Voter fraud is a dangerous myth
If Donald Trump looses the election on Tuesday Nov. 3, he will seek to remain president for a second term by claiming voter fraud. This is what he did after losing the popular vote in 2016. And throughout his term in office he has hammered home among his supporters the idea that votes cast against him are fraudulent.
Voter Fraud is a very risky crime. It is a felony and carries a penalty of 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Considering how little any individual fraudulent voter might stand to gain against the potential for punishment, it is difficult to understand why anybody would run the risk of committing it. In fact, very few people do.
According to a study conducted by Loyola Law professor Justin Levvitt, there were only 31 credible cases of voter fraud from 2000 to 2014 among more than 1.7 billion votes cast during that period. In spite of the president’s claims of massive fraud in the states where he lost, only four credible cases emerged after the 2016 election. That hasn’t kept the president from trying to convince the American people not to trust the results of their elections.
Following the 2016 election in which President Trump fell short by more than 2 million votes, the president set up Voting Integrity Commission which was given the job of substantiating his rationale for actually loosing the popular vote. The man tasked to spearhead this effort was Kris Kolbach. After two years, the commission was unable to produce a report or produce any hard evidence backing up President Trump’s claims, and he disbanded it.
A right-wing legal organization called the Public Interest Legal Foundation issued an alarming report entitled “Alien Invasion in Virginia” which claimed that thousands of double votes were cast in battleground states. Several of the specific individuals cited in the report subsequently sued the foundation, and it was forced to publicly withdraw the claims and apologize.
Ironically, the best documented case of election fraud turned up in North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District in 2018 and it involved a Republican candidate, Mark Harris. What took place involved a campaign consultant who collected absentee ballots from voters, possibly throwing away votes cast for his opponents and delivering the rest to the local election board. The consultant was caught, and Harris’s election was disqualified. Episodes like this one clarify why the law requires that you personally deliver or mail in your ballot.
The fact is, conducting an honest election is not a trivial task and unintentional registration errors do occasionally crop up despite the best efforts of local election workers to keep that from happening. More than 14% of Americans move every year, and that accounts for a large number of the purported double registrations. Many people have the same name, and among any collection of 180 people, it is likely to find two people with the same birthday.
When President Trump disbanded the Voting Integrity Commission after it failed to find a significant number of fraudulent voters, he transferred the project to the Border Protection and Immigration section of Homeland Security. The goal going forward will be to link voting to a special kind of driver’s license that requires an onerous amount of paperwork and documentation to obtain called “Real ID.” Since a good number of people either don’t have the required documents in their possession or do not have the time to wait in line at the DMV to obtain this kind of clearance, using Real ID to establish the right to vote would disenfranchise countless millions of voters and amount to the largest single act of voter suppression in the nation’s history. Not surprisingly, no states have climbed aboard this initiative, but the federal government has been successful in forcing many states to issue Real ID drivers licenses, and by the beginning of next year, citizens will be unable to travel by plane without having either a passport or a Real ID drivers license.
Voting is the fundamental affordance of citizenship in a democracy, and when its validity is compromised by an administration seeking to limit the franchise to likely supporters, the country that allows this to happen can no longer be called a democracy.