> https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/declaration-of-non-dependents/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/declaration-of-non-depende... > > Some cheating leaves bar

> https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/declaration-of-non-dependents/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/declaration-of-non-depende... > > Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number for each child. Suddenly, seven million children — children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms — vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States. > The “seven million” figure appears to be accurate, as noted in a December 2000 National Tax Journal article by Jeffrey B. Liebman that drew its data from a 1990 Internal Revenue Service conference report: The same people claiming there is minimal voter fraud on the basis of the relatively few in number convictions for voter fraud probably would have also claimed in 1986, before the IRS rule change, that there was minimal IRS dependent tax credit fraud. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence unless you make a sufficiently thorough effort to actually collect the evidence (i.e., to detect voter fraud).