Another partisan issue is voting; Captain Obvious would agree. After all, voting involves choices among parties (in most places), so who gets to vote and under what circumstances is obviously a matter up for partisan debate. Some democracy advocates would disagree saying “it’s a fundamental human right” and the UN Declaration on Human Rights supports this view. Yet even fundamental rights have limits: children don’t vote, and no one seems to get upset about that.
In the United States, there are two camps–both extreme–currently waging war over voting rights and procedures. On the right, Trump supporters claim the 2020 election was rigged, full of vote fraud which illegally denied then-President Trump a second term. In his supporters’ view, this fraud requires a tightening of voting rules and greater oversight by State elections officials, up to and including the ability to overrule and replace slates of electors in future elections. On the left, the push to enact greater restrictions is seen as an attempt to disenfranchise (mostly) minority voters who vote overwhelmingly for Democratic Party candidates, and to build in an illegal backstop to overrule majorities and ensure Republican electors in the future. Their meme is “Jim Crow 2.0” recalling the many ways southern states denied black Americans their franchise for almost one-hundred years.
As I usually admit, both sides have basic facts to support their contentions, but both exaggerate or outright lie to make a stronger case. Let’s examine the whole truths, shall we?
For starters, the notion everybody has a right to vote. Advocates chant this, but no one, and I mean NO ONE, really believes it. Children (as noted) don’t deserve a vote. People who are unconscious don’t merit a vote. You and I may disagree about how young is too young, or how conscious someone needs to be, or if felons or non-citizens should be allowed to vote. But the principle stands: some people do not have a right to vote. In fact, the original text of the US Constitution said very little about who could vote, other than that if one was eligible to vote in one’s state, one was eligible to vote for federal office. States were left to decide the franchise, that is, who could vote.
Much is made of the sexism and racism of the original state decisions to limit voting to white men who owned property. This was more a case of elitism than anything else (since it disenfranchised more white men than women or blacks). It was elitism to believe (as those passing the laws feared) that large groups of voters could be bought or directed by others. Yet even the white men of property all knew of cases of ‘saloon meetings on election day’ when wealthy candidates bought rounds of drinks for eligible voters in exchange for trips to the voting booths. More voters simply meant more opportunities for fraud in this view.
And the history of American politics is rife with voting fraud. Anyone familiar with the two centuries of Tammany Hall control of New York City or the Daley machine’s sixty-year run in Chicago knows that such organizations knew precisely how much corruption and vote fraud was needed for every election, from ward member to President. Top those stories off with the hundred years of poll taxes, rigged literacy tests, and violent intimidation of black voters under Jim Crow laws. It was very late in the Twentieth Century that most of the blatant voter fraud and disenfranchisement was wrung out of the US democratic process, at the cost of many new laws and controls.
But’s that all (dirty) water under the bridge: what about today? One cannot see today’s exaggerations for what they are if you don’t know the history!
Let’s start with the fraud claims in the 2020 election. President Trump and lawyers representing him filed sixty-three lawsuits claiming voter fraud. They were heard in a variety of states, under various Republican- (including Trump) and Democratic-appointed judges. All of these suits were denied, most in summary judgments. That is, the attorneys filing the suit made claims, but when asked by the judge to present ANY evidence to support the claimed fraud, they did not do so. So it’s not a matter of not considering the evidence; no evidence was produced. Some lawsuits presented evidence, but never in sufficient numbers to affect the outcome of the election in that state, rendering the suit moot. Some more outrageous claims, like those of rigged voting machines, are not being adjudicated as (disproven) vote fraud accusations but as defamation by the individuals making the claims. Even various recount efforts by pro-Trump organizations and legislatures have failed to find anything which undermines the legitimacy of Biden’s 2020 victory.
Why do so many Trump supporters (and even Republicans in general) still believe the election was rigged after this unbroken record of failure? First off, there is the recent historical precedent. What’s good for the (Democratic) goose is good for the (Republican) gander. Democrats clung to the 2016-election-was-rigged-and-Trump-is-a-Russian-stooge fairy tale to this day, and Trumpers love a good tit-for-tat. Second and more importantly, the 2020 election was held during a pandemic which made for really dicey voting conditions and delayed outcomes. States changed voting rules and procedures, often late in the election cycle, in a genuine attempt to assist voting when gathering in public on election day may not be advised or even permitted. Some of these changes violated State constitutions and were thrown out; most were allowed as prudent responses to an unprecedented situation. In general, these rules favored absentee/early voting.
