When Republicans wail about election fraud (which is frequently), their complaint almost always concerns voter impersonation at the polling place--that's the only cheating, after all, that would be averted by voter ID laws, which is their solution for the nonexistent problem. I say "nonexistent" because there are a lot of reasons to suppose voter impersonation is too exceedingly rare and inconsequential to merit a remedy.
1. Common sense. Voter impersonation could add one vote at a time to the tally of the cheating candidate. How does that actually sway the result? You'd need organized teams of fraudsters descending on polling places, all of them knowing whom to impersonate, and some way of knowing that the voter being impersonated wasn't going to vote. No one has ever explained the details of how the cheating Democrats, who according to legend routinely organize themselves into circular firing squads, manage to pull it off.
2. Republicans occasionally acknowledge the above difficulty by asserting, never with any evidence, that these squadrons of cheaters have in fact invaded polling places and, with their illegal ballots, put the Democratic candidate over the top. For example, President Trump, who in 2016 lost New Hampshire by fewer than 3,000 votes, has alleged that "bus loads" of illegal voters crossed into the Granite State from Massachusetts on Election Day to vote for Hillary Clinton. The claim is so implausible as to be laughable and of course there's no evidence it happened--Trump's just bleating. If there were 50 illegal voters per bus, there would have to have been about 60 buses--another caravan! Where did the buses start from? Who paid for them? Where did they stop? How many illegal ballots were cast at what polling places? The whole tale is preposterous.
3. The testimony of election officials and other experts, who, with one voice, assert that voter impersonation isn't an issue. Court records indicate that the number of cases is minuscule, and, of those few that do arise, the most prevalent underlying explanation is never organized and corrupt intent but, rather, the simple carelessness or confusion of a lone careless or confused person. The Republican response to this objection is essentially the children's joke about pink elephants who hide in cherry trees. That there is no evidence it happens proves how cunning they are!
4. Possibly my favorite: after Trump's election, when Republicans had their fingers on all the levers of power, they organized a commission to investigate this gigantic problem. The commission soon disbanded without uncovering any evidence that the problem exists. There have been no efforts to rev up a new investigation. It's almost like this fraud is just a phantom to invoke whenever Republicans lose a close election--and voter ID laws, the solution for the invisible problem, a tool to suppress the vote!
We do now know, however, of at least one documented case of election fraud from the just completed midterm election. It didn't fit the Republican scheme in several significant respects. First, it didn't involve voter impersonation, and was of a sufficient scale to change the outcome of a fairly close election. Second, the fraud, evidence of which is clearly visible in the tabulated results, has now been confirmed by the testimony of principles. And third, it was Republicans who were cheating.
The race in question was for the congressional seat from North Carolina's ninth district. The Republican, Mark Harris, "won" by 905 votes out of more than 282,000 cast. There was in the immediate aftermath of the election some murmuring about what are politely referred to as "irregularities," in this case "election workers" who showed up at people's houses to collect their absentee ballots that otherwise would have been mailed in. (In North Carolina, the names of people who have requested an absentee ballot is a public record.) There are nine counties within the district, and reports of these personal visits to collect ballots came from two of them--Robeson and Bladen. Journalists investigating the "irregularity" easily discovered clear evidence of fraud. For example, in the other seven counties the percentage range of requested absentee ballots that were not returned ran from a low of 12% to a high of 27%. But in Bladen County the figure was 40% and in Robeson County it was 62%. Of people in Robeson County who requested an absentee ballot to mail in, 38% were registered Democrats, 22% were registered Republicans, and the rest were independents. Despite the Democrats' advantage in registration, Harris, the Republican, won 61% of the returned absentee ballots. Robeson was the only county in the district in which Harris got a majority of the mailed-in absentee votes.
Testimony in an ongoing hearing about the election has made it quite evident what was going on. The Harris campaign employed an operative--his name is McCrae Dowless--who ran an absentee ballot scam in two of the district's nine counties. Campaign workers (not "election workers") would show up at houses where a voter had requested an absentee ballot. The worker would offer to collect the ballot. Back at headquarters, ballots marked for Harris would be falsely witnessed and then, in small batches at post offices near the voter's home, mailed in to be counted. Ballots marked for the Democrat didn't go anywhere. That's why there was such a high rate of unreturned absentee ballots in those two counties.
Dowless has asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The lower-level workers who did the grunt work have corroborated the details of how the fraud worked. No one testified that the candidate, Harris, was aware of the scam--until, yesterday, the candidate's own son testified that he had warned his father that Dowless was crooked. Today, Harris himself testified, and called for a new election. Apparently that's what will happen, but to me it seems like a pretty meager penalty--no penalty at all, actually. Cheat and "win." If you don't get caught, great. If you do get caught, the "penalty" is that you then have to try and win a fair election--what you would have had to do in the first place had you never perpetrated a fraud against democracy.
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