For years now, we’ve watched with seething horror as one Republican-controlled state after another passed voter suppression laws under the guise of trying to protect our sacred system from rampant voter fraud they see lurking around every corner. And for years now, we’ve fought back tooth and nail by pointing out to anyone who will listen that their complaints of voter fraud are bunk, a ruse to take away the vote from Black voters and Latino voters and elderly voters and young voters, all of whom might have a harder time securing proper photo identification than those voters who demographically skew toward Republicans.
Every voter ID law that’s been passed across the country in recent years was rammed through because of the epidemic of voter fraud. Y’see, there are all these dead people voting, and people voting twice, so many of them in fact that you can count them all on one hand, even if you have no fingers!
Take Wisconsin, for instance:
The evidence at trial established that virtually no voter impersonation occurs in Wisconsin. The defendants could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past.
Or North Carolina:
Strach also said a "10-year death audit" found 13,416 deceased voters who had not been removed from voter rolls as of October 2013. Eighty-one of those individuals, she said, died before an election in which they are recorded as having voted.
Strach cautioned that about 30 of those 81 voters appear to have legally cast their votes early via absentee ballot and then died before Election Day.
And up yonder in Pennsylvania:
House Majority Leader Mike Turzai (R-Allegheny) suggested that the House’s end game in passing the Voter ID law was to benefit the GOP politically.
“We are focused on making sure that we meet our obligations that we’ve talked about for years,” said Turzai in a speech to committee members Saturday. He mentioned the law among a laundry list of accomplishments made by the GOP-run legislature.
“Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation – abortion facility regulations – in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
Oh, whoops! He wasn’t supposed to say that out loud. Surely that was a mistake. Let’s go back to Wisconsin to see if…
During an interview with a local TV station yesterday, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) admitted as much. Asked by a reporter why he thinks Ted Cruz or Donald Trump can become the first Republican to carry Wisconsin in a presidential election since 1984, Grothman said, “Now we have photo ID, and I think photo ID is gonna make a little bit of a difference.”
...yep, okay. Republicans used the non-existent “epidemic” of voter fraud to make it harder for groups of people who skew Democratic to vote in elections. That’s verifiable. Every time we try to prove that they’re lying about their justification for passing such laws, they come back and heehaw at us by bringing up some unverifiable claims of widespread fraud from some city in some state. It’s a never-ending exchange that benefits them in the end.
Fast-forward to the 2016 Democratic primary, where so many on this site and beyond claim that no Hillary Clinton win is the will of the people, but rather the illegitimate result of voter fraud or a system rigged to wound Bernie Sanders’ campaign.
Hillary didn’t really win Iowa, it was a series of oh-so convenient coin tosses! (Wrong.)
Hillary isn’t really leading in the popular vote or pledged delegates delegates, it’s the corrupt superdelegates giving her the win! (Including caucus estimates, she leads 56-43 in the popular vote and has a pledged delegate lead of 280.)
Hillary didn’t really win Arizona, she colluded with the Democratic Party to suppress the vote in Maricopa County! (The decision was made by the Republican county recorder.)
Hillary hasn’t really won any states at all! The exit polls prove that there was massive fraud! (What even?)
Closed primaries exist to personally wound Bernie Sanders! (Many states have held closed primaries since before Bernie first held elected office.)
And now we have claims today that Oregon was preemptively tampered with through irregularities and a rigged process before the ballot boxes have closed and before we even know who won.
It’s ridiculous.
I know what it’s like to strongly believe in your favorite candidate. It can be hard to fathom why other enlightened people would vote for someone other than the person you think is obviously the right choice. But when you insist that your every loss is the result of a rigged system or an illegitimate result arrived at through voter fraud, you’ve slipped through the looking glass into dangerous territory. You’re attempting to delegitimize any outcome that’s unfavorable to your position. It’s simply not possible that more people like the other person—hell no!, that person and their supporters simply participated in a massive conspiracy to defraud the public by tampering with the entire electoral process. It’s the same “wake up, sheeple” argument that people who believe in chemtrails use to heehaw at those who use science to prove that hot, moist air condenses in the cold atmosphere.
The integrity of election results in the United States is sound; it’s an exceedingly rare situation when the integrity of an election result is actually in question and not just upset protests from the losing side. There’s nobody behind the curtain pulling the strings. There’s no Boss Hogg stuffing ballot boxes. The Clinton Foundation doesn’t team up with counties to write code that switches Bernie votes when you feed the ballot through the scanner.
These claims do not exist in a vacuum. When you cry voter fraud at every result, you’re giving more and more ammunition to the Republicans when they continue their crusade to pass voter ID laws (or worse) when they’re licking their wounds from Donald Trump’s disastrous presidential campaign. They’re going to look for something to make themselves feel better for incurring such a stinging loss, and railing on against non-existent voter fraud will be a mighty cool salve as they eye 2020. And now, when we show proof that there is no voter fraud, they’ll point back at our own side’s words and say “you’re lying.”
