To fight fraud, expand the pool of voters

Voter fraud is rare, but it takes many forms.

What the term usually refers to is inperson fraud, where someone pretends to be someone else or votes more than once. It’s been the subject of countless laws around the country ostensibly aimed at cleaning up elections.

But it hardly ever happens, and the people who push laws aimed at fighting it are aware of that, and instead use it as a pretext to disenfranchise people. In the name of tighter election security, they pass laws that shut entire swaths of the population out of the electorate, making it more likely their chosen candidate will win.

None of that has much to do with what happened in Bridgeport in the Democratic mayoral primary.

A Hearst Connecticut Media investigation found evidence of all kinds of issues, including people improperly helping others to vote and others casting ballots who shouldn’t have been eligible. All the problems were connected to absentee ballots, not inperson voting.

This has been a pattern in Bridgeport for decades. The League of Women Voters in advance of the primary said it was concerned about the possibility of more trouble this year, and those concerns were warranted. Though Marilyn Moore surprised everyone by beating Joe Ganim at the machines, he overwhelmed her with a 600vote margin in absentees on the way to a narrow victory.

Connecticut has very clear laws about who gets to vote by absentee ballot. It’s only for people who cannot vote in person, either because they will be out of town or are physically incapable of doing so. Many states allow anyone who would prefer an absentee ballot to vote that way, but Connecticut is not one of them.

Still, what happened in Bridgeport is not what typically comes to mind when someone — say, the president — talks about voter fraud.

“The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes,” President Trump said last year. “When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace what’s going on.”

Shocking to believe, maybe, but the president is off base on this one. Denise Merrill, Connecticut’s secretary of the state, is one of many people to accurately note that “rampant voter fraud” of the kind the president is talking about “quite frankly doesn’t really exist.” One study found 31 credible instances from 2000 to 2014 out of more than 1 billion ballots cast, and even that probably overstated things.

Still, Republicans have used that fear to pass restrictive voter ID laws around the nation that aim to limit participation by people who are unlikely to vote Republican. In North Carolina, for example, that led to a statewide voter ID law whose goal was to “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision,” according to a federal court, and keep them from voting.

North Carolina was also the site of the most serious instance of voter fraud in recent memory, resulting in the redo of a 2018 congressional election. But here, too, it was absentee ballots at issue, not inperson voting.

Whatever happened in Bridgeport, it wasn’t something that demands more ballot restrictions. Instead, the state needs to move ahead with what Merrill and others have long been pushing, including noexcuses absentee ballots and automatic registration. Make it as easy as possible for people to vote, and focus on better recordkeeping, not on enforcing discriminatory laws.

A lot of what looks like fraud in Bridgeport — people voting absentee who didn’t need to, for example — would not have been improper if the state had more modern voting laws. They have a negative perception in this state, but an absentee vote is just as valid as any other, and candidates shouldn’t be penalized for doing a better job finding their voters.

Given the laws we have, though, there need to be repercussions. Ordering a redo of the primary vote, as happened in North Carolina, should be under consideration.

In the long term, the only solution is to make it easier to vote, not harder.