“You can’t keep a good homicidal maniac down.” It was Roger Ebert, I think, who first said that of the unstoppable slashers in unstoppable slasher movie sequels. They just keep coming. Like “zombie lies,” that way. Paul Krugman first encountered that term in regard to lies circulating about Canadian heath care.
The voter fraud fraud is just as unstoppable. Republicans have worked assiduously for decades to ensure that. Facts don’t phase it. The most secure election in American history can’t stop it. Proving “dead voters” aren’t dead isn’t a kill shot. Republicans keep spinning. Real Election Integrity™ advocates keep trying:
An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election.
Democrat Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states.
Please note the word potential. It appears over 15 times in the article and graphics. Potential voter fraud is not actual fraud or a provable crime. But it will be spun that way by voter fraud fraudsters.
AP’s review found the potential cases of fraud ran the gamut: Some were attributed to administrative error or voter confusion while others were being examined as intentional attempts to commit fraud.
The vast majority will be dismissed as unprovable as deliberate attempts to commit a crime. Others will prove to be the kinds of baseless allegations thrown around by Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and Team Kraken. Those, AP reports, are based “largely upon an incomplete assessment of voter registration records and lack of information concerning the processes by which these records are compiled and maintained.” Translation: Allegations made by people who know shit about election processes. Ask Rudy. He has a 3-ring binder full of those.
At The Atlantic, Vann R. Newkirk II interviews Crystal Mason. Convicted of voter fraud for improperly casting a provisional ballot that was never counted, Mason faces five years in prison. Texas made an example of her:
The story of Mason, a Black woman, illuminates the extraordinary efforts the Republican Party has made to demonstrate that fraud is being committed by minority voters on a massive scale. That false notion is now an article of faith among tens of millions of Americans. It has become an excuse to enact laws that make voting harder for everyone, but especially for voters of color, voters who are poor, voters who are old, and voters who were not born in the United States.
Mason was on supervised release from jail and thought she was eligible to vote again. She was not.
Most everyone knows what’s going on here. The way Fox News anchors knew privately the Jan. 6 insurrection was Trump supporters Trump himself could call off while in public keeping up the pretense the rioters were Black Lives Matter or antifa activists.
Fear of voter fraud, or at least the pretense of fear, has been a centerpiece of conservative objections to the expansion of voting rights going back, in the modern era, to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Taking steps to curb alleged illegal voting tends to boost Republican electoral fortunes by disenfranchising people of color.
Newkirk adds:
It must be underscored: There is no evidence that illegal voting of any kind occurs at a level capable of influencing elections. Nor is there evidence that the scattered violations that do take place have been increasing in frequency or severity. Common kinds of election violations include local candidates fudging signatures to get on the ballot, partisans politicking too close to polling places, and people accidentally voting at the polls after forgetting that they had already mailed in a ballot—a glitch easily corrected by administrative procedures that already exist.
Indeed, procedures and laws are already in place to catch such actions and to punish them if necessary. Just as AP found.
Yes, Mason signed an affidavit affirming she was eligible to vote, but like most of us she simply read to make sure her name and address was correct. And remember, she was voting in a presidential election in Texas (emphasis mine):
“They said I tried to circumvent the system,” Mason said. “And for what? For a sticker?” Alison Grinter Allen, her attorney, echoed the point: “Why would you risk two to 20 years in the penitentiary in order to shout your opinion into the wind, basically?”
Just to add a single extra vote to her preferred candidate’s total in a state where it wouldn’t matter. Prosecutors did not even attempt to prove criminal motive. Mason got five years.
In 2018, Russ Casey, a Republican judge in Tarrant County, pleaded guilty to falsifying signatures in order to get his name on the ballot. Casey held a position of public trust, his actions were egregious, and he admitted that the accusations were true. In a plea deal, he received five years’ probation, with no prison time.
Guess his color.
It’s hard to keep a good zombie lie down. Making examples of the rare cases ensures a steady drip of examples people vaguely remember when it comes time to pass ever stricter procedures for voting. The ACLU observed of Mason’s case, “If you start to criminalize people who make mistakes, [who think] they’re eligible and then find out they’re not, then that guts the provisional-balloting system—turns it into a trap.”
It’s a vicious cycle—which is exactly the point. First gin up fear about fraud, then use that fear to aggressively prosecute voting infractions, then use those prosecutions to create stricter laws, then use the stricter laws to induce more examples of fraud, then use those examples to gin up even more fear. The potential impact on turnout is bad enough. But the cumulative effect of restrictive laws corrodes the democratic process itself.
Which is exactly the point of this decades-long, post-Voting Rights Act campaign against voting. Gin up fear. Demonize the Other:
Professional voter fraud frighteners like Hans von Spakovsky and James O’Keefe expect Real Americans™ to believe that while they’re having their Election Day coffee, “Others” are headed to the polls not to do their patriotic and civic duty, no, but to participate in a nationwide crime spree unparalleled in the annals of American criminology.
The Frighteners expect you to believe that thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of these Others – you know who they mean – go to the polls on Election Day determined instead to commit felonies punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense by impersonating dead or fictitious voters. With nothing, nothing to stop them.
Take the case of 950 dead people voting in South Carolina in 2010. Um, no. Didn’t happen:
As was suspected from the beginning, the fevered stories of “zombie voters” turned out to be fantasy. This week, state elections officials reviewed 207 of the supposed 950 cases of dead people voting, and couldn’t confirm fraud in any of them. 106 stemmed from clerical errors at the polls, and another 56 involved bad data — the usual culprits when claims of dead voters have surfaced in the past.
The point of these stories is to get the front-page headline people will remember. By the time the story is debunked, it shows up on page five where no one sees it. The zombies keep shambling. Unfounded rumors keep circulating. Voter suppression legislation keeps passing.
What are Democrats going to do about it? Only they can.
