The New Yorker Radio Hour - Voter Fraud: A Threat to Democracy, or a Myth?

Episode Date: November 7, 2017

Donald Trump memorably claimed, without a shred of evidence, that millions of votes cast by undocumented immigrants had given Hillary Clinton the popular vote in the 2016 election. More circumspect conservatives argue that voter fraud is a real problem requiring more stringent checks on voting—which their opponents see as thinly disguised voter suppression. Here, three views on voter fraud: a Kansas lawyer who defended a woman charged with fraud; the columnist John Fund, who argues that voter fraud may exist widely, whether we see it or not; and Lorraine Minnite, a political-science professor who researched the topic exhaustively, and who tells the staff writer Jelani Cobb that purposeful fraud in the electoral system essentially does not exist. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent. I think it would be interesting to really try to unravel what his ties. There's a sort of country-city divide for their own convenient, and it's not clear where it goes next. From one world trade center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For generations, the truth of American democracy has been that we seem not to like it very much. We don't act on it. Ask your fellow Americans to get out and vote, and it's a very tough sell, even in a presidential election, where we vote at much lower rates than most

Western democracies. Voter turnout in a country that prides itself as being one of the first democracies in the world is embarrassing, and has been so for a long time. This isn't some new form of modern American cynicism. But in recent years, some in the political world have diagnosed a new problem, too many people voting, or maybe better put, the wrong kind of people. The White House is standing by President Donald Trump's unsubstantiated claim that millions of people voted illegally in the November election. Donald Trump is not the first person to claim that voter fraud is a serious problem. Chris Kobach, who now serves as vice chair of Trump's advisory commission on election integrity, claimed in 2010 that in his home state of Kansas,

as many as 2,000 people cast ballots using the names of dead voters. When I was sworn in as Secretary of State in Kansas in January of 2011, my primary objective was to set about drafting the strongest anti-voter fraud law possible in any state and to get it enacted and implemented as quickly as possible. We succeeded in doing that. Koback went to work filing charges. As of now, there are 12 alleged cases of voter fraud. 12. Two of the first cases he filed were against Stephen and Betty Gatke.

That's Betty Gatke's lawyer, Trey Petlin. He practices in Olathe, Johnson County, Kansas. I defend people mostly in Kansas and Missouri in criminal cases, and I also handle personal injury cases. And this was definitely Petlin's first case of voter fraud. Betty and Steve Gatke are both retired from the Postal Service. Betty is a proud Native American Indian, a registered Republican. She's very civic-minded. And then Steve is a retired military. In late 2015, an officer arrived at their house asking about the 2010 election, and then he had them arrested. And the moment he read them their Miranda rights. I can tell you they were concerned. Originally, it was a charge that they had used an absentee ballot to double vote in Kansas when they had also voted in the election in

Arkansas. They had to sink back, but in 2010, they were in the process of moving. Betty had already moved to Arkansas. Steve still lived in Kansas, traveling to Arkansas quite a bit during this voting period. Ultimately, Betty never voted in Kansas. That was a mistake. She was innocent. Her case was dismissed. Steve voted by absentee ballot in Kansas, and he thought he could vote in

in Arkansas, because he moved to Arkansas, he wasn't voting for any of the same candidates. Voting crimes are often felonies, but Steve eventually pleaded guilty to a Class C misdemeanor, the lowest misdemeanor charge in Kansas. Naturally, Steve and Betty were both embarrassed and disgruntled. You know, these are people that believe in the system and believe in the government. So they were disillusioned a little bit, and it was a difficult experience, I think, for both of them. And one of the things that I, in my research of all of this as I was defending, Betty, it was clear that voting crimes are extremely rare.

