Voter Fraud

Voter fraud is the deliberate corruption of an election by unlawful means: impersonating another voter, casting ballots in the name of the dead or the departed, buying votes, coercing or forging absentee ballots, or altering counts after the fact. It is a criminal category, and the conservative interest in it is an interest in a criminal-law and administrative question rather than a claim about any particular election result.

The conservative argument holds two propositions at once. Election fraud is a documented feature of American and Canadian political history, not a modern invention, and the procedural safeguards that suppressed it were themselves hard-won reforms. And the incidence of the specific offence most discussed in public argument — in-person impersonation at the polls — is demonstrably rare. Conservatives who take the subject seriously argue about ballot custody, voter-roll accuracy, and absentee procedure, because that is where the documented cases are.

Key Takeaways

• Organised election fraud in the English-speaking world predates mass democracy; the secret ballot, the registered voter list, and the government-printed ballot were all introduced to suppress it.
• The bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker III, reported in September 2005 that absentee ballots remained the largest source of potential fraud, and recommended photo identification for voters.
• Studies of in-person impersonation find it vanishingly rare: one review identified thirty-one credible incidents across roughly one billion ballots cast in American elections between 2000 and 2014.
• The best-documented recent American case, the 2018 congressional election in North Carolina’s Ninth District, involved absentee ballot handling by a Republican operative and led the state board to order a new election.
• Conservatives argue that the standard for election administration is public confidence in a verifiable process, which is not the same standard as the prosecution rate.

History And Context

Before the secret ballot, elections were conducted in the open and were corrupt by design. Voters in colonial Virginia announced their choice aloud to the sheriff while the candidate stood by; George Washington’s 1758 campaign for the House of Burgesses distributed some one hundred and forty-four gallons of liquor to a few hundred voters. Party-printed ballots in distinguishing colours, used through most of the nineteenth century in the United States, made a purchased vote verifiable to the purchaser.

Tammany Hall industrialised the practice. In the weeks before the 1868 New York election, friendly judges naturalised tens of thousands of immigrants on production of little or no evidence, and repeat voters were shuttled between wards with changed clothes and shaved whiskers. Thomas Nast’s cartoons in Harper’s Weekly made William M. Tweed the face of the system, and Tweed died in Ludlow Street Jail in 1878. The remedy arrived from Australia: the government-printed secret ballot, adopted in Louisville and in Massachusetts in 1888 and across most American states within a decade.⁴

The twentieth century supplied its own cases. In the 1948 Texas Democratic primary runoff, Ballot Box 13 in Jim Wells County produced two hundred and two late votes, listed in alphabetical order and written in the same ink, giving Lyndon Johnson an eighty-seven-vote statewide margin and a Senate seat. Chicago’s 1960 returns remain disputed. In 2018, absentee ballots in North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District were collected and handled by an operative working for the Republican candidate; the state elections board refused to certify the result in November 2018 and ordered a new election on 21 February 2019, the first such order for a federal race in decades.

Canada’s record is thinner but not empty. The 2011 federal election produced the “robocall” affair in Guelph and elsewhere, in which automated calls directed voters to the wrong polling stations; a Conservative staffer, Michael Sona, was convicted in 2014 under the Canada Elections Act.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives argue that an election is a procedure whose legitimacy depends on being verifiable in advance, not merely unchallenged afterward. The chain of custody for a ballot, the accuracy of the roll it is checked against, and the identity of the person casting it are administrative facts that can be secured cheaply. Securing them is not an accusation against anyone.

The Carter-Baker Commission is the reference point, because it was bipartisan and because its findings cut against the position now attributed to each side. Reporting in 2005, the commission recommended a photo identification requirement tied to the REAL ID card, urged states to issue the card free to those without one, and identified absentee balloting as the largest remaining vector for fraud.¹ Conservatives note that the same recommendations, from the same document, were treated as sensible in 2005 and as suspect a decade later.

The second argument concerns voter rolls. Registration lists in both countries carry substantial numbers of records for people who have moved or died, because removal is legally slower than addition. An inaccurate roll is not itself fraud, but it is the raw material for it, and it degrades confidence independently of whether anyone exploits it.

The third argument is about method. Conservative writers on this subject — John Fund’s Stealing Elections is the widely read example — concentrate on absentee ballots, ballot harvesting, and machine-era municipal politics rather than on impersonation at the polls.⁵ The reason is that this is where the prosecutions are. A rule requiring that absentee ballots be requested by the voter, returned by the voter or a family member, and verified by signature or identifier is a rule about custody, and it is the rule most consistently defended on the right.

The underlying conservative claim is Burkean. Institutions carry authority because people believe they are honest, and that belief is a form of inherited capital that can be spent down. A regime that becomes careless about procedure because the current fraud rate is low has misunderstood what the procedure is for.

Differing Positions

The strongest opposing case is empirical. If the offence to be prevented is in-person impersonation, the evidence for its scale is thin: a systematic review of American elections from 2000 to 2014 found thirty-one credible incidents in a period covering about a billion ballots.² Voter identification requirements impose a cost on every voter to prevent an offence that occurs at a rate of roughly one in thirty million. That is a poor trade, and courts examining the record in Texas and North Carolina in the 2010s found that some identification statutes had been drafted with knowledge of which groups would be burdened.

The second argument is historical and carries real weight. The apparatus of registration, literacy tests, poll taxes, and discretionary administration in the American South after 1890 was built and defended in the language of election integrity, and it disenfranchised black voters for three generations.³ Defenders of expanded access argue that a policy tradition with that history has to meet a higher evidentiary burden than a neutral administrative proposal would.

A third point concerns claims about the 2020 American presidential election. Sixty-odd lawsuits alleging outcome-determinative fraud failed in state and federal courts; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and state election officials described the election as secure in November 2020; and Attorney General William Barr said in December 2020 that the Justice Department had found no fraud on a scale that would change the result. Conservatives who work on election administration have argued since that conflating that dispute with the ordinary case for ballot security damaged the ordinary case.

References

1. Commission on Federal Election Reform, Building Confidence in U.S. Elections (Center for Democracy and Election Management, American University, 2005).
2. Justin Levitt, “A Comprehensive Investigation of Voter Impersonation Finds 31 Credible Incidents Out of One Billion Ballots Cast”, Washington Post, 6 August 2014.
3. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (Basic Books, 2000).
4. Tracy Campbell, Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition, 1742-2004 (Carroll and Graf, 2005).
5. John Fund, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books, 2004).