Voter fraud



Voter fraud is a type of moral panic that is popular in the United States. As genuine cases of it are almost nonexistent, it's almost always a dog whistle term for people of color voting. Actual cases of voter fraud fall into three broad categories: a single person voting multiple times in a single election, an ineligible person voting (e.g., non-citizen or non-resident), or a person casting a ballot in someone else's name without written authorization. The more-broadly defined electoral fraud can also include such things as vote buying, false disenfranchisement, ballot destruction, duplicate counting of ballots (ballot stuffing), or tampering with voting machines.

In functioning democracies, voter fraud is by definition a rare event, usually to the point where it does not affect the outcome of election. On the other hand, the more authoritarian the government, the more likely that electoral fraud is part of all elections, e.g.:
 * 100% of Iraqis voted for Saddam Hussein.
 * Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov of Turkmenistan got 97%.
 * Poor Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus only got 80%.

Baseless or mostly-baseless allegations of voter fraud in the United States have been used as a proxy for racially-motivated restrictions on voting because of the Reconstruction-era Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution that forbids race-based voting restrictions: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Voter fraud allegations as a rationale for racially-biased voting restrictions was used by White nationalist southern Democrats starting in the late 19th century to restrict the voting power of African Americans, and continued as a nationwide Republican Party tactic after Dixiecrats moved en masse into the Republican Party.



A widespread belief persists of hordes of illegal immigrants and homeless people being bused around from one polling place to another on election day. This claim has been used as an excuse to pass voter ID laws, abolish same-day voter registration, require birth certificates when registering to vote, and conduct frequent purges of the voter rolls. Even if voter fraud actually was a significant problem, few (if any) of these measures would actually be effective in preventing it.

In the US, polling indicates that belief of voter fraud being widespread is highly correlated with belief in Christian nationalism. Christian nationalists such as Paul Weyrich, co-founder of Moral Majority, have also spoken in favor of voter suppression measures in what they call "leverage" to exclude likely demographics that might oppose theocracy.

As a proxy for racism
In 1890, Judge J. J. Chrisman went so far as to state during the 1890 Mississippi Convention that implemented Jim Crow-based voting restriction (poll tax and literacy tests) for voting in the state: It is no secret that there has not been a full vote and a fair count in Mississippi since 1875 that we have been preserving the ascendancy of the white people by revolutionary methods. In plain words we have been stuffing the ballot boxes, committing perjury, and… carrying the elections by fraud and violence until the whole machinery was about to rot down. No man can be in favor of the election methods which have prevailed… who is not a moral idiot. Despite this, Chrisman argued that banning Blacks from voting would be the solution to Whites committing massive voter fraud. The date of 1875 is noteworthy because that was when the "Mississippi Plan" was created by White southern Democrats to disenfranchise Black citizens (by the racially-biased poll tax and literacy tests), and led to the period of Jim Crow segregation until the Civil Rights era in the 1960s. The Supreme Court even approved such measures as late as 1959 in Williams v. Mississippi.

As the Jim Crow era began coming to an end, Black voters began leaving the Party of Lincoln (GOP) for the Democratic Party making the GOP increasingly White. The GOP struggled to win in cities, and concluded from the results of the 1960 election that a new strategy was needed. Thus was born which focused on the 1964 election in Arizona, which was based on a scheme by future Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist had led in the 1962 election in Phoenix. The scheme consisted of: Operation Eagle Eye became a blueprint for future voter suppression strategies.
 * "Caging", sending mail to registered voters and using any returned mail as the basis for challenging the legitimacy of registrations
 * Sending deceptive mailers and phone calls to registered Democrats, stating that they will be arrested if have a traffic violation and they vote, or telling them to vote for Martin Luther King Jr. who was not on the ballot
 * Sending GOP "poll watchers" to polling places, specifically to harass minority voters, including both people with "Ballot Security" armbands and uniformed-and-armed off-duty police officers

Ronald Reagan began a campaign in 1975 against poor and urban people voting, with the implicit idea that they're likely to commit voter fraud, later demonizing the poor as 'welfare queens'.

In 1980, Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation went further than Reagan in saying that voter suppression was the key to Republicans winning elections, and opposing what he called "Goo-Goo Syndrome" (good government).

In 1981, the national and state GOP revived the 1964 Operation Eagle Eye tactics in New Jersey, with the GOP claiming without evidence that there was a tradition of urban vote fraud. The election sites in minority districts were again patrolled by GOP members and armed off-duty police who harassed poll workers and would-be voters.

