Voter Fraud and Voter Suppression
I originally planned on posting an article about a month ago to discuss the misinformation surrounding the 2020 election. Those plans changed drastically after January 6th. I will still cover some of my original content regarding voter fraud (or rather, a lack thereof) and voter suppression, but I will do so now with a more acute understanding of the true danger of misinformation and volatile rhetoric.
For decades, politicians have discussed the “integrity of the ballot” and created the “boogeyman”[1] of voter fraud, which has operated as the justification for widespread voter suppression. As examples of this, I turn to Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia (former Georgia Secretary of State/Chief Election Officer) and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. I am interested in these two figures, namely because they both presided over their own gubernatorial races as secretaries of state,[2] which presents a conflict of interest. In Georgia, the office of the secretary of state oversees voter registration and elections at all levels and is also responsible for preparing election materials, investigating voter fraud, and enforcing election laws.[3] Similarly, in Kansas, the office of the secretary of state is in charge of all elections, including maintenance of the voter registration database and collecting campaign expenditures.[4]
Kemp, who ran against Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams in 2018, is known for accusing voter registration groups of illegal activity and generally discouraging voter registration through punitive action.[5] Another of his insidious tactics is voter roll purging. Kemp had 250,000 to 665,000 names purged from voter registration lists in years when he was on the ballot (including during the gubernatorial race), but in years when he was not up for election, less than 100 voters were purged using the same policy.[6] Between 2016 to 2018, he purged 10% of Georgia’s voters and another 85,000 in the three months leading up to his 2018 election for governor. With hundreds of thousands of names purged from voter registrations lists, countless polling stations conveniently closed right before the election (predominantly in poverty-stricken and majority-Black areas), and 1,835 voting machines conveniently taken out for inspection/repairs but never returned in Cobb, Fulton, and DeKalb counties alone,[7] Kemp won the 2018 election by less than 55,000 votes.[8]
In a similar vein, Kris Kobach promoted the use of the Interstate Crosscheck program, which purges voters from the registration lists when they appear to be registered in more than one state. However, the information entered into the database varies from state to state. Most do not require social security numbers, and some don’t even require suffixes or middles names, so John Smith in one state is seen as the same John Smith in another who is supposedly unlawfully registered to vote.[9] As an example of this epic failure, at one time, North Carolina reportedly removed over 35,000 voters from the registration list, deeming these individuals as unlawfully registered, but after the state hired a former FBI agent to investigate the list, the agent did not find a single double-voter.[10] The Interstate Crosscheck program reportedly has an error rate of more than 99%,[11] and, unsurprisingly, these errors disproportionately affect African American, Latinx, Asian, and Native American voters, as well as naturalized citizens.
Kobach continually referred to noncitizen voting as the justification for his actions, yet he made only nine convictions, most of which involved elderly individuals or couples, often who had homes in multiple states and made a mistake regarding absentee or double voting.[12] As another example of voter fraud’s “boogeyman” status, Kobach claimed in a 2012 article that 221 incidents of voter fraud occurred between 1997 and 2010.[13] What he failed to mention was that these were allegations (never proven) of voter fraud cited from his own office.[14] He also claimed that his office found “sixty-seven aliens illegally registered to vote in Kansas; and that is just the tip of the iceberg.”[15] His source for this was his own testimony in a hearing before a Kansas State committee on ethics and elections.
