Hillary Clinton.

The investigation sparked when Richard Allen Claybrook Sr., a World War II veteran, was discovered in the voter registration office by a clerk who knew him as a former Fairfax elementary school principal.

After an FBI investigation, it appears that Spieles, a senior majoring in political science, came clean, although it is uncertain if he has been charged and if so, with what specifically.

He worked for a non-partisan organization called “HarrisonburgVOTES”, which aims to register people to vote. Former Harrisonburg mayor and founder of HarrisonburgVOTES, Joe Fitzgerald, had no knowledge of Spieles’s actions and fired him immediately after he confessed to the fraud.

“He’s smart, and he understands the [political] process,” Fitzgerald told the Daily News-Record. “Who the hell knows what his motivations were?”

Clearly, his motivation was to register dead people to vote in order to help out his preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton. This story, and many more across the country every election, should be a wake-up call that voter fraud is still a real issue.

Although the electoral fraud rate in the US is supposedly less frequent than UFO sightings and getting struck by lightening, the fact that 1,000 instances of illegal immigrants or non-citizens were found registered to vote in eight Virginia counties (according to The Public Interest Legal Foundation) is very concerning. That is enough to change the election.

More needs to be done to prevent this. This does not mean that Voter ID laws (which require a photographed ID) are the best solution, but perhaps same-day registration, automatic registration or simply the government making it easier for citizens to obtain those IDs could all be solutions.

The story of Andrew Spieles, however, should remind us that the issue of electoral fraud is not a myth. It should also remind us that it’s about time we find ways to not only prevent this type of incident from occurring in the future, but to make voting easier and less complicated for voters.