I didn’t write this for DK, because this stuff is obvious here. It’s for publication elsewhere, but since I wrote it, here it is.
We have heard a lot from the president and his GOP associates about the possibility of election fraud. There is a reason why they are focused on one side of the issue and not the other, because there are two forms of election fraud. The first, which I call active voter fraud, is multiple votes being cast by individual voters, or votes being cast by secretly recruited shills who are not eligible voters.
Investigations have shown that one voter casting multiple votes is such a rare instance that there is no possibility of it affecting an election.
Mr. Trump has accused the Democratic Party of recruiting undocumented immigrants (or other, unnamed shills) to cast fraudulent ballots. In order to move the electoral needle, you need at least thousands and more likely hundreds of thousands of people to cast unlawful ballots.
Let’s unpack what would be necessary for a scheme of this nature to be carried off. First you have to find your shills, people who are in this country unlawfully and are not on any voter rolls. There is no directory of people who have every reason to avoid notice, so volunteers would have to fan out across poorer sections of cities to locate them personally.
Then the shill has to be convinced that it is in his or her interest to take a chance on committing a felony by walking into a hostile and unfamiliar environment and acting natural, while voting in a second and probably recently acquired language.
Aside from the absurdity that these thousands of shills can be located and persuaded, it is beyond unlikely that tens of thousands of people could keep such a secret. The paper trail of emails and operating procedures would be a mile wide, and then there would be all those…ballots.
The second form of voter fraud is the flip side of active fraud, passive voter fraud or voter suppression.
There is no reason to create votes if you have the wherewithal to prevent them. There are so many ways this is done that it would be tedious to compile a list, but my focus here is the polling place.
The appeal of passive voter fraud is that you can’t prove a negative. A suppressed, non-vote leaves nothing to show that it was prevented. Anyone who has the authority and the power to prevent one vote can probably prevent two, three or any number. Each vote prevented is that person voting again.
It is inconvenient for most voters to report on a specific day to a specific polling place, but it is impossible for some. How long should a person who uses a walker stand in line? Soldiers can’t come home for an hour to vote. We are allowed to take vacations in November. That is why we have had absentee voting in every election.
Even for those who have the means of reaching the polling place, the ease of doing so varies across a wide spectrum. A ten minute drive is not as inviting as a walk across the street. This is the first small wedge in discouraging some voters over others.
If the polling place is any distance away, every foot of that distance starts shedding voters. If a voter has to take public transportation, that is an additional expense, and can add hours to the process of dropping an envelope into a slot.
When the voter does arrive at the polling place, how long should he or she wait in line to vote? In a recent election, some voters persisted for as much as four hours, in the face of an unconscionable barrier placed in the path of their participation. Every minute added to the process drives down the participation.
It is easy to suppress votes if you control the polling places. You can limit the hours. You can put them in locations that are not close to public transportation. You can have so few available voting booths that people must stand in line. You can make non-drivers travel to a distant DMV to get voter ID, which solves a problem that does not exist and adds a “poll tax,” reducing participation among a demographic of mostly old or poor people. You can require that all votes be cast on the same day, instead of allowing voters to submit them early at their own convenience.
Every minute and every inch added to the process of voting drives down the vote. Voting officials can tailor the vote by selecting where to place barriers and where to lubricate the process. They are in effect voting hundreds or thousands of times, while we are exhorted to look in the other direction for those elusive thousands of unlawful voters without voter ID.
There is no paper trail to this form of voter suppression. You don’t have to conspire on a grand scale with hundreds or thousands of co-conspirators. It only takes a dozen people with the authority to assign either polling places or the source for “voter ID” to decide the vote.
This is why need to vote by mail, and allow early voting.
There is another benefit, which is that a mailed ballot is a paper ballot, and can’t be hacked from Moscow.