False claims that there had been voter fraud in St. Louis, Missouri in the 2000 U.S. presidential election were made by a Mark "Thor" Hearne, Bush/Cheney representative, and Missouri Senator Christopher "Kit" Bond. The Board of Elections had erroneously removed 50,000 registered voters, and a court had ordered extended voting hours to remedy the situation after the voters had been restored to the election roll. Hearne and Bond had claimed that the court order represented fraud, Bond used his false allegation to write part of the Help America Vote Act, which allowed individual states to require identification to vote. Voter identification is regarded by the the Brennan Center for Justice as a form of vote suppression targeted at minorities.

Indiana became the first state to pass a voter ID law in 2006. This was despite there being no known instance of voter fraud in Indiana. In 2007, Judge Terence T. Evans dissented on the constitutionality of the law in a circuit court ruling, stating, "Let's not beat around the bush: The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic." Judge Richard A. Posner who had ruled in favor of its constitutionality in the circuit court later said that he regretted writing the majority opinion, stating, that often "judges aren’t given the facts that they need to make a sound decision." When it was appealed again, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the majority opinion that ruled the law as constitutional later said that it was "a fairly unfortunate decision."

Belief that voter fraud occurs in the US is common, particularly among Republicans. Despite this, it has been documented that only 31 credible incidents of voter impersonation occurred out of 1 billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014.

In 2016, Donald Trump fuel was poured onto the fire of the myth of rampant voter fraud in large part due to his bruised ego from winning the Electoral College but losing the popular vote. After he entered the White House, he created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to investigate the "fraud" of how he lost the popular vote. The commission decamped without producing any credible evidence. It's sole product included an outline of preordained conclusions. This could be regarded as a prelude to in which he lost both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

Some modern examples
Modern-day allegations to "panic" about thinly-veiled race-based voter fraud include:
 * ACORN — despite any evidence sorely lacking, the "ACORN engaged in voter fraud" allegation has been repeated so many times that people now make an automatic mental connection between ACORN and voter fraud. (For example, Ballotpedia, a supposedly neutral wiki that engages in the balance fallacy about elections and candidates which is actually funded with Koch Industries money, has 9 separate pages devoted to different types "election fraud" as well as a separate one for ACORN ) What those making these allegations really don't like is that ACORN was registering Black people to vote.
 * "Felons voting" — felons can legally vote in most states, and in most of them restoration of voting rights is automatic upon completion of their sentence. There are still a few lone holdouts still imposing lifelong voting bans on some or all felons or requiring a cumbersome petition instead of making restoration automatic. The trend in the last two decades has been to repeal those disenfranchisement laws. What those raising this claim really don't like is the fact that Black people are voting.
 * Intimidation of voters at the polls by the New Black Panther Party. This stems from a lone incident in Philadelphia, which has been mentioned so many times in the reactionary media, way out of proportion to its actual newsworthiness, that people believe it is widespread.
 * Illegal immigration in general. The "illegal immigrants voting" claim has been used by the John Tanton network of immigration-restriction groups as a pretext to support voter ID laws, as part of their broader agenda of promoting tamper-proof ID cards through the REAL ID Act and eventually a national ID card, which they view as key to stopping illegal immigration. One of the first of the current rash of voter ID laws (Arizona Proposition 200 in 2004) was promoted almost entirely as an anti-illegal immigration measure.

Dead man's vote


What started out as a joke in some states became an actual conspiracy theory. Claims that dead people were rising from their graves to cast ballots somehow turning in ballots are largely overblown. People sometimes end up casting a ballot in their name, but this most commonly is the result of an internal error and not fraud. Some examples of things that can happen:


 * A person is somehow, in fact, still alive. This claim that they're dead usually stems from the fact that their date of birth on the registry is very old.
 * When states shifted to digital voter rolls, people who lacked a date of birth on their form were given a placeholder in some states when digitized.
 * Someone has the same name as a dead person, usually someone who shares the same name as their deceased parent.
 * Signatures on a roster may end up going into other rows, causing a computer to mistakenly think that the marks in the other rows are the signatures of other people.
 * Very rarely, a person may legally cast an absentee ballot, but dies before the votes are counted. In these cases, seventeen states will not count the ballot, but the rest will.

People casting ballots in a dead person's name is still possible, but it's incredibly rare.

