Ohio Secretary of State John Husted has acknowledged that hundreds of people attempted to vote more than once in the general election in his state. The important question is what that means?

A left-leaning website summarizes Husted's comments this way:

After a contentious and controversial election season, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted is standing by the measures his office took to restrict early voting in 2012, as well as the state’s voter ID law, even though he now admits that voter fraud is “a very rare occurrence.”

In an interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer, Husted said that while county boards of elections across the state are investigating apparent attempts by hundreds of people to vote twice, “the system caught it” and “we shouldn’t overreact.”

Every legitimate voter should be glad that attempts at voter fraud were stymied--and we should hope that every case is prosecuted to the fullest extent possible. And, of course, we should not "overreact." But it is certainly nothing to celebrate that hundreds of people tried to break the law. Hundreds of people showed their willingness to cheat, to violate basic democrtatic principles and the rule of law, in order to win an election.

It raises the question: How would we respond to a spike in the rate of attempted homicides? Or, more to the point since election fraud is a kind of white collar crime, how should we react after discovering hundreds of unsuccessful attempts at embezzlement?

One thorny issue with whilte collar crimes is that they generally leave no obvious victim. They succeed only by going undetected. We know that some embezzlement and some election fraud is likely to happen without ever being found out.

What Ohio shows is that election fraud is a real concern because there are people who, if they could, would in fact steal elections. (If this seems obvious to you, it's because you're not a liberal commentator or politician who must insist that vote fraud doesn't exist.) The revalations in Ohio only underscore the duty that election officials have to be proactive in keeping our elections honest.