The latest evidence that the Trumpian claim of endemic mass voter fraud is, in fact, a big lie comes from, of all places, the Florida governor’s office. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is wooing supporters of former President Donald Trump in an obvious bid for the presidency, is touting his new election fraud unit’s crackdown. And what sweeping evidence of election-altering fraud has it uncovered? The probe revealed 20 voters (out of more than 11 million) who weren’t supposed to vote because they had criminal records.
While Trump has elevated phony cries of election fraud into the center of conservative politics, he didn’t invent the strategy, and he’s not the only Republican trying to benefit from it. Officials throughout the GOP, who can read demographic trends like anyone else, have long known that one-person, one-vote democracy works against them in an increasingly diverse country. Which is why they have spent years looking for ways to hamper voting by those who might vote against them.
Of course, they can’t say that’s what they’re doing, so they’ve invented the bogeyman of systemic, widespread vote fraud to justify it. Such fraud certainly existed in various forms in the political past but would be virtually impossible to pull off under modern voting systems. Missouri’s cumbersome voter ID law, for example, was predicated on the claim that Missouri elections face the threat of significant fraud from voters impersonating other people at the polling place — yet a chief proponent of that law, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, when pressed during public events as he was promoting it in 2017, could cite just one known case in which that happened.
Trump himself launched a full-blown voter fraud commission after the 2016 election. He had legitimately won the Electoral College that year, and thus the presidency, but he lost the popular vote by almost 3 million ballots, a fact his fragile ego couldn’t accept. After the commission was launched with great fanfare in 2017, it quietly folded its tent months later having found nothing to justify its existence. Then there were the scores of judicial smackdowns of Trump’s lawyers after the 2020 election, when for all their frenzied cries of fraud, they couldn’t provide evidence of one significant case of it.
DeSantis’ vote fraud squad proves the non-case yet again. Though DeSantis is crowing about those 20 arrests as if they’re some kind of validation of his Trumpian vote fraud mythology, it is actually the opposite. Not only is the number of arrests so small as to be meaningless but the offense for which they were arrested — violating a state law that disallows people with murder or sexual assault records from voting — has nothing to do with claims of people affecting election outcomes with voter impersonation or multiple voting. In that sense, DeSantis deserves thanks for proving yet again (however unintentionally) what a bogus issue this is.
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