Not only had I not had one, I hadn't heard of one. I've done criminal defense for 23 years. It's not charged. And the reason it's not charged is because it doesn't happen. That was Trey Petlin, a Kansas lawyer who defended one woman accused of, voter fraud. Of the cases filed in Kansas, it appears that not one involves an undocumented immigrant, and maybe ironically, most of the accused were registered Republicans. But the issue has become a major talking point for conservatives. And one of the prominent voices on this is

John Fund. Fund is a columnist for the National Review, an editor of the American Spectator, and he previously wrote for the Wall Street Journal. He's the author of two books about threats to our voting system. Do you think voter impersonation is a problem of any scale? I think in close elections where people know it's going to be close and decisive, I think their temptation, given how difficult it is to catch and detect, the temptation in certain close elections is overwhelming and presents a real danger in some elections where people get desperate and will use any methods. And by the way, voter fraud happens in both political parties. I can take you counties in Kentucky where Republican voter fraud is rampant. And by the way, it's not $10 a vote.

It's not $20 a vote. It's a bottle of bourbon. So one study from Justin Levitt at Loyola, at Loyola Law School, on voting across the country between 2000 and 2014, 14 years, found exactly 31 instances of impersonation fraud out of a billion votes cast. Is that not a meaningful study? No, because it's almost impossible to detect. You know, if you go to the Securities and Exchange Commission and you ask them, how many cases of insider trading violations do you have? They will tell you, we know there's a lot of them, but we know it's almost impossible to detect unless we have an informant or somebody squeals. So you could go and ask people how many insider trading convictions the SEC has conducted the last few years, and it's a small number. No, a very small number. If you go to the SEC.

The researchers at Wisconsin and Stanford have noted that the number of reported incidents of voter impersonation is about equal to the number of reported incidents of alien abduction. So what's going on? Do you think that these political scientists and the many, many others who have studied this issue are deliberately misrepresenting the facts? No. What I'm saying is proving it, showing it is very difficult because once you put the ballot in the box, it's anonymous. So the only way to stop voter impersonation is to stop it from happening in the first place. Do we know how much there is? No, because it's almost impossible to detect and catch. I want to ask you about the National Voter Registration Act, what people usually call the motor voter law. George H.W. Bush, the senior Bush, refused to sign it. But it went into law during the Clinton administration, and Republicans have been fighting about it ever since.

What, in your view, is the problem with the law? enforcement? Yes. Well, of course we want people to be able to register to vote easily. We even give them postcards to do it. The postcards are standardized. That's fine. But we gave the state the responsibility to keep their voter rolls clean. And the federal government had the responsibility to sue the states if they didn't keep their voter rolls clean. So this is part of the law that means, of course, it should be easy to register to vote. But if people don't vote or they're voting illegally over an extended period of time or their names are no longer valid, we have to call the rolls. There has been no enforcement of that since 2008.

John, at what point you claim that, thanks to the motor voter law, eight of the 9-11 hijackers were registered to vote? This is you talking about that on Morning Joe some years ago. Eight of the 9-11 hijackers, eight of the 19 hijackers were registered to vote because they've gotten drivers licenses. Really? Wow. Now, that's a pretty explosive claim. It's also not true, but it gets to one of the arguments you've made about the voter voter law that linking the voter registration process to the process of getting a license could lead to abuse. Do you think that it's too easy? David, let me explain. Do you think that it's too easy to register to vote in this country? You've accused me of reporting a falsehood. I would simply tell you some of them, it was not eight. It was a lower number. What was the number?

You're asking me to report something that was 15 years old. But what's the number? If it's a lower number than eight, what is the number? Well, give me time to research it then, because you're asking me a question out of the blue after 15 years. How much do you remember of what you reported 15 years ago? Quite a lot. Well, you have a better memory than I do. My source was someone inside the Justice Department, a top official.

Obviously, it was on background, and I can't give you that person's name. But it was wrong. Certainly the number was wrong, yes. It was not that high. Were any of them? Yes. We know several of them have driver's licenses. We know that.