But here’s the problem – once a leader professes the lie, once their followers hear it, the impression is made. Nevermind that there is no evidence. Nevermind that more than sixty cases across the nation found that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were baseless. Once a public figure with a loyal following introduces the lie, the myth can take off. Take, for example, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley’s 98,000-name list of voters he purged from the rolls because, he claimed, they were not US citizens. In response to this, James Dicky, the chairman of the Texas Republican Party, said, “We knew it was happening and now we have proof.”[16] There was no proof. In their “initial review,” meaning this first review only uncovered a small portion of the error, election officials in Harris County found that at least 60% of the names on the list were naturalized citizens.[17] The other lie was that 58,000 of those individuals on the list voted illegally – in other words, Whitley singled out as criminals those citizens who legally registered and exercised their right to vote. In addition to the tens of thousands of citizens wrongfully on the list, hundreds of the names were duplicates.[18] This bogus list made headlines, but by the time its falseness was revealed, it didn’t matter. The lie was out there, circulating. The debacle led to Whitley’s resignation before he was even confirmed by the Texas Senate.[19]
Claims of voter fraud have been disproven repeatedly, and yet, one poll found that 52% of Republicans believed Trump actually won the 2020 election and 68% were worried that the election was “rigged,”[20] believing in widespread voter fraud and following Trump, Kemp, Kobach, Cruz, Hawley, and other lawmakers and officials who continually feed flat-out lies to their followers regarding voter fraud. My question has always been, “Why?” If there is no evidence, and, indeed, there is evidence to the contrary, why do so many people believe in widespread voter fraud? I reject the degrading argument of some lack of intelligence or education. Intelligence does not equal worth, and knowledge does not necessarily lead to optimal or ethical decision-making. Ted Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard, Josh Hawley went to Stanford and Yale, and Kris Kobach went to Harvard, Oxford, and Yale. Believe me, they know exactly what they are doing, and their followers, Ivy-League to middle-school-educated, have likely seen the evidence that disproves these figures’ claims. However, they have been primed to ignore it.
I think we confront a problem that is two-fold: 1) the willful ignorance (to connote “ignore”) of non-extremist believers in widespread voter fraud, and 2) the weaponizing of far-right extremists (and simultaneously, far-right extremists seizing an opportunity to push their anti-government agenda). Here, willful ignorance refers to one’s desire or ability to follow a person, rhetoric, or set of beliefs no matter what information they are presented with. This is less a matter of seeing the facts and more a matter of whether one chooses to believe them.
One of these problems appears less dangerous, but this is not the case. They are inextricably linked, as we saw known figures of far-right groups storming the Capitol alongside everyday Americans. The line between healthy skepticism and belief in conspiracy theories has been blurred. So, what is the danger of misinformation and willful ignorance? The danger lies in the treatment of one’s peers and in making ill-informed choices in voting and policy considerations but also extends into a widespread distrust in our government and institutions. Willful ignorance slips into extremism far too easily. To be clear, our government and institutions are complicit in systemic issues that produce inequalities across races, ethnicities, genders, classes, and sexualities. However, acknowledging failures and proactively working to correct those is distinctly different from the violent overthrow of the system altogether, particularly by white supremacist groups that are entirely antithetical to democracy and to the novel diversity of this country.
Willful ignorance turned away when David Duke announced his support for Trump’s candidacy in 2016. Willful ignorance turned a blind eye to Trump’s countless xenophobic and racist claims and policies (not to mention his sexist and anti-LGBTQ positioning), and willful ignorance ignored his complete inability to denounce white supremacy and far-right extremist groups.
These groups are more prevalent than we know or would like to admit and have only been emboldened by so-called leaders like Trump who have weaponized their support. With the Vietnam War as a catalyst, paramilitary groups and training camps have been sprouting up and operating across the country for over 50 years.[21] These training camps and various recruitment efforts (such as the Aryan Brotherhood distributing Aryan Nations propaganda in prisons) have resulted in an amalgamation of once disparate groups, culminating in joint support of Trump as a way to push an overarching anti-government (and anti-diversity) agenda. Numerous red flags have cropped up and been ignored, including the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, the shootings in El Paso in 2019, and the attempted kidnapping of Governor Whitmer of Michigan in 2020.[22] Domestic terrorists are often characterized as lone-wolf, eccentric, or otherwise “crazy” individuals rather than part of a larger threat.[23] If the violent storming of the Capitol, the death threats against lawmakers, the beating and murdering of police officers (while parading Blue Lives Matter flags), and the presence of the confederate flag and “Camp Auschwitz” shirts in the halls of Congress weren’t enough of a sign, I’m not sure what is.
