The Myth of Voter Fraud and the Reality of Voter Suppression

By dcompbooks

The term voter fraud keeps getting bandied about a lot lately. I won't say from who or where, because I'm sure you already know. I'm here to tell you just how rampant voter fraud isn't and what voter fraud actually looks like.

What is it? In the "cases" that keep being brought up it's people voting illegally, ballots being cast in the name of people who are no longer living, people voting twice, or people registered to vote in multiple states. Sometimes it can be the way in which ballots are collected and whether or not they're counted.

A notable moment of voter fraud and ballot tampering occurred in North Carolina in 2018 where conspirators working for Republican Mark Harris, who was running on the congressional ballot, signed certificates that validated absentee ballot voting when those votes didn't exist and improperly mailed ballots for those who hadn't mailed it for themselves.

How does one improperly mail a ballot? Well, say you want to be nice for your neighbors. You're heading to the post office and you offer to bring their ballots with you and you'll just drop them off all together. That's actually illegal. You're only allowed to handle ballots within your household or those for whom you are operating as a designated assistant on that ballot, for which you'd need to sign.

Voter fraud is a real thing. People do vote twice and every once in a while you get a dead person voting. But how big of a problem is it?

Well, it's not. In fact, it's statistically irrelevant.

In case you need some help translating that graph, out of the nearly 900 million votes cast in a 14 year time span, there were only 35 credible allegations of voter fraud. That is .000000042% of the total ballots cast were credibly fraudulent. You have a better chance of winning the lottery while being eaten by a shark in Kansas than of finding voter fraud.

(There's supposed to be a very funny sharknado gif here, but the file is too big. :( Boo! Here's the short link to go visit: http://gph.is/2aiObUV)

What about all those mail-in ballots? There's a huge uptick of mail-in and absentee ballot casting occurring thanks to COVID-19. Surely those are more susceptible to fraud right? Yeah, no. Not at all.

Take Arizona, where I live. What's called early voting (that replaced the absentee terminology) has been around since 1991 and people here looooooooove it because our ballots are the size of phone books and it's just so much easier to take 3 weeks to fill out your ballot and mail it in at your leisure (DON'T DO THAT THIS YEAR! MAIL YOUR BALLOT ASAP!). In 2010 60% of the voting population in Arizona was voting by mail. In 2018 that number went up 80%. This year we're at about 91%. No real issues.

Colorado is almost entirely vote by mail only (except in extenuating circumstances), meaning vote by mail is default. They don't have polling places. And they've been doing this since 2011 without any major hiccups.

While you will see states right now kind of bungling this process, it's not fraud. It's states trying to adapt to handling a majority of their votes by mail where they hadn't previously. There are bound to be issues with that, but it doesn't mean it's nefarious.

What is nefarious is voter suppression and that is very, very real, has been around for literally centuries, and is pervasive and insidious today. From poll taxes to voter ID laws to purging voter rolls to closing polling places to outright intimidation at polling places, suppression is real.

Back at the founding of this country, the only people who could vote were white, land-owning men. That is voter suppression because this country was populated by far more than some WASPy dudes. Black men got the right to vote with the 15th Amendment in 1869 (by technicality only, really). White women didn't get the vote until 1920 with the 19th amendment. Technically Black women did too, but Black people in general found that the states deemed it within their right to make voting as difficult as possible for them in order to deter voting. Hell, Natives weren't even considered citizens until the 1920s. How's that for horrible irony.

Because voting is left up to the states to decide, the rules states put in place have varied wildly over the years, with some even considering voting a privilege, not a right. Jim Crow laws effectively ensured that Black people would have the hardest time voting by having to pass reading and writing tests, knowledge tests, and pay poll taxes in order to vote. This was all in an effort to suppress their vote and prompted the Selma march in 1965.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act, expedited entirely by the horrible violence that ensued at the Selma march, helped to remove those barriers by providing federal oversight whenever a state wanted to pass a law that appeared to inhibit a person's ability to vote. Unfortunately, in 2013 a lot of those provisions were rolled back by the Supreme Court because, as they ruled, the factors used to determine what was fair and what wasn't were antiquated and needed to be updated. However, without those updates states effectively have carte blanche to treat the polls as they will.

Since 2013 Arizona is second only to Texas in polling place closures, the majority of which are in Maricopa county, Arizona's largest county population-wise and its most diverse. With a 25% reduction in in-person polling places, it created long voting lines with wait times closing in on 3 hours.

Voter ID laws, purging voter rolls, felony disenfranchisement (denying a felon's right to vote), and gerrymandering are all methods used today in order to suppress voting. You might think that voting by mail can solve a lot of these problems, right? Just get on an early voting list and get the ballot mailed to your house. Except, for instance, people with PO boxes for addresses can't get mail ballots. You know who has a lot of PO boxes? People living on tribal reservations. Where something doesn't seem like such an issue, it really can be.

Even denying Washington, DC and Puerto Rico statehood is a form of voter suppression. One district and one commonwealth, both whose residents are US citizens, are denied the right to vote in the US and do not have representation in our democracy. The primary reason there's such a fight against statehood for these places is really because they are predominantly democratic-leaning.

And lately we've been seeing resurgences of voter suppression via voter intimidation at the polls themselves. It is illegal to campaign at the polls and it's illegal to intimidate voters to vote a certain way. And with a not-so-subtle call by particular individuals in charge for white supremacist militias to effectively patrol polling places, people are rightly concerned. In the bibliography I've provided an excellent link to a set of fact sheets that outline how each state handles illegal militias and what your rights are if you're confronted with them at polling places (last link).

In summary, voter fraud is pretty much nonexistent and voter suppression is very much real. So how do you combat the false narrative of one and buck against the systemic oppression of the other?

It's the strongest tool you have to make a change in how this country operates. If you haven't registered and you still can, do it. Don't know if you still can? Check out Better Know A Ballot (https://www.betterknowaballot.com) for more information in your state. And then vote.

This article just skims the surface of voter fraud and voter suppression. For a deeper dive, and a great jumping-off point, I would recommend Vox's Explained - Whose Vote Counts, a 3 episode special series on Netflix. Immensely informative, easily digestible, and to the point, you will learn a lot from this series.

Bibliography

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-operative-faces-new-felony-charges-that-allege-ballot-fraud

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/26/18156326/north-carolina-9th-district-election-voter-fraud-hearing

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/6/13854266/trump-pence-voter-fraud-report

https://news.azpm.org/p/newsfeature/2020/8/21/178857-arizonas-long-history-with-voting-by-mail/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-washington-state-holds-its-elections-by-mail

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/26/904730251/yes-women-could-vote-after-the-19th-amendment-but-not-all-women-or-men

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/reference/united-states-history/voter-suppression-haunted-united-states-since-founded/#close

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2019/09/12/arizona-has-closed-hundreds-polling-places-2013-voting-rights-act-decision/2288261001/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/phoenix-long-voting-lines-arizona-presidential-primary-blame-voters-election-2016/

https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-voter-suppression-in-2020/

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/second-class-citizens-how-dc-and-puerto-rico-lose-out-on-democracy/282888/

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/trump-supporters-disrupt-early-voting-in-virginia/

https://www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/our-work/addressing-the-rise-of-unlawful-private-paramilitaries/state-fact-sheets/?fbclid=IwAR3J3bbaqsNmOE7IyHomEfT5U6lrR3Vks0tR2OFJ4Qb5bd81z0p7kEZpJ3A