Stop the Steal Redux: Why Conservatives Are Pushing All-In on Election Fraud…Again
When combined with mail-in ballots, the system is *designed* to make it impossible to prove fraud.
Elon Musk Tweet from 7/8/2024
We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number.
Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, 5/8/2024
Even before the baton pass from Biden to Harris, when Donald Trump was leading comfortably in the polls, the drumbeat of election denial and voter fraud continued to issue forth from all corners of the conservative landscape. In reality, Trump and his allies have never really stopped pushing bogus election fraud claims since before the 2016 election. And going back even further, some type or another of electoral shenanigans accusation has always been a stock theme of conservatism since the advent of the Gingrich-Limbaugh revolution of the mid-to-late 90s.
But as the two quotations leading this piece show, there is, and has never been, any actual evidence for widespread voter fraud, and high-profile conservatives admit this publicly. If you “check the research,” which beflagged MAGA minions are forever urging their liberal interlocutors to do, you can see the nothing-burger nature of voter fraud on conservative sites themselves. The big right-wing site to look at here is the Heritage Foundation Voter Fraud map and tracker ( https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud). At first glance, this looks promising for conservative claims for voter fraud. The lead descriptions are tantalizing: “ A Sampling of Recent Election Fraud Cases from Across the United States.” And, “ This database is not an exhaustive list. This database is intended to demonstrate the vulnerabilities in the election system and the many ways in which fraud is committed.”
These descriptions give the sense that the instances are just the “recent” ones, the tip of the iceberg, signaling that there there is a shit-ton more fraud going on that what is listed on the site. Of course, the truth is exactly the opposite. This is not a database just of recent cases. It goes back to 1979, and the total number of cases cited is… wait for it… 1,546 (as of July 18th). As far as non-citizens voting illegally (more on this later), there have only been 24 instances between 2003 and 2023. The “sampling” language is, of course, a deliberately deceptive hedge. You know damn well that if there were more cases of actual fraud, they would be up on this site (indeed, there is an option to submit your own fraud accusation case). Far from demonstrating the “vulnerabilities in the election system,” the fact that Heritage can only find 1,546 cases in the last 45 years is actually a testament to how secure and solid our voting systems are.
Of course, conservative leaders know this, which is why they have to fall back on the ‘intuition’ language, making assertions that the liberal voter fraud schemes are so brilliantly-conceived as to be undetectable. Now, normally, when there is no evidence for something that you intuitively believe, you would want to go out and get that evidence before wasting time putting in ‘fixes’ for things that might not exist. After all, if you don’t know HOW something is being done (because there is no evidence), then how would you know how to fix it?
But that is not the type of thinking that drives conservative claims of voter fraud. Indeed, the quotation from Mike Johnson above comes from his discussion of the SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility), a bill that the House passed in July, mandating voter ID requirements for all federal elections (even though it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal contests, and even though there have been virtually no cases of non-citizen voting in the last 20 years). The SAVE Act is unlikely to pass the Senate, but the fact that the House passed it demonstrates the Republican commitment to crafting solutions to problems that don’t exist.
So why do conservative leaders continue to push voter fraud claims, despite there being zero evidence, as they themselves admit? And why do rank-and-file conservatives persevere in believing something that is so demonstrably false? What is really going on here?
One thing to note before we get to the reasons themselves is something hinted at obliquely in the Heritage site disclaimers. Their database doesn’t prove widespread fraud, but it “demonstrates the vulnerabilities” in the system. Another way of describing this would be that the site has anecdotal evidence only, isolated cases or stories of particular incidents that could or might point to a wider problem. The anecdotal/story approach to reality is stock and trade for conservative media. We are storytelling animals, so we want colorful tales about what’s going on. Not stats. Not numbers. Not egghead theories or scientific mumbo-jumbo. The deep machinery of our primate brains wants dramatic, relatable, easily-understood yarns, and the more personal and interpersonal, the better. No matter how many times you hear that there have only been 24 cases of noncitizen voting in the last 20 years, you’ll be more likely to believe (and retell) a story about a specific dude who got caught doing something bad (or more likely, it will be a story about a guy who heard from some other guy that this dude was doing something bad). But this is just a cognitive feature of all people, liberal, conservative, and otherwise. What are the real reasons that conservative leaders push the specific fraud angle, and why do people believe it?
The first reason for loud GOP proclamations of voter fraud is to suppress the votes of legal voters who just don’t want to be hassled or jump through more hoops. Voter ID laws (like the SAVE Act) tend to affect urban (i.e., Democratic) populations more negatively than rural ones. People who live in cities are less likely to have current drivers licenses, as they disproportionately use public transportation, and thus may not need valid IDs on a regular basis. Voting also takes longer in urban areas, due to population density, traffic congestion, etc., and it is difficult for many to get time off from work to stand in long lines at overcrowded polling places. This is the reason why Republicans attack extended voting periods and mail-in voting: not because of fraud, but because those methods make it easier for urban populations to vote, which is a boon for Democrats. In-person one-day voting and voter ID laws are key tactics in suppressing urban voting, a crucial strategy for the tight elections that have become the norm.
