As he has done before when trailing in national polls, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is again talking about Hillary Clinton rigging the Nov. 8 election in her favor. He even told his supporters to go to polling places on Election Day to monitor voting to ensure it is “on the up and up.”
Promoting such election vigilantism is dangerous — and, of course, undemocratic. It is also unnecessary. Voter suppression, especially the turning away of poor and minority voters, is a much bigger problem.
“There have been a handful of substantiated cases of individual ineligible voters attempting to defraud the election system. But by any measure, voter fraud is extraordinarily rare,” Jason Leavitt, a Loyola Law School professor, wrote in a 2007 report for the Brennan Center for Justice. Most instances of alleged voter fraud are instead clerical errors made by election officials.
More recently, Leavitt did a comprehensive analysis of voter fraud allegations between 2000 and 2014 and found 31 instances nationwide with credible evidence of potential fraud that may have been addressed through voter ID laws and another 13 cases of potential voter impersonation that such laws would not have stopped. That’s out of over 1 billion ballots cast.
Meanwhile, voter ID requirements are more likely to keep voters home than they are to prevent cases of voter impersonation. A Government Accountability Office review released in 2014 found ID requirements in Kansas and Tennessee were responsible for statistically significant slides in voter turnout between 2008, when no photo ID requirements were in effect, and 2012, when they were. In those two states, based on the GAO’s findings, those ID requirements suppressed 122,000 votes while likely preventing a miniscule number of fraudulent votes — if any at all.
So if fraud by individual voters is unlikely, what about hacking voting machines? There isn’t much to be worried about, Time magazine reported in its Oct. 10 issue. Although many of the voting machines used across the United States are old and easy to hack into, they aren’t connected to the internet, so hackers would have to crack into individual machines. Only five states have electronic-only voting. Three states — Colorado, Oregon and Washington — send all voters a ballot in the mail. Maine uses paper ballots, which are counted by tabulation machines in about 60 percent of the state’s voting precincts; the rest are hand counted.
Hacking into voter registration databases is a bit more of a serious possibility, for which federal agencies are preparing. They are confident that contingencies, such as allowing provisional ballots, would minimize the damage, Time wrote.
So, what can be done to really rig an election? Restricting the number of polling places. Increasing voter registration and voter identification requirements. Restricting early voting and voter registration.
Coincidentally, in recent years, a number of states have imposed just those restrictions. A number of Republican-led legislatures quickly made those changes to their states’ voting laws after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 invalidated portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, freeing some states from a requirement that federal officials approve voting law changes.
Courts, in recent months, have struck down many of the changes, such as a reduction of the number of early voting days and voter ID requirements because they discriminated against minority voters.
“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,” U.S. District Judge James Peterson wrote in a July 29 ruling that struck down portions of that state’s new voter identification law.
In Maine, the Republican-controlled Legislature eliminated same-day voter registration in 2011. Voters promptly repealed the law that November.
Election rigging is real, but it is done much more often by state policymakers who make it more difficult for people to vote. This won’t be resolved by self-appointed polling monitors looking for instances of voter fraud that are exceedingly rare.
