Good morning Hank it's Tuesday, today I want to talk about the rigging of U.S. Presidential
elections, so travel back with me to the election of 2004, where incumbent republican George
W. Bush defeated democrat John Kerry.
Across the country, Bush received about 3 million more votes that year than Kerry did, but
of course the popular vote doesn’t matter in U.S. presidential elections, because of
the electoral college.
This is a strange and anachronistic feature of our presidential elections explained in
detail by CGP Grey here, but quick overview: Every state is allotted a certain number of
electoral votes based on congressional representation.
So, every state has two senators, so they get two electoral votes, and from
there it's decided by population.
Like, California has 55 electoral votes, whereas Montana has 3.
Right, so, most states—there are of course exceptions because nothing is ever easy in
U.S. politics—allot their electoral votes to the candidate who gets the most votes in
that state; a candidate needs 270 total electoral college votes to win, and because you might
win some states by a wide margin and lose others very narrowly, it is possible to win
the popular vote in the country but lose the election.
In fact, that’s how George W. Bush was elected in 2000.
Also, if 3 or more candidates get some electoral votes and that prevents any one candidate
from getting a majority of electoral votes, the President is actually chosen by the U.S.
House of Representatives.
This has happened a couple times in U.S. history, including in 1826, when Congress chose John
Quincy Adams to become President, even though Andrew Jackson had received more votes.
Anyway, if you’re thinking all of this sounds bananas, I agree.
But one of the few even arguable upsides to the electoral college is that it makes U.S.
Presidential elections extremely hard to rig, because we’re not actually having one election:
We are having 51 elections, each governed by the separate states.
But in fact, it's even more complicated than that, because in every state, counties and
townships have their own elections with their own independent oversight, so we’re having
thousands of elections.
And this massively decentralized system protects against widespread fraud.
So back to 2004.
There's not much question that George W. Bush won the most votes in that election.
The question is Ohio.
Kerry lost Ohio by about 118,000 votes.
If he’d won, he would've been elected President, and lots of people on the left (including,
by many accounts, John Kerry himself) believed that voter suppression and possible ballot
fraud essentially rigged that election.
Like, there was a Rolling Stone cover story about it; you can still find blogs making the case.
The claim goes like this: Ohio's secretary of state, who oversees elections, was a Republican
who engineered long lines at polling places.
Also, he purged voters from the rolls, and failed to get the names of 25% of newly registered
voters to polling places.
And also somehow 150,000 votes in rural Ohio were switched from Kerry to Bush, possibly
via hacking electronic polling machines, possibly via physically altering ballots.
Here's what actually happened: 25% of newly registered voters did have to fill out provisional
ballots, which is ridiculous and speaks to how poorly the Ohio election was run that year.
However, almost exactly half of those people cast their ballots for George W. Bush.
The voter rolls were purged because they are required by law to be purged, because people die and/or move.
Actually, I guess I don’t really need the and/or there.
Mostly they just die or move.
Right, also, none of the 150,000 purportedly switched votes was actually switched.
There were, however, long lines at polling places, which did disenfranchise voters, but
not in a way that would've affected the outcome of Ohio's Presidential election.
The 2004 Ohio election was poorly run, and it did not reflect the ideals of our democracy,
but it also did not steal the election from John Kerry.
Like, the democratic party's own investigation concluded, "Despite the problems on Election
Day, there is no evidence from our survey that John Kerry won the state of Ohio."
But of course, that report was written months later.
The morning after the election, John Kerry still believed he might've won, and he was
furious with the partisanship he saw in the Ohio election, but nonetheless, he called
George W. Bush and conceded.
This is one of the central tenets of our country: We have fair elections where the outcomes
are trusted—broadly if not universally—and when power changes hands, it does so peacefully.
Like, it’s sometimes said that the greatest moment of George Washington's presidency was
its final moment, when he handed the office over to John Adams and created a precedent
for how American leaders would cede power.
To paraphrase something George W. Bush said recently, in American history, the office
of the Presidency is always more important than the person who holds it.
Now, none of this is to say that our elections are perfect.
Like, voter suppression has been a hallmark of U.S. voting, and suppression efforts have
disproportionately targeted systemically disadvantaged voters—the poor, initially, and then when
the franchise was extended, women and people of color.
Even today, there are many political strategies for suppressing voters.
But voter suppression, which is real, is not the same thing as widespread fraud, which is not.
In most states, observers from both major political parties monitor poll workers to
prevent official fraud, and fraud among voters is incredibly rare in the United States.
With very few exceptions, people do not vote when they are not allowed to, or impersonate
voters, or vote multiple times, or vote when they are dead.
The voter rolls often include dead or otherwise ineligible people, because the rolls aren't kept
up to date or purged often enough, but that does not mean fraudulent votes will be cast.
Like, you may have heard that in-person voter fraud is as uncommon in the United States
as dying from a lightning strike.
But that’s just not true.
In the past 14 years, there have been 31 substantiated cases of in-person voter fraud in U.S. elections,
and 36 people have been killed by lightning this year alone.
Now, fraud via absentee ballots is somewhat more common because it's easier to fill out
someone’s ballot if it's mailed in, but it is not widespread and it is not systematic.
You might hear about a study showing that 6.4% of non-citizens living in the United
States voted in 2008; that study has been thoroughly debunked.
You may have heard that certain voting machines can be easily rigged; that is just not true.
And you may have heard that voting machines owned by liberal George Soros will be used
in 16 states this year.
In fact, George Soros has no ownership stake in the company in question, Smartmatic, and
furthermore Smartmatic machines will be used in zero states in 2016.
By the way, links to nonpartisan sources in the dooblydoo, as usual.
So the U.S. Presidential election will not be rigged, any more than the one in 2004 was.
What's different now is that one of the major party Presidential candidates is loudly and
consistently claiming that the election will be rigged, that there will be widespread voter
fraud, that people may vote 10 times, that undocumented immigrants will vote, and on
and on and on.
These are all simply lies.
They are not substantiated in any way, and normalizing those conspiracy theories frankly
scares the crap out of me, because it means fewer Americans will trust our elections even
when they are free and fair.
I guess I understand that fearmongering is part of U.S. politics, but undermining the
legitimacy of our political institutions without cause isn’t.
Hearing that unfounded rhetoric from a Presidential candidate is a new and disturbing development
in American political discourse, so I want to be very clear.
Your vote will count.
The election will not be rigged.
If you’re fortunate enough to be an eligible voter in the United States of America, please
make your voice heard.
Hank, I'll see you on Friday.