Republicans have long railed about “election fraud.” President Trump carried this to new levels, insisting that Hillary Clinton received her national majority vote only because of millions of illegal votes cast. This charge is patently ridiculous, believed only by those untethered to reality. But the long history of Republican charges of widespread fraudulent voting gives Trump the ammunition with which to spout such nonsense.
Complaints of voting fraud are not new. With the Tea Party victories of 2010, many states, including Wisconsin, instituted new stringent voting restrictions. These included identification requirements that on the face of it sound reasonable, but had a nefarious purpose. Republicans justified such measures as being absolutely essential to prevent even a single fraudulent vote.
It didn’t matter that there was no evidence of fraudulent votes. Instances of such fraudulence are extremely rare. No rational person would risk jail time to cast an extra vote that changes nothing.
The real reason for increasingly strict voting requirements, and the reason that Republicans are behind it, is to make voting more difficult for students, minorities and older handicapped people who are more likely to vote Democratic. It is more likely that these categories of voters do not have acceptable ID cards, and it would be more difficult to get them. It is also more difficult for many of these voters to get to polling places.
Republicans piously insist that, “the right to vote is cherished, and we just want to ensure that votes are legitimate.” This is pure transparent eyewash. There are staff reports of Republican legislators breaking out in cheers when the Wisconsin ID law was signed by Governor Walker. Those cheers had absolutely nothing to do with “ensuring that votes are legitimate.” It had to do with restricting Democratic turnout; pure voter suppression.
Republican efforts at voter suppression go way beyond restrictive ID requirements. Such measures include restricting voting hours, making it more difficult for working people to get to the polls. Insufficient poll workers cause lines to be long. This makes voting a more arduous process, especially for older and infirm people, and even more so with inclement weather. Restricting the number of polling places and putting them in inconvenient places impedes voting for some. Such measures are often targeted in districts and precincts where there are large numbers of minority voters believed to vote for Democrats.
The U.S. has a dark history of minorities not allowed to vote. In the former Confederate states, minorities placed themselves at personal risk for merely attempting to register to vote. It took a white southern Democrat, LBJ, to muscle through the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Section 5 of that law stipulated that eight states with long histories of voter discrimination submit any future changes of their election laws, no matter how small, to the U.S. Department of Justice.
This law was challenged in 2013 with the case, “Shelby County vs. Holder.” To the dismay of voting rights activists, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated Section 5, the centerpiece of the Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Section 5 “had served its purpose,” since “voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were eased, and African Americans attained political office in record numbers.”
Gutting the Voting Rights Act opened the door for states to impose a variety of new restrictive election laws. Since the Shelby case, 17 states, not limited to the old Confederacy, have new voting restrictions in place. In 2016, Arizona’s Maricopa County closed 70 percent of their polling places, causing some voters to stand in line for five hours.
While Republican politicians have been railing about fictitious “voter fraud,” and instituting restrictive measures to solve a problem that does not exist, they have turned a blind eye toward broader, real, election fraud, such as scrubbing voters from the rolls for phony reasons, and worse. The latest example of real election fraud is North Carolina’s recent 9th congressional district race.
In this close race, the Republican candidate, Mark Harris, apparently squeaked out a narrow victory. Then it comes to light that some absentee ballots were illegally collected by Republican operatives and allegedly either not turned in, or actually filled out by Republican operatives. The Republican candidate denied knowledge of this skullduggery. Last week, during questioning by the North Carolina Elections Board, he instead called for a new election to be held, giving up his fight to retain his win after campaign workers admitted to tampering with absentee ballots.
The election was close enough, just 905 votes in Harris’ favor, that these missing and/or altered absentee ballots very possibly made the difference, giving the Republican candidate the apparent victory.
The North Carolina Elections Board did the right thing by declaring a new election. What is sobering about this whole case is that, in addition to such blatant lawbreaking, there have been rumors of such illegal actions going on for some time. Even more sobering is that had this not been for intensive investigative journalism, and that this was such a close nationally watched election, politicians could have gotten away scot free with criminal election fraud.
Will anybody involved in this clearly illegal activity get indicted, found guilty and punished for this criminal activity? We’ll see. Harris cited recent health problems as his reason for being unable to answer questions correctly during the evidentiary hearing.
But meanwhile, we can expect Republican politicians to continue their efforts at voter suppression, passing laws to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. This, while ignoring real fraud of purging voter rolls for no real reason, and illegally collecting absentee ballots that actually change the outcome of an election.
All this is in addition to gerrymandering and potential Russian meddling in American elections; matters conveniently ignored by the Trump Administration.
Honest elections in which citizens are encouraged to be informed and to vote, and in which citizens have faith that their votes will count, are central to democracy. It’s clear that we have some distance yet to go. We won’t get there by focusing on problems that don’t exist and ignoring the problems that do.
— John Waelti of Monroe can be reached at jjwaelti1@tds.net. His column appears Saturdays in the Monroe Times.
