Decades of excellent reporting by CBS’s Major Garrett show that he should know better than to put forth the near-slanderously one-sided story he did on Dec. 4 on citizen efforts to ensure the integrity of voter rolls.

Despite the clear insinuations otherwise from the 7-minute, 23-second CBS Mornings report , voter fraud and substantive voter irregularities actually are a real problem. Likewise, despite the CBS report, efforts to clean up voter lists usually are not intended to keep eligible citizens from voting, nor are they particularly meant to disenfranchise minority voters.

While former President Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was illegally stolen from him are absolutely , irrefutably false , Trump’s lies do not negate the indisputable fact that the nation’s voter rolls are a mess and that fraud does occur in amounts large enough to change the outcome in some close elections.

It was not a sketchy right-wing group but the universally respected Pew Research Center that reported in 2012 that 1 of every 8 voter registrations, about 24 million in the United States, “are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate,” that “ more than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters,” and that “approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.” Improved state laws and better enforcement since then have cleaned up some, but nowhere near all, of this mess.

That’s why Garrett’s report, especially as bookended by inflammatory comments by CBS Mornings hosts, was so unfair. With Garrett’s all-but-explicit endorsement of the claim, black Georgia voter James McWhorter told Garrett that a mistaken citizen challenge to his own voter registration was part of a deliberate effort “to disenfranchise certain demographics, trying to put a foot on someone else’s neck.” Garrett amplified the insinuation by asking the citizen who issued the challenge, a retired white woman named Gail Lee, if she could “understand how people who are African American might feel this deeply, personally, in that your work feels threatening to them?”

It was no wonder, then, that studio host Jericka Duncan summed up Garrett’s report by saying, “This really highlights the strategy being used to try and prevent people from having their voices heard.”

That allegation is patently unjust. Despite numerous assertions and insinuations to the effect that citizen challenges have been motivated by race and a desire to stifle otherwise eligible voters, Garrett actually provided not a shred of evidence of such intent. Indeed, Lee, who has issued some 500 challenges to suspicious registrations, had absolutely no way to know the race of any of the names she challenged: She merely analyzed computer printouts for anomalies and filed challenges based on them. And rather than trying to stop eligible people from voting, Lee and other citizen activists quite obviously believe they are trying to identify fake registrations used to perpetrate fraud.

In McWhorter’s case, he was registered not at a residential address but at a commercial location, his barbershop, because he was otherwise homeless when he registered. As most people do not reside in their commercial establishments, and as storefronts often are used as addresses by those trying to game the system, Lee’s suspicions were entirely understandable even if, in this instance, incorrect. As it was, McWhorter’s name was not stricken from the rolls because the system in place in Georgia provides for all such challenges to be carefully examined, with ample notice given to the registrant to set the record straight.

Other than Garrett acknowledging at the end of his report that at least 12,000 challenges in Georgia actually had been upheld, a fact he immediately dismissed as representing “overwhelmingly clerical errors and technical violations,” there was not a single other word in 7 minutes that gave credence to concerns about voting irregularities.

Count former Justice Department whistleblower J. Christian Adams among those who would have approved of Garrett’s report if it had been more narrowly focused instead of a conduit for accusations of a race-based conspiracy. Adams, an election law specialist and now president of the right-leaning Public Interest Legal Foundation , has regularly won court cases forcing states to clean up their voter registration records and specifically has identified some 350,000 names of dead people still listed as eligible voters.

Adams said that the citizen-challenge method used in Georgia is well intentioned but problematic because ordinary citizens usually are not well trained to navigate complicated laws governing voter registration. For example, “They don’t have experience with ‘false positives’” — people such as McWhorter whose registrations appear wrong but actually are legitimate — because “filtering out false positives is hard and sometimes very expensive.” Adams said such confusion can indeed create “too much risk of improper disenfranchisement.”

But, he added, “nobody should think these challengers are trying to disenfranchise people deliberately. They aren’t.”

Adams said, though, that by systematically presenting data to trained election officials to investigate, errors can and should be corrected. And there are errors aplenty, such as the “27,000 dead people that Michigan kept on the rolls sometimes for 20 years after they died,” in whose names other people have indeed sometimes voted.

To watch Garrett’s report, a viewer would think that all vote-irregularity accusations are as meritless as Trump’s are. But some sorts of ballot shenanigans are relatively easy to implement and relatively hard to catch. One that actually was caught in Michigan earlier this year, as highlighted by the Heritage Foundation, is illustrative: A lady named Nancy Williams pleaded guilty to election law violations after “she submitted voter registration and absentee ballot applications for 26 legally incapacitated residents [of a nursing home] without their consent.”

Even when deliberate voting fraud perpetrators are convicted, they usually get punished only lightly , with mere probationary sentences and light fines.

If reporters such as Garrett were just as diligent about rooting out and castigating real fraudsters as they are about smearing well-intentioned but sometimes incorrect citizen watchdogs such as Gail Lee, perhaps voting officials and judges would do more to eliminate improper voting so that Lee and her cohorts wouldn’t feel obliged to do the job themselves.