[A quick aside on the SAVE Act in particular. The House Bill purposely conflates the expansion of noncitizen voting in isolated local/municipal elections with a totally fictitious accusation that Dems are trying to instate noncitizen voting at the federal level. This is pure fantasy, but a handful of Democrats felt the pressure of this insidious insinuation, and voted for the bill. To make things clear, federal law does not prohibit noncitizens from voting in state or local elections. That is left up to the states/localities themselves. No state currently allows noncitizens to vote in state elections, but a handful of municipalities in California, Maryland, and Vermont allow noncitizens to vote in municipal elections only (school board, register of deeds, etc.). There is no reality whatsoever to the claim that these are trial balloons for allowing noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Total fantasy, but a useful scare tactic for the GOP. And on the subject of “illegals” voting: the last thing that undocumented workers want to do is to draw attention to themselves by committing a federal crime. As is true around the world, illegal immigrants come to the US to work. Labor demand is by far the overriding driver of all immigration, and undocumented workers in the US keep their heads down and mind their own business. Immigrants, legal and illegal, pay a steep price to come to the US, and they would not jeopardize their position by breaking federal election law. Libs would need to be paying noncitizens millions and millions of dollars to illegally vote, something that would obviously leave an evidentiary trail miles wide. Needless to say, no such trail exists.]
The second reason for voter fraud claims is to lay down a narrative backdrop for officials in swing state to do whatever they can to ensure that the GOP wins. Fraud justifies tactics with which we are now all familiar: voter intimidation, poll watching, harassment of non-partisan election officials, non-certification of the popular vote, “alternate” (i.e., fake) slates of electors, final authority for results granted to a Republican governor or legislature instead of election officials, etc. At the GOP convention, there was a call to recruit armies of poll watchers to ensure a fair election. Aside from straight-up intimidation and purposeful muddying of the waters on counting procedures, another ancillary reason for poll watchers is to potentially provoke minor instances of conflict or violence, to create the impression that particular localities are out of control, in need of authoritarian intervention to ensure a “fair election.” Of course, this will only be a concern in Democratic districts in swing states and Democratic areas inside red states. Let’s remember that, for Conservatives, voter fraud is only produced by Dems, so GOP areas don’t really need any scrutiny.
This brings us to the most important purpose of conservative claims of Democratic voter fraud: it is a foundational pillar in the polarizing strategy of the GOP, the escalating portrayal of Democrats and Liberals as evil and traitorous, out to destroy the country. It should go without saying that this is horribly cynical and self-destructive. It paints natural and long-term demographic changes (like white people having less babies) as part of a nefarious liberal replacement scheme, with illegal immigrants helping to vote in an evil cadre of pedophiles, criminals, groomers, and radical Marxist something-or-others.
But this deranged portrayal of reality just doesn’t hang together easily, or logically, because lower birthrates, demographic transition, an aging population, a need for younger workers, immigrants (legal and illegal) coming to the US to fill labor demand — these are all reflective of easily-demonstrable global phenomena. See this great book by Hein de Haas for background on all the myths and realities surrounding immigration and its related political issues.
Because this polarizing project of conservatism makes no logical sense, as evidenced by tens of millions of people believing a huge falsehood based on zero evidence, it has to be held together with more sordid forces than common sense or basic logic: racism, white supremacy, religious demonization, and supercharged culture warring. This toxic stew is creating a kind of fascism simulacrum, because most conservatives don’t believe that they’re signing up for a Handmaid’s Tale-Fourth Reich. They just think that they’re defending America from the radical left, which is filled with radical left socialists, agents of Satan, and possibly baby cannibals. But in embracing obvious falsehoods like the Big Steal, they are voting to upend our democracy for a quasi-religions phantasm with no future. And as the realities of ecological collapse set in with more undeniability, conservatives will be left in an untethered, free-floating dreamland, like Neo before he was ripped free from the Matrix.
All of this stuff, of course, sits inside our own version of the Matrix: the Polarization Industrial Complex (PIC), which keeps us battling each other while the machinery of our economy, politics, and culture-production keeps churning out bigger and bigger windfalls for the plutocrats at the helm, while the earth burns, shrivels, and dies beneath our feet.
If Kamala Harris wins, as is looking increasingly likely, it remains to be seen what chaos will issue from this messy landscape of election denial and imagined voter fraud. A large-enough victory for Harris could render all the GOP election machinations moot. But anything close could spawn a nightmare of lawsuits, political violence, anti-constitutional action at the state level, Supreme Court interference, and even another coup attempt on Washington DC.
Basically, the plutocrats are being painted into a corner by their own Frankenstein’s monster. The PIC is not sustainable, because the people inside the artificial battle arena eventually break the boundaries of the playing field and start turning their hyper-polarized dreams into realities, which then become nightmares. There is no endgame to the Conservative fantasy of crushing all Libs/Dems, and turning the US into a theocratic, white, baby factory, Ayn Rand shopkeeper nation. This dream is too divorced from reality to even contemplate, and it will be interesting and tragic to see how long the plutocrats will let it continue before they snuff it out.
Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on August 18, 2024.
