Donald Trump’s sustained, lie-filled assault on vote-by-mail is only the latest in a long tradition of Republicans attempting to win by preventing people from voting. Trump has spent months screaming about fraud as a threat to his reelection despite the fact that the only major voter fraud case in recent memory was carried out in 2018, by a Republican campaign operative. But while Trump has taken this to a higher and louder level than other such efforts to use fraud claims to keep people from voting, Republicans have been doing the same basic thing—though more quietly—for decades, usually aimed at Black voters, young voters, poor voters, and new citizens. “Voter fraud” claims are a part of the machinery that rose up to replace poll taxes and overt violence aimed at preventing Black people from voting.
Trump came to the head of a Republican Party that had invested heavily in lawyers and elections officials dedicated to suppressing votes, a major New York Times Magazine investigation shows. The George W. Bush administration had raised up a generation of far-right lawyers dedicated to promoting the myth of voter fraud to keep Black and Latino people from voting, while state-level Republicans across the country pushed voter ID laws and voter purges that disproportionately targeted people of color. The efforts went up to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice John Roberts cast the deciding vote to gut the Voting Rights Act. Then came Trump.
Trump made voter fraud claims a hallmark of his first year in office because he was dedicated to showing that he didn’t really lose the popular vote—it was just that there were millions of fraudulent votes cast against him. (It was never clear why such a powerful, well-funded, effectively secret operation didn’t cast those fraudulent votes in the places that would have tipped the electoral vote to Hillary Clinton.) But his claims were supported by the preexistence of that Republican voter suppression machine. For instance, in Indiana in 2016, a voter registration group flagged suspicious voter registration forms and stopped using the canvassers who had collected them, but despite those efforts at transparency and honesty, the group was raided by police … and then-Gov. Mike Pence used it as a major public example of voter fraud.
When Trump went to assemble his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, he was able to quickly stock it with dedicated warriors against people of color voting—people like former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Hans von Spakovsky. That commission fell apart when the designated Democratic patsies included on it for the appearance of bipartisanship refused to be quite the pushovers they were intended to be, with Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap ultimately suing and publicly posting documents showing a plan to go national with Kobach’s Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck system, which targeted people as double-registered to vote based simply on their names and birthdays. The problems with that system were huge.
”One study showed that Kobach’s program would cause 300 wrongful terminations for every double registration it might prevent,” The Times Magazine reports, while “another study found that nonwhite voters—who are more likely to share the same names than white voters are—were far more likely to be flagged in its data.”
Republicans have been trying to prevent people they suspect are Democrats—especially Black people—from voting basically for years, with false or massively exaggerated claims about voter fraud as one key weapon. A tiny handful of people accidentally voting when they shouldn’t, or somehow in the wrong way, becomes the evidence for excluding tens or hundreds of thousands of people from voting rights. It happens again and again. But under Trump this has been taken nuclear, first because he wanted to prove he didn’t really lose the popular vote in 2016, and now because he believes he is going to lose in 2020 and wants to delegitimize the election. Attorney General William Barr is lined up and ready, already lying about supposed voter fraud cases—Barr claimed that one case involved 1,700 fraudulent ballots when a local prosecutor said that in fact, early suspicions of widespread fraud had ended when “we couldn’t find it except that little tiny case.” Barr also said: “If there was a specific investigative danger that we detected some problem and risk—yes,” the Trump administration could and would send law enforcement to polling places. This after he had showed the willingness to lie about specific investigative dangers.
Trump is building on that longstanding framework of racist voter suppression to specifically benefit himself—and if, as polls suggest, he can’t suppress his way into a “win,” he will happily use that machinery, with the weight of the federal government behind it, to disqualify huge numbers of votes, fight the full counting of all votes … whatever it takes to either “win” or throw a Joe Biden win into doubt. But here, as in so many other areas, we cannot make the mistake of believing that other Republicans are somehow separate from Trump. He is just the pinnacle of what they’ve been working toward for decades.