Republican Party election strategy
The truth is that over all those years Republicans found only isolated incidents of fraud. Proof of systematic fraud has become the Loch Ness Monster of the Republican Party. People have spent a lot of time looking for it, but it doesn’t exist. The Republican Party's strategy on elections has increasingly boiled down to "Heads, I won, tails, you lost." Or, "if I won, there was no voter fraud; if you won, there was voter fraud." This undemocratic strategy dates back at least as far as Richard Nixon's defeat by John F. Kennedy in 1960. Starting with the 2020 election, this tactic became weaponized by Trump, who could not accept the idea that a majority of U.S. citizens hated him for good reason. Insurrectionist and Republican Congressman Mo Brooks even made this strategy fairly explicit to The New York Times, claiming that only Democrats commit fraud: "I'm in a Republican primary, and noncitizens don't normally vote in Republican primaries. In a Republican primary or a Democrat primary, the motivation to steal elections is less because the candidates' philosophy-of-government differences are minor." In the 2022 midterm elections, at least four other Republican candidates (Ron Johnson, Josh Mandel, David McCormick, and Adam Laxalt) have made similar claims that voter fraud only happens in urban (i.e., primarily Democratic) areas. Despite these Republican claims, Trump's own Attorney General at the time, Bill Barr, knew that the claims were bullshit, but only publicly admitted as much after leaving office.

Early Republican hypocrisy
Before Steve Bannon was a Trump White House adviser in 2017, he made forays into the world of voter fraud, falsely claiming three times on voter forms from 2014-2016 that he was a resident of Florida. Prosecutors concluded, "This investigation revealed evidence that tends to indicate that the Subject did not intend to or actually reside in Miami-Dade County." Prosecutors ultimately declined to prosecute due to antiquated and poorly-drafted Florida laws. In one court hearing on alleged 2020 voter fraud, Judge Linda Parker referred to the 'evidence' presented by Trump's lawyer Sidney Powell as "levels of hearsay" in one instance and as so speculative as to be fantastical in another.

2020: The year that allegations of voter fraud led to an attempted insurrection
I don't want my vote or anyone else's to be disenfranchised. […] Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with people just moving around. […] Anytime you move, you'll change your driver's license, but you don't call up and say, hey, by the way I'm re-registering.

We need to make sure that everybody's vote is cast. But we also need to make sure that no one else disenfranchises those by creating a fraud on the voting system.

Following his resounding defeat in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump began actively circulating allegations that he had actually won the election, and only lost it because of voter fraud. But this was not actually new; Trump has claimed voter fraud even before he became a politician — meaning he won the 2016 U.S. presidential election despite (or because of) voter fraud in his own mind.

Many false claims of voter fraud in 2020 were initially propagated by Russell J. Ramsland Jr. with his company Allied Security Operations Group. Ramsland tried unsuccessfully to push similar false claims in 2018, but no candidate took his bait at that time. In 2020, the false claims were incorporated into failed lawsuits by Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and Trump surrogates Louie Gohmert and Rudy Giuliani. The voting machine companies that were defamed by Powell and Trump's other surrogates, Giuliani, Lou Dobbs, Fox News, and Newsmax have subsequently been sued for defamation to the tune of billions of dollars.

In the real world, there were indeed cases of voter fraud during the 2020 election: less than two dozen individuals across the whole country (less than 1 per 10 million votes cast).

In several cases, people have voted in two different state primaries in the same year, generally by changing residences. It's not always clear whether this is illegal, since state primaries usually are on different dates.

The real voter fraud problem
The moral panic around voter fraud is particularly silly if you consider how badly the proposed kind of voter fraud scales up and how easy it would be to get caught. It would take large numbers of people, access to extensive information about ballots that can be co-opted, a means of generating hundreds of false registrations resistant to examination after the fact, or at the very least, a way of stuffing large numbers of ballots into the count in a way that makes it difficult to tell they all came from the same place. As it happens, there is a form of voter fraud that scales incredibly well and has been used with much success in US elections: voter suppression. Closing polling stations in areas that skew towards your opponents, purging voter registrations in a demonstrably over-eager way, and imposing onerous requirement to vote (in person or via post) are just three ways, and they have the benefit of being legal. The Republican Party has had this kind of voter fraud as part of its arsenal for several electoral cycles.

In this context, the real reason for crying wolf about voter fraud becomes apparent: the moral panic helps create support for voter suppression. The spectre of voter fraudOriginal flavour is used as justification for voter fraudNew Coke.

An unanswered question
Republicans who allege that Democrats benefit from voter fraud have never answered a simple question: if voter fraud is so easy, why wouldn't Republicans do it just as often as Democrats? Put another way, if Democrats could really get away with busing voters from Massachusetts into New Hampshire, why wouldn't Republicans bus voters from Alabama into Florida and Georgia, from Utah into Nevada and Arizona, or from Indiana into Michigan? If millions of undocumented immigrants are registering and voting in the Southwest, why don't millions of conservatives register under false names and vote twice?