Quite a lot of hay has been made about Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his wild claims about voter fraud and the election system being “rigged” by dead illegal immigrant voters.
“They even want to try to rig the election at the polling booths and believe me there’s a lot going on,” he told supporters at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin. “Do you ever hear these people? They say ‘there’s nothing going on.’ People that have died 10 years ago are still voting, illegal immigrants are voting -- I mean, where are the street smarts of some of these politicians?”
President Obama blasted him on this.
“We’ve got to do it big. We’ve got to leave no doubt,” Obama told a rowdy crowd in Miami Gardens, Florida on Thursday. “Because you notice the Donald is already whining that the vote's going to be rigged before the game’s even over.”
Obama brought up Trump’s statement at a rally earlier Thursday that he would accept the election results “if I win,” countering, “There is no way to rig an election in a country this big.”
Now this is pretty easy to debunk because dead people can’t vote, because ... dead. Undocumented immigrants can’t vote because you have to be a citizen. What he’s talking about is fraudulent voters taking their spots, but the things is that this almost never happens, as comprehensive research has shown.
So far, I’ve found about 31 different incidents (some of which involve multiple ballots) since 2000, anywhere in the country. If you want to check my work, you can read a comprehensive list of the incidents below.
To put this in perspective, the 31 incidents below come in the context of general, primary, special, and municipal elections from 2000 through 2014. In general and primary elections alone, more than 1 billion ballots were cast in that period.
But on the basis of the fear of 31 phantom zombie voters the GOP has implemented a massive wave of voter suppression across the nation that has limited and blocked access to the polls for millions of legitimate voters.
The first method used by GOP governors and legislatures have used is to gerrymander congressional districts so that no matter how many more Democrats vote, they remain unlikely to gain more congressional seats for years.
[Obama’s 2008 election] analysis, however, missed the root cause of congressional inaction. In 2012, Democratic candidates for Congress received more votes than Republican candidates. For the first time in 40 years, the party that received the most votes failed to take control of the House. The people did vote for candidates who believed in gun-control reforms. Obama had it backward: it’s the Republican mapmakers who gerrymandered our democracy so effectively after the GOP’s historic 2010 victory who have made it hard for the voters to affect elections. The strategy was dubbed REDMAP, for Redistricting Majority Project, and it was brilliant in its execution. With $30 million or less than the cost of some losing Senate races — smartly spent in the right districts in the right states — Republican strategists turned the House of Representatives red for a decade, and maybe longer.
It paid immediate dividends. If the 2012 election had been fought without the GOP’s redistricting firewall, some form of the gun-control reform which failed to make it through Congress after Sandy Hook likely would have been enacted. On issue after issue—climate change, immigration, reproductive rights, guns, the minimum wage—public-opinion polling shows broad support for the president’s proposals. They have been stymied not because they are unpopular but because our politics have become paralyzed, held hostage by the most extreme wing of a minority party which figured out how to rig the game in its favor.
And that analysis remains true this year as well.
During Obama’s presidency, Republicans retook control of the House in 2010 and increased the size of their majority from 242 to 247. Even if Republicans suffer a landslide defeat in 2016 with Donald Trump at the top of their ticket, most experts predict that they will retain control of the House. Whatever national polls say about Obama or the GOP, Republican lawmakers are relatively safe in their seats. And as long as Republicans have a lock on the House, party polarization will continue in the years to come, since House Republicans will have no reason to compromise with a Democratic president or even more moderate voices within their own party.
How do conservative Republicans maintain so much power in the House, even though Americans reelected a liberal president and polls show that the GOP suffers from high disapproval ratings?
Salon editor David Daley’s punchy, though overstated, new book lays the blame for Republican power in the House on partisan gerrymandering, the byzantine process through which state legislatures draw district lines to favor incumbents from one party. Challenging the claim that increased partisan polarization is a result of voters naturally sorting themselves into red and blue states, Daley argues that a group of operatives in the Republican Party did the sorting for them. The GOP poured money into an unprecedented effort to control governorships and state legislative bodies in 2010 and to then redraw congressional districts so that the party could turn the House into a firewall against the Democrats.
That is the definition of “rigged.”
Their second tactic is to limit polling places, including early and weekend polling places, to create massively long lines for those attempting to vote. Democrats have challenged these in court, but it hasn’t been going that well.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to reinstate for the Nov. 8 general election Ohio’s so-called Golden Week voting procedures, when people could register and cast ballots in the same week, that had been abolished by a Republican-backed law.
The high court rejected a request by Ohio Democrats and let stand an August ruling by the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld the 2014 law, which imposed new restrictions on when people could register to vote and cast ballots. Ohio Democrats argued that the law had a discriminatory impact on black voters.
The law was one of numerous passed in recent years in Republican-governed states that Democrats and civil rights activists have said were intended to make it more difficult for voters including African-Americans, Hispanics and others who tend to back Democratic candidates to cast ballots.
The result of these efforts are likely to play out as they did in Arizona during the primary.
