Voter Fraud

I’ve previously written about Donald Trump’s charges—both as a candidate and once elected—of a rigged 2016 national election.  These ongoing accusations and their intensity have been unique in the history of presidential elections; as I have argued in earlier posts, they have been a significant danger to our democracy.

A related, but significantly narrower, issue is voter fraud.  A rigged election is defined as a top-down and intentional attempt to manipulate the results of the election.  Voter fraud differs from a rigged election in that it requires the individual voter to cast a fraudulent vote, either voting more than once, or voting without being registered. Voter fraud would not be an important issue were it not for the facts that

a. Half the American public believes there is widespread voter fraud,
b. Lawmakers in many states are using accusations of voter fraud to pass laws that suppress the rights of legitimate voters.  Most of those who will not be allowed to vote are among groups that traditionally vote Democrat (eg, African-American, immigrant, and/or poor).
c. President Trump has appointed a “voter integrity commission” chaired by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has already revealed his bias by publicly questioning the legitimacy of the 2016 presidential election without offering any evidence.

As supposed evidence for massive voter fraud, Kobach and others are presenting statistics that seem to justify their suspicions and the need for voter-suppression laws.  But these statistics must be interpreted carefully since they refer to inaccurate registration lists, not voter fraud.

According to the reliable Pew Research Center these lists “are plagued with inefficiencies and errors.”

Approximately 24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate. [Of these,]
More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters.
Approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.

While those figures would seem to give some credence to the accusations of voter fraud, in fact they only demonstrate how lousy voter-registration lists are. They say nothing about voter fraud.  The Brennan Study for Justice referenced fifty-four studies of voter fraud and found that

“The consensus from credible research and investigation is that the rate of illegal voting is extremely rare, and the incidence of certain types of fraud – such as impersonating another voter – is virtually nonexistent.”

As the author of one of those studies wrote, it’s more likely an American “will be struck by lightning than that he (sic) will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

The problem is that many states are using the lousy registration figures to enact laws that suppress legal voters from voting.  A careful study compares states with strict voter-ID laws to states with less strict or no voter-ID laws.  It found that the laws do not significantly suppress the white vote.  But they do suppress the minority votes by 13.2% among (legal) Hispanics, 11.5% among Asians, and 5.1% among African Americans.

Since minority voters overwhelmingly support Democrats, the laws suppressing voters are extraordinarily effective for the Republican Party.

There is simply no comparison between the number affected by voter suppression and the numbers of fraudulent votes.  Voter-suppression laws suppress millions of voters and change the results of elections; those same laws have essentially no effect on (non-existent) voter fraud.

Trump, of course, is not directly responsible for voter-suppression laws; Republicans have been pushing them for years.  But like his claims of rigged elections, his actions and repeated claims have convinced millions and given new legitimacy and power to the Republican Party’s years-long effort to suppress the Democratic vote more and further undermined faith in American elections and in American democracy.