Nothing wrong with absentee/early voting, although it does require special and different forms of verification than in-person voting. States like Colorado had pioneered the effort and had strong procedures in place. But other states tried to enact new early/absentee processes on the fly, while the government officials responsible for implementation were not even working in-person. This led to debates about fairness, ballot verification, voter identification, drop-boxes, and nursing home ballot harvesting. None of these situations demonstrated any fraud which could have changed the state’s electoral outcome. But they did delay vote total announcements, and that was a major problem.
As predicted by several analysts, the delayed announcements of voting results were inevitable, and had an obvious effect: Republicans tended to favor in-person voting, where rapid processes were in-place that resulted in quick vote totals. Democrats favored absentee or early balloting (the kind that took longer to count). This resulted in election night preliminary results indicating President Trump would be re-elected, and morning-after results showing he lost. Which the President and his supporters were never going to believe, no matter how many recounts, lawsuits or fact checks were done. Hey, some on the left still believe that Al Gore beat George W. Bush, so delusion is bipartisan.
Now some red states are rolling back the pro- early/absentee processes they enacted during the pandemic, and some Democrats are crying foul. The amusing thing here is (1) there is no evidence the changes increased the number of Democratic votes, and (2) there is no evidence the changes increased the total number of votes. The 2020 election was a vast experiment with red and blue states making different choices about voting rules, but with an odd outcome: the changes neither affected the total turnout nor the partisan results. And this tracks with decades of research on the issue. So Republicans are doing something meaningless in terms affecting Democratic voters, and Democrats are fighting it even though it doesn’t make a real difference. This may be the ultimate “no there, there” issue. What did happen is when people voted changed (Democrats early and absentee, Republicans in person on election day), but not the number of people voting. Furthermore, some of the red state changes are the same as or less restrictive than those which already exist in blue states, which hardly is evidence for claims of “Jim Crow 2.0”. Georgia has been the principle battleground for these charges. If you want a solid review of what’s changing and why, Georgia Public Broadcasting has it here. Suffice it to say the changes place Georgia in line with voting processes in New York, and New Jersey, and even Delaware, so Jim Crow is more widespread than we knew.
Gerrymandering remains a problem, but I note that the same folks who decried it as a great Republican threat to American democracy (sic) are now chuckling at the Democratic party’s clever use of it to secure more seats before the 2022 mid-terms. Perhaps it isn’t quite the existential threat some imagined.
States may find a way to limit gerrymandering, but I am not optimistic. It must be done using State constitutions, not the federal one, since the US Supreme Court has called gerrymandering an unfortunate but inevitable fact of electoral life (my words). The move to create new or additional review mechanisms to certify an election is troubling, and might provoke a constitutional challenge if implemented. Oddly enough, some state legislatures once appointed their own choice of federal electors, regardless of the votes cast, in effect treating the vote as a popularity contest. However, once a state commits to using an election to determine slates of Presidential electors, it would be legally dubious to somehow ignore the results and select other electors. And the US House of Representatives need not accept them (another thing which already happened).
Finally, there are those who claim that since there is no widespread evidence of voting fraud, there is no reason for new or additional restrictions on voting. Those holding this view are guilty of the magic amulet fallacy (“See this magic amulet; it keeps away tigers.” “I don’t believe it.” “You don’t see any tigers, do you? It must be working!”). Voter fraud has always been an issue, and it was one mitigated by increasing identification and verification processes. If the states wish to move toward more options for voting (early, absentee, online, whatever) they need to enact more and better processes to prevent voting fraud, which will occur. One need not be an alarmist or a racist or a partisan, just familiar with history and technology, to see why.
In summary, Republicans are attempting to suppress Democratic votes, and vice versa. The fact that one side seems more successful (in passing new rules) is not a moral judgment. More importantly, there is no evidence the changes make the difference that is (privately) believed by the Republicans or publicly-decried by the Democrats! That fifty-state experiment in 2020 showed that the increases in voting, and the partisan shifts, were the same in blue and red states and in states with fewer/more restrictions. The 2020 federal election was legitimate, as was the 2016 one. All that changed is when people voted: Democrats before the election, Republicans on election day.
Most importantly, don’t question the legitimacy of the election process, and remember to vote!