This is the danger. The very fact that the January 6th events are even debated shows where we are at in the realm of truth-telling (or rather, truth-obscuring). So, what is the solution? As I mentioned, the mere presence and distribution of factual information (i.e., that voter fraud is not a widespread issue but voter suppression is, and that the violence of January 6th was entirely predictable) cannot fully combat willful ignorance, but it’s a start. With a foundation of factual information, the truly difficult work begins with finding effective ways to disseminate these truth-bites. I think we chip away at willful ignorance through discussion – at the smallest level, with the people we know who believe differently than us, and at a grander scale, through politicians with a conscience stating the facts for their constituents and doing their job to represent the interests of the people rather than their own. This does not mean tolerating abhorrent behavior like Trump’s incitement of a violent mob, but it does mean willing to have difficult conversations, making our positions known, and disseminating helpful information rather than pure vitriol. We must be wary of misinformation, seek truth, fight against willful ignorance, and look to the facts – not a single person or rhetoric – to comprise our worldview.
One of the many January 6th images that stick with me is someone carrying a copper-colored bust of Trump in the midst of the siege of the Capitol.[24] It was like watching the tearing down of a dictator’s statue in reverse. Let that image remind you that his “movement” and the extremists who make up a large portion of his base were never pro-America. They were only ever pro-Trump and pro-white supremacy. That is the red flag – blindly following one man, one idol, or one doctrine while defying all conscience, logic, and factual evidence to do so.
Notes
[1] Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018).
[2] Anderson, One Person, No Vote, 166, 186.
[3] “Elections,” Georgia Secretary of State, accessed January 26, 2021, https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections.
[4] “Elections,” State of Kansas Secretary of State, accessed January 26,2021, https://www.sos.ks.gov/elections/elections.html.
[5] Anderson, One Person, No Vote, 163.
[6] Lydia Hardy, “Voter Suppression Post-Shelby: Impacts and Issues of Voter Purge and Voter ID Laws,” Mercer Law Review 71, no. 10 (2020): 868, https://digitalcommons.law.mercer.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1315&context=jour_mlr.
[7] Anderson, One Person, No Vote, 186.
[8] “Georgia Governor Election Results,” The New York Times, January 28, 2019, Election 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/georgia-governor.
[9] Anderson, One Person, No Vote, 87; Ari Berman, “The Man Behind Trump’s Voter Fraud Obsession,” The New York Times, June 13, 2017, The New York Time Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/magazine/the-man-behind-trumps-voter-fraud-obsession.html.
[10] Anderson, One Person, No Vote, 87; Berman, “The Man Behind Trump’s Voter Fraud Obsession.”
[11] Anderson, One Person, No Vote, 87.
[12] Berman, “The Man Behind Trump’s Voter Fraud Obsession.”
[13] Kris Kobach, “Why Opponents are Destined to Lose the Debate on Photo ID and Proof of Citizenship Laws: Simply Put – People Want Secure and Fair Elections,” Syracuse Law Review 62, no. 1 (2012): 5, https://lawreview.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/H-Kobach.pdf.
[14] Stephen Douglas Bonney, “Democracy’s Rainbow: The Long Ascent and Rapid Descent of Voting Rights in Kansas,” Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy 25, no. 3 (2016): 359, http://law.ku.edu/sites/law.drupal.ku.edu/files/docs/law_journal/v25/9%20Bonney%20-%20Democracy's%20Rainbow.pdf.
[15] Kobach, “Photo ID and Proof of Citizenship,” 5; Bonney, “Democracy’s Rainbow,” 359.
[16] Anderson, One Person, No Vote, 191.
[17] Anderson, One Person, No Vote, 193.
[18] Hardy, “Voter Suppression Post-Shelby,” 869.
[19] Hardy, “Voter Suppression Post-Shelby,” 870.
[20] Chris Kahn, “Half of Republicans Say Biden Won Because of ‘Rigged’ Election: Reuters/Ipsos Poll,” Reuters, updated November 18, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll/half-of-republicans-say-biden-won-because-of-a-rigged-election-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKBN27Y1AJ.
[21] Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
[22] Colin P. Clark, “A New Era of Far-Right Violence,” The New York Times, January 22, 2021, Opinion, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/opinion/domestic-terrorism-far-right-insurrection.html?searchResultPosition=2.
[23] Belew, Bring the War Home, 127.
[24] Evan Osnos, “Mob Rule in the Capitol,” The New Yorker, January 18, 2021, Dispatch, https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/mob-rule-in-the-capitol.
