" Don’t Blame Trump: American Democracy Was Broken Before He Muscled In" (excellent journalism from Newsweek)
newsweek.com
Masters of deception, what would they do without fear & faked bogeymen?
And that’s because it’s all horsefeathers. In her 2010 book, The Myth of Voter Fraud, Lorraine Minnite, a professor of public policy at Rutgers, collected decades of voting data and concluded that in 2005, more people had been indicted for violations of migratory bird laws than for election fraud. “Fraud itself is a relatively rare event,’’ she wrote. “Rather, the problem is the myth of fraud that can influence the vote count and, more important, shapes the rules that erode voting rights.”
That includes the big Republican bogeyman: the idea that millions of people—particularly aliens without documentation—are assuming other people’s identities to illegally cast ballots. In normal times, this would be a laugh line. Think of it: The conspiracy-minded contend that individuals in this country are illegally risking discovery and deportation so they can cast a single vote, or that citizens are risking lengthy prison time to add one more ballot to the millions cast in their state, because…why? Studies that claim dead people voted or registered multiple times invariably turn out to be based on clerical errors or instances where someone voted, then died. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, which investigated hundreds of reports of alleged fraud in thousands of elections, found only a handful of alleged—much less proved—cases of in-person voter fraud. Instead, the reasons for the allegations were almost always benign, such as a dead man with the same name as a man who voted, or a name was written down incorrectly by a poll worker. In fact, almost every example that has been held up in recent years as proof of fraud tends to fall away as a misunderstanding or mistake when the details are examined.
A draft report about voter fraud written in 2006 by two consultants to the federal Election Assistance Commission found that “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling-place fraud, or at least much less than is claimed.” (The final report toned down the language to a more politically palatable level, saying that the issue was a subject of “a great deal of debate.”)
To address this nonexistent problem, Republicans brought out a sledgehammer with “voter ID” laws that require people to produce specific types of identification at the ballot box. But even if the problem was real—which it isn’t—the “solution” wouldn’t solve it.
Take Texas, which was at the forefront of pushing this tactic. In 2012, Forrest Mitchell, an investigator with the state attorney general’s office, said in sworn testimony that only about five of the more than 300 investigations into election fraud in the previous decade had involved in-person voter fraud, and just two of those would have been prevented by an ID law. That means that out of more than 39 million votes cast during those years (not including primaries), cases where there was evidence of fraud that might have been stopped by voter ID occurred 0.0000005 percent of the time. Put another way, over 10 years, the number of Texas cases of in-person voter fraud that could have been impeded by voter ID is equal to or less than the number of people bitten by sharks over the past nine months—in landlocked Nevada. |
