The election “fraudit” continues in Arizona:
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer on Saturday called a Trump statement accusing the county of deleting an elections database “unhinged” and called on other Republicans to stop the unfounded accusations.
“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country,” Richer tweeted.
I want to comment on Digby’s Saturday post on the circus happening in Arizona. That tweet thread from an election technology professional details the myriad of ways that the fraudit is a disaster. These tweets in particular caught my attention:
It could spread elsewhere, Perez warns. And it has. Or at least, it did. Trump Twitter is buzzing that Wisconsin has joined in with its own audit of 2020 results. Except that news is three months old. Whatever.
Weaponized doubt has been one of the right’s favorite tools for undermining democracy for decades. The rise of Fox News and social media (with the aid of foreign bots) simply pumped up the effect the way certain features enhance the yield of nuclear weapons. Only these bombs are designed to generate smoke, not fire.
A quick review (from 2012):
… some people really don’t want you to vote. Every couple of months, their agents (figuratively) fling smoke bombs into newsrooms and yell “voter fraud.” By the time the smoke clears and reporters realize there’s no fire — and no fraud — all viewers remember are hearing the words “voter fraud” over and over again, and the eye-popping crawlers on the news at six about dead people voting. Thus is spread an urban legend.
“Smoke” filling the studios of your local news outlet sticks in the brain more than reports that it was all right-wing fake news.
Here is a memorable example from South Carolina (from earlier in 2012):
After claims that hundreds of the walking dead had voted in the Republican primary, the Attorney General released the names of only six to the State Election Commission for review.
By early February, the election officials were able to confirm all of the voters were legitimate: five were very much alive, and one had voted before dying. Clerical errors were blamed.
Even as Fox News pressed ahead with its zombie voter headlines, the State Election Commission pressed ahead with its investigation, reporting its findings this week:
In 197 of [the 207 cases examined], the records show no indication of votes being cast fraudulently in the name of deceased voters. Research found each of these cases to be the result of clerical errors, bad data matching, errors in assigning voter participation, or voters dying after being issued an absentee ballot. In 10 cases, the records were insufficient to make a determination.
With all that smoke, casual viewers conclude there must be a fire. And for smoke bombers, the truth is beside the point. The allegations land on Page 1 and on the news at six. Investigation findings showing no fraud occured wind up on page six.
It might be dead people. It might be busloads of “those” people using fake, pristinely uncreased utility bills for ID. It might be “double voters.” It might be “Chinese ballots” or voting machines rigged by Venezuela. It’s not voters who are dead. It’s truth.
Loud, well-publicized allegations are the point, just as in the ongoing miniseries in Arizona.
Here’s another clip from 2014 regarding alleged double voting:
Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies just as quickly debunked the study by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach whose office, after checking 5 million voter records in 2013, “couldn’t provide any evidence of a single instance in which the Interstate Crosscheck’s data had led to an actual legal charge of voter fraud.” Because the data, Kromm writes, ”offers no proof such fraud is occurring.” Requiring citizens to present identity cards to vote would have no effect on voting in multiple states.
Per Kobach’s method, a two-state match of just last and first names and a birthday are enough to flag someone as possibly voting in two states. “There are going to be a lot of David Lees on that list,” said Philadelphia elections commissioner Stephanie Singer last October of the Kobach Crosscheck of Pennsylvania’s database. In a 2007 study on the “Birthdate Problem,” Michael P. McDonald and Justin Levitt demonstrated how it is common, statistically, to find people sharing the same name and birthdate in a large population. They wrote, ”And common sense should expose the flaws in accusations like that against a New Jersey woman who, based only on a matched name and birthdate, allegedly voted at the northern tip of New Jersey in 2004 and then drove the length of the state to vote in-person for a second time.”
Yet, as Laura Clawson observes regarding old, straight white guys, “[I]f they aren’t on the winning side of discrimination, that’s like being discriminated against themselves, by their way of thinking.” If their side loses an election, someone must have cheated. The panic among the white Republican base over voter fraud, dead voters, messy voter rolls, double voting — the proximate threat varies — is because demographic trends in this country show that the numerical edge to which they feel entitled will be gone within decades. They avoided looking at that fact square on for years, maybe peeking through their fingers at the supposed threat posed by high Muslim birthrates and lamenting the West’s “lack of civilizational confidence” (instead of “banging away elsewhere,” as Michael Kinsley once suggested). But when a half-black man moved into the White House, they could no longer look away. Barack Obama embodies the demographic trends reducing white people to just another minority in this melting-pot country. And the Republican base knows how minorities are treated in America. Their European forebears did most of the treating here for several centuries. They are as scared as Stephen Stills at Woodstock.