Thousands of voters waited in line for hours after polls closed — and winners were projected — in Arizona, after a Republican county official cut the number of polling places by 70 percent to save money.
Election officials in Maricopa County blamed higher than expected turnout, with competitive races in both the Democratic and Republican parties, and voter confusion for the massive delays, reported KNXV-TV.
Maricopa County used just 60 polling places in Tuesday’s primary election, down from more than 200 in 2012’s presidential primaries and 400 in 2008, saying demand for in-person voting has dropped as more voters mail in their ballots.
The GOP also has a long history of illegal voter caging.
The National Voter Registration Act prohibits any state from purging names from the voting rolls within 90 days of an election.
The law doesn't, however, preclude mass partisan challenges on or shortly before Election Day - known as voter caging - based on the same returned envelopes from state-sponsored mailers like the ones in Ohio and others going out across the country.
In 2004, the year the national election hinged on results from Ohio, the Ohio Republican Party challenged 35,000 voters based on returned mail from the GOP's own friendly reminder notices. From 2004 to 2006, Republicans challenged 77,000 voters this way nationwide. A consent decree issued in 1982 and amended in 1987 enjoins the GOP from instituting "ballot security programs" that focus on minority voters.
No evidence so far suggests Republicans - vote caging is essentially a GOP sport - have mounted a caging campaign this year. Yet, in July, Franklin County Election Director and County GOP Chairman Doug Preisse told reporters he didn't rule out challenges before November, particularly because of increased home foreclosures, which would make failures to change address on voter registration records more common.
To dodge allegations of caging the GOP has implemented a secret effort to purge cross-state duplicates from the voter rolls using a GOP inspired system called “Crosscheck” which Rolling Stone found does not work as advertised.
The data is processed through a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which is being promoted by a powerful Republican operative, and its lists of potential duplicate voters are kept confidential. But Rolling Stone obtained a portion of the list and the names of 1 million targeted voters. According to our analysis, the Crosscheck list disproportionately threatens solid Democratic constituencies: young, black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters – with some of the biggest possible purges underway in Ohio and North Carolina, two crucial swing states with tight Senate races.
…
On its surface, Crosscheck seems quite reasonable. Twenty-eight participating states share their voter lists and, in the name of dispassionate, race-blind Big Data, seek to ensure the rolls are up to date. To make sure the system finds suspect voters, Crosscheck supposedly matches first, middle and last name, plus birth date, and provides the last four digits of a Social Security number for additional verification.
In reality, however, there have been signs that the program doesn't operate as advertised. Some states have dropped out of Crosscheck, citing problems with its methodology, as Oregon's secretary of state recently explained: "We left [Crosscheck] because the data we received was unreliable."
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The Virginia list was a revelation. In all, 342,556 names were listed as apparently registered to vote in both Virginia and another state as of January 2014. Thirteen percent of the people on the Crosscheck list, already flagged as inactive voters, were almost immediately removed, meaning a stunning 41,637 names were "canceled" from voter rolls, most of them just before Election Day.
We were able to obtain more lists – Georgia and Washington state, the total number of voters adding up to more than 1 million matches – and Crosscheck's results seemed at best deeply flawed. We found that one-fourth of the names on the list actually lacked a middle-name match. The system can also mistakenly identify fathers and sons as the same voter, ignoring designations of Jr. and Sr. A whole lot of people named "James Brown" are suspected of voting or registering twice, 357 of them in Georgia alone. But according to Crosscheck, James Willie Brown is supposed to be the same voter as James Arthur Brown. James Clifford Brown is allegedly the same voter as James Lynn Brown.
...
This inherent bias results in an astonishing one in six Hispanics, one in seven Asian-Americans and one in nine African-Americans in Crosscheck states landing on the list. Was the program designed to target voters of color? "I'm a data guy," Swedlund says. "I can't tell you what the intent was. I can only tell you what the outcome is. And the outcome is discriminatory against minorities."
Minority voters who tend to vote Democratic and against the GOP will now show up at the polls and find their registration has been deleted. Surprise!
Then there’s the massive backlog of nearly a million legal immigrants who’ve applied for naturalization in time to vote, but won’t be processed in time.
If there’s any kind of rigging of the vote going on, it’s in Trump’s favor: the government effectively excluded large numbers of immigrant voters this year by failing to process more than half of the nearly 930,000 citizenship applications from legal permanent residents who filed in the 12 months ending in mid-September. These potential voters technically filed for naturalization early enough to be assured a chance to register and vote, the National Partnership for New Americans observed. The group blamed the backlog on US Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security known as USCIS.
It is unconscionable that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spends billions of dollars to deport immigrants and destroy their families, but that the same department cannot identify adequate resources to serve aspiring American citizens,” the Partnership said in a report that called 15 states “disenfranchisement danger zones.” The list — which includes the swing states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina — covers territory where “naturalization backlogs are large, growing rapidly, or both.”
