The real threat to elections
Sounding baseless alarms about voting integrity erodes our trust in democracy.
As with pretty much anything in which humans are involved, our elections aren’t always as perfect as we’d like them to be. That’s a far cry, though, from suggesting that they are rife with mismanagement and corruption.
So it was heartening to see the Greene County Legislature reject a call by a self-anointed voter integrity group to endorse the idea of a needless “audit” of elections in the state, on the premise of rooting out some imagined widespread problem.
Back in the real world, this is already done. Local elections boards routinely clean up rolls, purging dead or long-inactive voters. The rolls are open to public inspection. State and local boards of elections are run on a bipartisan basis, with Republicans and Democrats keeping an eye on each other. During elections, the process is monitored by paid election inspectors as well as by poll watchers for political parties and candidates.
Yes, voter rolls aren’t always up to date. Yes, once in a while bad players from both major parties, and sometimes from one of the various third parties, are involved in some sort of fraud, such as signing nominating petitions or casting absentee ballots in other people’s names. But on the whole, the administration of our elections tends to be an honest and
nd transparent affair. That was well demonstrated in 2020, when the executive committees of the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council — made up of federal and state elections and cybersecurity officials, along with voting machine industry and citizen representatives — declared that year’s election to be “the most secure in American history,” and found “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Definitive as that was, it didn’t stop then-President Donald Trump from attempting to spread the lie that the election had been stolen from him — a wild assertion he and his minions failed to prove in more than 60 court cases. It was an allegation not only so flimsy but so reckless that some of the lawyers who helped him promote it have been disbarred. And it was so incendiary — sparking the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol— that Mr. Trump, now running for reelection against President Joe Biden, faces criminal charges related to his efforts to deceive the public and subvert an entirely legitimate election.
And the lies continue to spin off more nonsense, like New York Citizens Audit’s crusade for a costly, dubious investigation, and the recent joint announcement by Mr. Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee (which his daughter-in-law now heads as co-chair) for a massive “election integrity” effort involving the deployment of 100,000 volunteers and lawyers to “protect the vote and ensure a big win.” (One of the RNC’s election integrity specialists, attorney Christina Bobb, was indicted last week in Arizona in connection with the ”fake elector” scheme in that state.)
These are not harmless political stunts. As we saw with the Jan. 6 insurrection, the claim that our elections are corrupt can have dangerous, even deadly consequences. It threatens to incite misguided, angry people to intimidate voters and election officials. It threatens, too, to undermine the public’s trust in the integrity of elections even more than Mr. Trump’s sore-loser claims already have.
To her credit, Attorney General Letitia James last year sent New York Citizens Audit a cease-anddesist letter to quit any voter deception or intimidation efforts amid allegations that members of the group were showing up at people’s homes, claiming to be election officials and accusing them of fraud. The group didn’t deny the allegations but said any such activity should be investigated.
We get that politics requires rallying people to a candidate or a cause, motivating them to provide the money and votes needed to win elections. But there’s a bright line between inspiring people and inciting them. Public and political leaders across the state, and across the nation, would do well to take a lesson from the lawmakers in Greene County, who wisely and responsibly decided not to endorse this insidious lie.