Voter Fraud: The Little Lie
The controversial presidential election of 2000 brought an intense national spotlight to how elections are run and boosted attention on voter fraud despite little evidence that it was a widespread problem. Nevertheless, this “little lie” persisted and was eventually magnified by Donald Trump.
False claims of voter fraud are a regular occurrence in American political history, dating from the early 1800s, and are typically put forward to promote restrictive voting laws under the guise of increasing election security. While claims of fraud have been made by both parties, historian Heather Cox Richardson has written that voter suppression initiatives have been “part and parcel of Republican governance since the 1980s” and are a reflection of Republicans’ rejection of the idea that all Americans are entitled to vote.
It wasn’t until the confusing month-long Bush-Gore vote count in 2000 and its aftermath that the deficiencies in our voting system received significant public attention. Three commissions formed to take a closer look at the potential for voting irregularities in our elections and make recommendations that would reinvigorate the public’s trust in elections. Ironically, the commissions’ reports, published between summer of 2001 and 2005, served to confirm the existence of vulnerabilities in our electoral system, particularly as Republicans persisted with claims of widespread voter fraud and the implication that it was perpetrated by the other party.
The first of the reports, from the US Commission on Civil Rights, focused specifically on voting irregularities in Florida, the source of controversy in the Bush-Gore election. Just two years earlier, the results of a mayoral election in Miami were invalidated due to sufficient evidence of fraud on behalf of the declared winner, a Democrat. Regarding the allegations of fraud raised by the Republican-controlled state government in 2000, the Commission noted that because state estimates of fraud were based on public reports, it had no way of confirming whether the incidents reported constituted actual fraud.
Instead, the Commission concluded that there had been significant disenfranchisement of eligible voters through an overly-broad purging of voter registration lists. Among its recommendations, the Commission wanted the US Department of Justice to “immediately initiate the litigation process against” all state officials who were responsible for overseeing the purge, including the governor and secretary of state. A court-ordered analysis later determined that 12,023 people may have been wrongly purged – a significant number in a state where the margin of victory was 537 votes.
In August 2001, the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, whose honorary co-chairs were former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, put forward a number of recommendations to address weaknesses that election officials had known for years. A year later, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which enacted many of those recommendations, including the creation of the Election Assistance Commission and requirements relating to voting systems, provisional ballots, voter information, voter registration, and identification for certain voters. None were implemented without some controversy.
To this day, requirements for photo identification, which have been frequently promoted by Republicans across the country, remain contentious: On September 12, 2024, the Republican National Committee and the North Carolina Republican Party sued the state over its approval for in-person voting of a digital form of ID for University of North Carolina students and employees.
Because HAVA seemed to create more controversy rather than settle concerns, a third commission, the Commission for Federal Election Reform, was organized in 2005. It is more commonly known as the Carter-Baker Commission for its Democratic and Republican co-chairs, Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker III. Citing specific incidents of voting irregularities, it concluded, “There is no evidence of extensive fraud in U.S. elections or of multiple voting, but both occur, and it could affect the outcome of a close election.”
This commission also made a number of recommendations, the first of which called for 1) the states, not local jurisdictions, to be responsible for maintaining voter registration lists, and 2) the Election Assistance Commission to connect state voter registration databases to address what it deemed the vast majority of fraud claims – voting by people who had either moved or died. Four years later, under the direction of former civil rights attorney David Becker, the Election Initiatives program at the Pew Charitable Trusts launched development of ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center. ERIC, which went live in 2012, gave states, on a voluntary basis, the ability to share voter lists and identify when voter records are out of date. By 2022, 33 states and the District of Columbia were participating in ERIC, and election leaders from both parties lauded it.
Since then, nine Republican-led states have dropped out of the consortium under pressure from party leaders and a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting the data sharing program. Two GOP secretaries of state who had praised ERIC – Iowa’s Paul Pate said it was “a godsend” and Ohio’s Frank LaRose called it “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have” – withdrew their states not long after making those statements.
As the Carter-Baker Commission said, fraud does occur. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, it occurs at “incident rates between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent.” That statistic obscures the very real impact even one incident of fraud can have on the outcome of a race, as was found in the Miami mayoral race.
But Republicans’ frequent and often baseless criticisms of election reforms and their persistent questioning of election results erodes the credibility of their claims of voter fraud. Like the boy who cried wolf, Republicans make it very difficult for their skeptics to believe them when they claim fraud in an election without producing evidence. And when they use general claims of fraud to pass legislation that makes voting more difficult for some segments of the population.
As the Brennan Center has argued, false and exaggerated claims of voter fraud should not justify passing laws that would create obstacles for less privileged citizens to register to vote and cast a ballot.
And yet, the little lie persists as do the efforts to suppress votes.
