Voter Fraud

A year ago I wrote two posts (here and here) about Trump’s unfounded allegations of voter fraud.  Since allegations like this from the president are so dangerous to our democracy, it seems important to emphasize and expand upon it.

After the Mississippi run-off election for Senator this Tuesday, November 27, the closest national elections will have all been resolved.  Governors’ races in Florida and Georgia are no longer in the news.  But for several weeks after the mid-terms, those two gubernatorial and the Florida senatorial race were mired in difficult and complicated recounts. 

Razor-thin margins in important elections have always been challenged, with each side seemingly sure that a recount will be decided in their favor.

But this year the recounts have been accompanied by President Trump’s repeated accusations of electoral fraud … and by the willingness of almost all national politicians in his party to go along. 

A Washington Post editorial reported Trump’s tweet from Monday, November 11:

“Large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged,” Mr. Trump tweeted Monday, as so often with no basis in fact. … “An honest vote count is no longer possible—ballots massively infected.”

In a country with so little trust in government, Trump’s reckless accusations are dangerous. Some of these allegations are so inane that it’s hard to believe that even Trump made them, for instance, when he accused some people who had

absolutely no right to vote … they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.

After Kyrsten Sinema was declared the winner in the race for Arizona Senator (and her opponent, Martha McSally, had graciously conceded), the President nevertheless tweeted

Just out — in Arizona, SIGNATURES DON’T MATCH. Electoral corruption—Call for a new Election? We must protect our Democracy!

Since President Trump’s election, of course, we have become inured to his lies. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker recently reported that since his election the president has made 6,420 false or misleading claims.  (My favorite is the President’s recent ridiculous [even if  innocuous] statement that forest fires in Finland are prevented by frequent “raking” of the 100,000 square miles of Finnish forest.)

Perhaps a bigger issue than Trump’s damaging lies about the electoral process is the unwillingness of national Republican political leaders to challenge him.  Political scientist Erica Frantz writes that

democracies do not fall apart because a single leader destroys them, but rather because the individuals and bodies with the power to check the leadership fail to use that power to preserve the system.

Unfortunately, most of the national Republican Party has refused this responsibility.  In fact, many in the party have taken up Trump’s chants.  For instance, while the recount between Republican Rick Scott and Democrat Bill Nelson in the Florida Senatorial race was still in process, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell had already officially welcomed Scott as the senator from Florida.  And Republican Senator Cory Gardner, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, demanded that the Florida recount be halted while Scott was narrowly leading.

As I explained in my previous posts, there is absolutely no evidence of individual voter fraud in the United States in at least the last century.  The Brennan Center for Justice reported on fifty-four separate studies by different organizations reported 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.

With much fanfare, President Trump even appointed a committee to research the issue, headed by Kansas Secretary of State Chris Kobach (R)—a leader in the movement to suppress the vote by claiming voter fraud.  Soon, however, the President quietly disbanded the committee after it, too, had found no evidence of voter fraud. 

Most of us don’t think about it, but democracy, even in the United States, is a fragile flower.  As we are seeing in some of the smaller European countries, such as Turkey, Hungary, Poland and others, democracy is being gradually snuffed out.  We have in the past been confident that American democracy was so firmly rooted that it could never be in danger.  So confident was he in the strength of American democracy that American social scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a book, The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that

the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government.

From our perspective in 2018, his naïveté is startling.

Democracy is only as strong as the confidence in which the people hold it.  As I’ve written before, only 30% of young people in the United States feel that living in a democracy is “essential.”  24% think it’s a bad way to run a country!

While many of us don’t take President Trump’s lies seriously, approximately 40% of the country does.  Their President and many in the Republican Party are convincing that 40% of the population that they cannot trust our democracy, and one way they’re doing this is by promoting the voter-fraud fiction.  The ultimate ramifications of such distrust are horrifying to think of.

I realize that many of us are also thinking that “there must be a better way.”  But as long as we can’t propose that better way, we must do everything in our power to maintain what we have.