People gather outside a polling station in Tempe, Arizona, to cast their ballots in the 2018 midterm elections. (Dominic Valente/For The Washington Post)
Voter fraud is not a problem in the United States. Study after study has shown that few — if any — people vote illegally in American elections.
Still, the issue has animated President Trump since he ran for office in 2016. On Monday, he once again tweeted about “ILLEGAL VOTING,” cautioning that anyone caught casting a fake ballot would face “Maximum Criminal Penalties.” Trump also claimed — inaccurately — that fraud is common. “Just take a look,” he told reporters. “There are a lot of people . . . that try and get in illegally and actually vote illegally. So we just want to let them know that there will be prosecutions at the highest level.”
Of course, election fraud does happen around the world. Today, “more elections are being held, but more elections are also being rigged,” according to “How to Rig an Election,” a new book by British scholars Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas. And politicians can get pretty creative when it comes to guaranteeing a particular outcome.
“How to Rig an Election” documents all kinds of inventive approaches: In one instance, officials in Ukraine tricked voters in opposition strongholds into using disappearing ink, so their ballots appeared blank by the time they were counted. In a Russian election, officials bribed men with the same name as their preferred candidate to run for his seat so voters would have a ballot that listed the same name three times.
When Ferdinand Marcos was running for reelection in 1986, poll-watching group Namfrel issued a manual on likely cheating methods. As my colleague William Branigin reported at the time: “It is taken for granted here that cheating will occur — that voters will be bribed or intimidated, that ballots will be cast in the names of persons too young or too dead to vote, that attempts will be made to monitor the supposedly secret ballot and to falsify election returns for entire towns or provinces.”
In some instances, so-called “flying voters” were paid to cast their ballots for a particular candidate. Voters were given a blank or fake ballot before stepping into their polling station. They would vote using the fake ballots and bring the real one backs as proof their votes were cast to the buyer’s satisfaction.
“These examples are effective but they’re also very obvious,” Cheeseman told me. “You know what the government is trying to do.”
Most times, Cheeseman said, voter fraud is much more mundane. According to his research, vote-buying occurs in about 40 percent of all elections; voters experience violence or intimidation about a quarter of the time. That might take the form of voters being kidnapped, polling stations being bombed or people being harassed or threatened on their way to vote.
One of Cheeseman’s big concerns is the spread of misinformation, particularly over encrypted sites like WhatsApp. “The problem used to be voters might not have any information,” he said. “Now they have bad information.” In his work, he has seen candidates sharing the wrong date of the election or claiming falsely a candidate dropped out.
He has also seen campaigns spread pretty vicious smears about their opponents. In one Brazilian race, a candidate was accused of designing penis-shaped baby bottles to make kids more comfortable with homosexuality.
Authoritarians also make it inconvenient to vote by closing polling stations or moving them without notice. Some voters are deregistered without their knowledge. Occasionally, the power at a polling station might be cut so real ballots can be swapped out for fake or pre-marked ones.
If that sounds familiar, it should: Misinformation and voter suppression have become more routine in the United States, watchdogs say, particularly under Republican leadership.
In Georgia, for example, Republican Brian Kemp is running for governor. Kemp is currently Georgia’s secretary of state, and therefore in charge of his own election. Kemp has championed much tighter restrictions on who can vote, which critics say is an effort to suppress turnout among minority groups that historically support Democrats. Just days ago, Kemp claimed — without any evidence — Democrats had tried to hack into the state’s election system.
In California, voters — as well as a Democratic candidate for office — say the state’s website has been giving them incorrect information on polling locations. In North Dakota, a new rule requires voters to offer an ID displaying a physical address, a challenge for Native Americans who are less likely to have the appropriate documents.
“It’s the smartest kind of election rigging imaginable,” Cheeseman said of voter ID laws. “It sells itself as protection to prevent other people from going to the polls.”
Read more:
Violence around election time actually makes people more likely to vote
The Trailer: 18 moments that shaped the midterms
Without evidence, Trump and Sessions warn of voter fraud in Tuesday’s elections
Credit:Washington Post
via USAHint.com
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