Voter Fraud: I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means

Paul Sableman, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Much ado is being made (again) about the lack of meaningful fraud in yet another red state audit of the 2020 election. More specifically, Texas has found (drumroll please):

Although it has yet to finish investigating the records, the state also included an unverified figure of 509 voter records — about 0.0045% of the 11.3 million votes cast in November 2020 — in which a voter may have cast a vote in Texas and another state or jurisdiction. The state said the work of reviewing those records to eliminate those that were “erroneously matched” because of data issues wouldn’t be completed until January.

The state also highlighted the investigation of 67 votes — about 0.0006% of the votes cast in the 2020 general election — cast by “potentially deceased voters.” This review also has not been completed.

In its report, the secretary of state emphasized that the removal of ineligible or deceased voters from the voter rolls “in and of itself does not indicate that any illegal votes were cast.”

All of which is to say that – again – while fraudulent activity was detected (as it is in every election) – there’s zero evidence that fraud caused Donald J. Trump to loose his job as President of the United States.  This follows similar results in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin; in Michigan the audit preening never got off the ground when state Republican legislators failed to find anything worth auditing.

So as Chris Cillizza noted on CNN today:

The basic point is this: Yes, on occasion dead people cast a vote. And, yes, some people try (and succeed) at casting ballots in two different states. But, there is ZERO evidence that these rule-breakers are doing so in any sort of coordinated way. And, the sheer paucity of people who even attempt voter fraud is so small (as compared to the overall number of ballots cast in a given state or district) as to make the Trumpian obsession with it laughable.

People who delude themselves into believing that humans are rational would thus conclude that Trump and his GOP enablers will now need something other then The Big Lie to grift their supporters, and that the pathway to securing federal elections via the various bills before the Senate would become easier – if there’s no real voter fraud threat, then shoring up voting rights at the federal level would be a shoe in.

Such people are deluded however because — yet again — all these audits bring charts and graphs to bazooka fights.  The politicians in the GOP care not one wit about reality in this instance, because for them “voter fraud” is simply a means to “other” their political opponents.  Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy and their state level enablers aren’t focused on illegal activity.  They are focused completely, fully, and directly on WHO votes and WHOM they vote for, with a single minded mission to remove anyone who won’t vote Republican.  They know, and have known for several decades, that Republican political and economic policies are and will be rejected as America becomes more “brown,” and women and underrepresented groups seek and gain more political and economic power. They don’t for one second desire to follow the “Rule of Law” regarding voter fraud unless it serves their naked power grabs, and they are perfectly content to manufacture a crisis around baseless rhetoric if it helps them stay in and consolidate power.

Put another way, when Republicans talk about the election being “stolen” they do so because they regard their opposition as illegitimate, and the voters supporting that opposition as fraudsters.

Which means that Democrats slow rolling of national voting rights bills plays into their hands. After all, people who vote illegitimately (i.e. for the opposition) should be expected to protect voting right for everyone, should they?