Fraud claims died in court, but myth of stolen elections lives
Many Republicans call for more restrictive voter identification laws
President Donald Trump’s baseless and desperate claims of a stolen election over the last seven weeks — the most aggressive promotion of “voter fraud” in American history — failed to get any traction in courts across seven states or come anywhere close to reversing the loss he suffered to Joe Biden.
But the effort has led to at least one unexpected and profoundly different result: A thorough debunking of the sorts of voter fraud claims that Republicans have used to roll back voting rights for the better part of the young century.
In making their case in real courts and the court of public opinion, Trump and his allies have trotted out a series of tropes and canards similar to those Republicans have pushed to justify laws that in many cases made voting disproportionately harder for Blacks and Hispanics, who largely support Democrats.
Their allegations that thousands of people “double voted” by assuming other identities at polling booths echoed those that have previously been cited as a reason to impose strict new voter identification laws.
Their assertion that large numbers of noncitizens cast illegal votes for Biden matched claims Republicans have made to argue for harsh new “proof of citizenship” requirements for voter registration.
And their tales about large numbers of cheaters casting ballots in the name of “dead voters” were akin to those several states have used to conduct aggressive “purges” of voting lists that wrongfully slated tens of thousands of registrations for termination.
“It really should put a death knell in this narrative that has been peddled around claims of vote fraud that just have never been substantiated,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit legal group, and a former Justice Department attorney whose work included voting cases. “They put themselves on trial, and they failed.”
Yet there are no signs that those defeats in the courts will change the trajectory of the ongoing efforts to restrict voting that have been core to conservative politics since the disputed 2000 election, which coincided with heightened party concerns that demographic shifts would favor Democrats in the popular vote.
The false notions have lived on in Trump’s Twitter and Facebook feeds; on the television programming of Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network; and in statehouse hearings where Republican leaders have contemplated more restrictive voting laws based on the rejected allegations.
In Georgia, Republican legislators have already discussed toughening the state’s rules on voting by mail and on voter identification. In Pennsylvania, Republican lawmakers are considering reversing moves that had made it easier to vote absentee, and their counterparts in Wisconsin are considering tighter restrictions for mail and early voting.
If anything, Trump has given the movement to limit ballot access new momentum while becoming the singular, charismatic leader it never had.
After declaring outright that high levels of voting are bad for Republicans, he persuaded his base that the election system is rotten with fraud, and to view that fiction as a bedrock party principle. Several recent polls have shown that majorities of Republicans think the election was fraudulent, even as election officials across the country report that it went surprisingly smoothly, even in a pandemic, with exceptionally high turnout.
Through seven weeks of court rulings, voter-fraud allegations have been rejected again and again as lacking proof or credibility, often by Republican-appointed judges.
Trump and his allies have argued that the 59 losses they faced in 60 lawsuits filed since Election Day were based on procedural rulings, complaining that judges refused to look at the particulars of allegations they have sought to use to overturn an election Biden won by 7 million votes (and by 74 in the Electoral College).
But according to a New York Times analysis, they did not even formally allege fraud in more than two-thirds of their cases, arguing instead that local officials deviated from election codes, failed to administer elections properly or that the rules in place on Election Day were themselves illegal.
In the single case Trump won, his campaign challenged a state-ordered deadline extension in Pennsylvania for the submission of personal identification for mailed ballots, affecting a small number of votes. In nearly a dozen cases their fraud accusations did indeed have their days in court, and consistently collapsed under scrutiny.
The Republican response has been to hold fast to the president’s fraud fictions. Republicans in Congress have promoted them as Trump pushes senators and House members to reject the Electoral College results at a procedural vote to affirm Biden’s clear victory over the president on Jan. 6.