Steven Carbó is director of Demos ' Democracy Program. This piece originally appeared in a Demos Democracy Dispatch.
Sometimes, when something is repeated often enough, it takes on the ring of truth.
That's the way it is with allegations of voter fraud. The myth has circulated for so long—decades, in fact—that for many people, it has moved from hypothesis to fact. Despite a massive void of evidence, the charges of widespread fraud perpetrated by individuals, or groups of individual voters, persist. In fact, they have become a major communications and lobbying tool in the arsenal of the right.
In the months since the November 2004 election, conservative ideologues and their partisan allies have harnessed voter fraud allegations as a powerful "new" weapon against the American people and our ability to have a political voice. Misleading accounts of illegal voting—involving identity theft, double voting, and voting by people with felony convictions—are increasingly reported as fact in the mainstream press, partisan blogs and political debates. To meet their goal of advancing election policy that restricts access to the ballot box, conservatives have devised a simple strategy: imposing strict new voter identification proposals on an unwitting electorate.
Legislating On Lies In Georgia
In Georgia, where the legislature recently passed a restrictive new voter ID bill, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has spent the last several months covering allegations of voter fraud. Writing in those pages, Republican State Rep. Willie Talton claimed that, "in the modern world that we live in today, there are too many people who steal identities and commit voter fraud." He went on to cite several convictions in the 1990s in a "massive" voter fraud case, where two elections were thrown out and several individuals imprisoned. But Talton fails to mention that the vote-buying case in question involved absentee voting—a form of voting made easier by the new Georgia law and one that cannot be regulated by a photo ID requirement.
Four months later, also in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Republican House Majority Leader Jerry Keen echoed Talton's charges about the pervasiveness of fraud—but drawing on much less convincing evidence. "We may not know about every case of voter fraud, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen," Keen said. His scenario—an individual stealing a utility bill out of someone's garbage and voting as that person—sounded more like an amateurish prank than an effective strategy for changing the outcome of an election. Atlanta Journal-Constitution associate editorial page editor Jim Wooten offered rhetorical support for the all-pervasive fraud argument in three other opinion pieces. Similar op-eds and editorials were run in leading papers in Wisconsin, Indiana and Washington state, where strident allegations of voter fraud fueled calls for voting restrictions.
These press placements have several things in common. Each sounds alarms about the integrity of our elections system on the basis of "evidence" that may be preliminary, unsubstantiated or misrepresented.
Those advancing the specter of voter fraud have also begun co-opting the language of voting rights advocates. An individual who steals someone's utility bill or bank statement in a poor neighborhood and then uses the document to vote in place of that person commits, in the words of Georgia State Rep. Talton, "the worst form of disenfranchisement."
And the solution most frequently offered to combat this phantom voter fraud: strict voter identification requirements that are advanced as a practical and non-burdensome remedy. They compare the fundamental right of voting to voluntary activities that require ID—boarding a plane, purchasing alcohol, driving a car. It is an emotional appeal that blurs the real impact that ID would have. Indeed, the ID requirement appears to be such a common-sense solution that the fact that more 150,000 Georgia seniors lack a driver's license—the most commonly accepted form of identification—gets lost in the debate.
Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox testified before her state's legislature this summer that there is zero evidence of voter fraud at the polling places that would have been prevented by a photo identification requirement. But to many of our elected leaders and their allies in the press, the real evidence on voter fraud doesn't matter. Those who object to new voting requirements like photo identification are utterly dismissed.
Continuing Obfuscation Of The Truth
It is clear that we are confronting a clever, organized campaign to halt the pro-voter election reform that followed the 2000 election and passage of the Help America Vote Act. The voter fraud drumbeat is now heard in states across the country, offering a resonant and emotional counterpoint—"ballot integrity"—to our calls for fair ballot access. Their campaign has saturated not only newsprint, but the book publishing world, talk radio, and even the television talk show circuit. Witness Wall Street Journal editorialist John Fund's magnificent job in touting "findings" in his new reverse roman à clef, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy .
The campaign deployed a new tactic just two weeks ago, when the American Center for Voting Rights Legislative Fund, a shadowy new organization led by Mark (Thor) Hearne II—the former National Counsel to Bush-Cheney '04, Inc.—released Vote Fraud Intimidation & Suppression in the 2004 Presidential Election . The spurious report claims that "thousands of Americans were disenfranchised by illegal votes cast on Election Day 2004," and that "paid Democratic operatives were far more involved in voter intimidation and suppression activities than were their Republican counterparts." In order to deflect blame and stave public inquiry, vote suppression is now reduced to partisan squabble.
Bringing The Debate Back To Reality
Those of us who work to create fair elections and increase participation need a campaign of our own, shorn of partisan trappings, to shift the debate away from the polarized frame that pits voter access against ballot integrity. Their story, however false, appeals to the fears that the right has engendered in Americans for the last four decades: We, the American people, might very well lose if we keep talking about elections the way we do today. The challenge is for voting rights activists to develop a bold and coherent set of messages—about our values, about fair elections, about the high American ideal of everyone having a voice in how they are governed. We must act now, before yesterday's myth becomes today's truth and ends the progress we have made toward achieving equal voting rights for all.
