Safe & Secure Elections

Is there such a thing as election or voter fraud? ("Voter fraud" indicates actions by individuals, usually isolated; "election fraud" is organized actions by political parties, lobbying groups or other entities to change the or illegally influence election results) Of course there is. We see a handful of cases every year. From someone who manages to vote twice, to a a deceased voter's mail-in ballot be filled out by a family member, to organized schemes that have popped up in a few constituencies. But is election or voter fraud widespread? Is it common? There is no evidence to suggest that it is, so where does the Republican idea that our elections not only are subject to fraud, but are so overrun with it that the results cannot be trusted, and are rigged in favor of Democrats? The answer is pretty easy to identify. 

Donald Trump.

Until 2016 candidates for public office operated under the assumption that votes would be counted accurately. That there were checks in place to identify any irregularities. That close elections would receive extra scrutiny, including recounts. 

This is not to say that politicians did whatever they (legally) could to make their own election and reelection more likely. Gerrymandering, unreasonable barriers to registration, and the like have a long history - but virtually every candidate for public office accepted the results and graciously (usually) conceded defeat when the numbers told them that's what happened. 

In the months before the 2016 presidential election candidate Donald Trump began to suggest that the only way that he could lose was if the election was "rigged" against him. He suggested that the primaries where he lost were rigged. Journalists, picking up on this started asking him if he would accept the results of an election in which he lost. He never said "no", but his answers, like "we'll see", and "if I win" indicated that he wouldn't accept the results of an election if he wasn't the winner. Since he did win, the point was moot. 

Or was it.

His opponent, former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, received close to three million more votes than he did. In our Electoral College system of electing a president, that's an irrelevant number. It really only matters in that it's an indication of popular support, but for the purposes of deciding who sits in the Oval Office it's meaningless. But it wasn't meaningless to President Donald Trump. He started tweeting (his preferred form of communication) that in addition to winning a majority of Electoral College votes, he actually won the popular vote...if you didn't count millions of votes by illegal immigrants. He also began referring to his victory as a landslide, even though his Electoral vote margin of victory was fairly average. 

Unable to believe that he hadn't convinced a majority of Americans to vote for him he established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity (aka "The Election Fraud Commission) headed by Vice President Mike Pence, with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as vice-chair and the driving force behind the commission. The commission was disbanded in January 2018 without finding any evidence of voter or election fraud. 

Fast forward to the 2020 presidential election. Who knows whether Trump believed that it possible that he would lose. He has a massive ego, but also has a history of massaging the facts in his favor. He made his first public remarks suggesting that election results were untrustworthy in April 2020. But as early as Summer 2019 he certainly was aware that former Vice-President Joe Biden would be the likely Democratic nominee and was taking steps to undermine Biden's chances. July 2019 was when Trump encouraged Ukrainian President Zelensky to open an investigation in the Biden and his son which resulted in his first impeachment. Trump disparaged Biden as "Sleepy Joe" and downplayed Biden's chances of defeating him, treating his candidacy as a joke. 

There were several differences in the 2020 voting environment from 2016. The Covid-19 pandemic caused many states to modify their rules, making mail-in voting, early voting, and the availability of drop boxes much more prevalent. Trump began his assault on election integrity by questioning the security of mail-in ballots. It's true that in some states this was a new thing, but other states had been using voting by mail for years without any problems, and some states' elections were entirely conducted by mail. Mail voting existed when the Election Fraud Commission was doing its investigations, yet they found no systemic problems with the practice. 

Throughout 2020 Trump continued to attack the reliability of voting systems, accelerating his rhetoric once Joe Biden became the Democratic nominee. Think about that for a minute or two - months before a single vote was cast he was asserting, without a shred of evidence, that due to these ephemeral irregularities, the election would be rigged against him...if he lost. In fact he insisted that the only way that he could lose was if the election was rigged and rife with fraud. He and many of his supporters imagined that voting by mail and the use of drop boxes was by its very nature not secure so therefore there will be fraud. Not a shred of evidence was presented; possibly because the election hadn't happened yet, but they couldn't point to any evidence that it was happening in states that were already using these voting methods either. But Trump's most ardent supporters had already been primed, as cultists often are, to believe anything that Trump told them. Based on the doubts sown by Trump, Trump voters now had their own doubts, which they echoed back to Trump and his allied political leaders, which Trump in turn pointed to as evidence that "many people had questions". Who knows what would have taken place if he had squeaked by and won again in 2020 - which very easily could have happened with a few thousand votes in some key states going the other way. Ironically Biden's Electoral College victory was exactly the same as Trump's 2016 margin. 

We all know what happened next. Trump not only refused to concede, he announced, before all the votes were counted in states with close elections, that he had won. Eventually he would start calling his "win" a landslide. Biden received around 7 million more votes than Trump. Recounts, audits, investigations, lawsuits, all turned up no fraud and no results were changed. But the damage was done. Millions of people believe that the election was stolen from Trump. Some of them went to Washington while the electoral vote certification was underway and invaded the Capitol. A majority of Republicans voted to not certify electoral votes in states where Trump narrowly lost. 

This was new. There have been disputed elections in the past. Recounts have taken place. in the 2000 election the Supreme Court got involved. But in all cases the loser eventually conceded defeat and moved on. Trump not only refused to admit defeat, but has ramped up his claims of chicanery by the Democrats, still insisting that he won...by "a lot". He has inspired hundreds of Republican candidates to run explicitly as election deniers. Candidates, who in positions like Secretary of State, have the power to influence how an election is conducted, and who indicate that a Republican victory is the only valid victory to be contemplated.

There's still no evidence. There never has been evidence. In over 60 court filings no evidence was ever presented. Affidavits without exception speculated on how fraud might have taken place, without uncovering any actual fraud, or pointed to "suspicious" activity that turned out to be perfectly normal procedure. Statistical "anomalies" were only anomalous if you didn't understand statistics. 

The idea of a rigged election came from the paranoid mind of Donald Trump and was passed on to his cult who accepted it without evidence. Scarily, the current crop of MAGA Republicans make the thought of a rigged election a real possibility.

Fortunately, in the election that took place earlier this month election deniers were elected, but fortunately the worst of them, the ones in positions to actually skew election results were not elected. In fact the trend seemed to be that traditional Republicans did better than Trumpy Republicans overall. The danger isn't past, but maybe it's delayed a little.