On the other hand there is some good news in that several GOP efforts to block the access of minority voters with restrictive voter ID requirements have been struck down by the courts as discriminatory.
A federal appeals court has struck down North Carolina’s voter identification law, holding that it was “passed with racially discriminatory intent.”
The ruling also invalidated limits the same state law placed in 2013 on early voting, same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting, and preregistration.
The three judges assigned to the case — all Democratic appointees — were unanimous that the Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature violated the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act three years ago by enacting the measure requiring voters to show certain types of photo ID at the polls.
"A district court had found not only that the law discriminated, but that it was intentionally designed to do so. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saw some flaws in that conclusion and instructed the lower court to reconsider that element of the case and rule again — preferably after Election Day."
In Wisconsin.
"Wisconsin's ID law has been the subject of litigation ever since it was passed by the state's Republican-controlled Legislature in 2011. Proponents said the law was needed to prevent voter fraud, although there has been little evidence of voter impersonation at the polls," NPR's Pam Fessler reported in 2015.
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In his decision, U.S. District Judge James Peterson wrote:
"The evidence in this case casts doubt on the notion that voter ID laws foster integrity and confidence. The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities. To put it bluntly, Wisconsin's strict version of voter ID law is a cure worse than the disease."
In North Dakota.
As The Associated Press reports, North Dakota doesn't require voters to register, but starting in 2004 it has required identity cards. There was an exception allowing people without an ID to vote, as long as a poll worker could sign an affidavit vouching for them — but in 2013, the exception was overturned.
"The public interest in protecting the most cherished right to vote for thousands of Native Americans who currently lack a qualifying ID and cannot obtain one, outweighs the purported interest and arguments of the State," U.S. District Judge Daniel Hovland wrote. "No eligible voter, regardless of their station in life, should be denied the opportunity to vote."
And in Kansas involving Crosscheck architect Kris Kobach.
"Since 2013, Kansas has required residents to show proof-of-citizenship when they register to vote. But a number of courts have blocked that requirement when it comes to federal elections — for president or members of Congress.
"In response, the state set up a two-tiered system where those who don't show proof-of-citizenship can vote in federal elections, but not state or local ones. But that arrangement was struck down earlier this year by a state judge, for those who used a national voter registration form.
"Still following? There's more. In May, a federal judge ordered the state to start registering approximately 18,000 voters whose registrations had been held in suspension because they didn't show proof of citizenship. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has appealed. He argues that the law is needed to stop immigrants in the country illegally from voting ... Kobach has ordered that the suspended voters be registered, but only for federal races."
All of these laws have been found to be deliberately discriminatory and if the mostly conservative Supreme Court hadn’t gutted the Voting Rights Act would’ve required preapproval by the DOJ for any state that had attempted to discriminate in the last 10 years.
When the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to overturn a key section of the Voting Rights Act last June, Justice Ruth Ginsburg warned that getting rid of the measure was like "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." The 1965 law required that lawmakers in states with a history of discriminating against minority voters get federal permission before changing voting rules. Now that the Supreme Court has invalidated this requirement, GOP lawmakers across the United States are running buck wild with new voting restrictions.
Before the Shelby County v. Holder decision came down on June 25, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required federal review of new voting rules in 15 states, most of them in the South. (In a few of these states, only specific counties or townships were covered.) Chief Justice John Roberts voted to gut the Voting Rights Act on the basis that "our country has changed," and that blanket federal protection wasn't needed to stop discrimination. But the country hasn't changed as much as he may think.
The country hasn’t changed, and in fact these measures—which were called discriminatory by the courts—prove that it hasn’t. And of course the Republican Congress hasn’t moved to fix the VRA either.
All of these laws were implemented by the GOP to relieve fears of unsubstantiated “Voter Fraud” that Donald Trump is currently fulminating about. This is the same paranoia that we heard when Obama was first elected with the claim that A.C.O.R.N. rigged it for him.
-69% of Trump voters think that if Hillary Clinton wins the election it will be because it was rigged, to only 16% who think it would be because she got more vote than Trump. More specifically 40% of Trump voters think that ACORN (which hasn't existed in years) will steal the election for Clinton. That shows the long staying power of GOP conspiracy theories.
The bottom line is that despite the fact the Donald Trump looks like he’s going to get shellacked electorally with FiveThirtyEight giving Clinton a solid 80 percent-plus chance of winning since the second debate, the only way for Trump to win is to run the swing-state table, then make another table….
Prior to Wednesday night’s presidential debate, CNN host Anderson Cooper noted that Trump would need to win every battleground “toss-up” state and then flip some of Hillary Clinton’s states to have a chance at winning the necessary 270 electoral votes.
“He has to run the table and then he has to find another table and then he has to run that,” Borger agreed. “If Trump can cut Hillary Clinton’s national lead in half then the battleground states generally moves, that is his hope.”
“When you talk about Utah being a battle ground state, you know that something is really different for Republicans in this election,” she added.
Even with all this It is still quite likely that Congress will remain in Republican hands. Yep, that’s “rigged.”