They were driving. One reason election officials are cautious about trying to clean up the registration polls is because of the real risk of mistakenly purging rightfully registered voters, right? Here in New York, our city board of elections, just admitted it accidentally purged more than 100,000 voters from the rolls. last year. Are you worried about that, too? Well, that is why over a third of my book involves cases of bureaucratic incompetence. I actually believe we need to spend more money and more resources and take more care with our elections. We need to have more sophisticated voting machines rather than the tinker toy things

that we buy. And we need to have better voter roles. And we need to also train a whole new generation of poll workers because the average generation of poll workers we have now working the polls is 70 years old. They're not going to be with us forever. I guess, John, what I want to So do you think that there's a really concerted effort afoot of real voter fraud? I'm not saying that there aren't isolated incidents. We can agree on that, and we know that the numbers of it are quite small, to the point of insignificance, the way I see it. But do you really think that there's a concerted effort to vote illegally in this country?

And that's significant, and that is something that should be a consuming national issue, as opposed to voter suppression on the other side of the coin. I think as Chris Dodd, the senator from Connecticut, who was the co-sponsor of the Help America Vote Act, the last bipartisan legislation in this, he said we can do both things at the same time. We can make it easy to vote and we can make it hard to cheat. I agree with Chris Dodd.

What I want to emphasize here is there's common ground, but there are people here who don't want us to reach common ground. right and some on the left. Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Andy Young, had a civil rights conference two and a half years ago in Austin, Texas. They proposed the freedom card. They said, we shouldn't be spending all of this money on lawsuits and, you know, who has a voter ID and who doesn't. Let's create a freedom card. Let's convert the Social Security card into an ID card for voting purposes only with a photograph on it. The cost would be minimal. And let's issue that to everyone who doesn't have an ID. Because as Andy Young told me, if people don't have an ID in this country,

I don't know how many there are, but if anyone who does, they can't participate in the mainstream of American life. They can't travel. They can't get government benefits. They can't cash a check. Let's get them an ID. And I have proposed this to many of the civil rights groups that are fighting these laws. Let's not fight about whether there should be a law. Let's get everyone an ID. I've had very little interest in this. They apparently want to spend their money on litigation and lawsuits. John, do you think that the federal government should be at the center of this? Would that be a good way to standardize? No, because the Constitution argues against that.

The Constitution specifically lodges responsibility for the time, manner, and place of elections with the states. A big reason supporters of Trump's commissions say that we need to focus on looking into this problem is because nobody knows exactly how many votes are cast fraudulently. It's true that it's very difficult to account for every single ballot, every single year. That's absolutely true. But isn't saying nobody knows how much fraud there is just a way to sow doubt in the system and justify putting up barriers to vote, which also happens? Is it possible to know anything about this? We don't know how much tax evasion there is in this country, but we try to have a good faith effort to try to put up enough risks for people that no one will commit tax evasion lightly. We don't catch nearly as many people as practice tax evasion, but at least they know there's some consequences for some people. Do you think this issue is as important as what we've experienced in 2016, the issue of hacking? I'm as concerned about the Russian hacking of our elections or the attempted hacking as I am of the mass unmasking of people caught up in NSA surveillance dragnets by Samantha Power and other officials in the Obama administration.

I think both are of concern and we both should look at them. John Fund, thank you very much. Thank you. John Fund is author of stealing elections and co-author of Who's Counting, how fraudsters and bureaucrats put your vote at risk? The argument that, well, voter fraud is meant to be concealed, therefore you can't find it. It's sort of ridiculous. I mean, all crimes are meant to be concealed.

Right. So money laundering is meant to be concealed. Right, you know, or any kind of a fraud is meant to be concealed. So we have that challenge with all kinds of crimes and fraud. and detecting them. And we have methods for doing that. Lorraine Menidi is a professor of political science who spent years researching claims of fraud in our electoral system. Her conclusions are apparent right from the title of her 2010 book, The Myth of Voter Fraud. She spoke with New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb.

So Lorraine, what did you find when you started looking into claims of voter fraud? Well, I should say it was a really difficult research project because there isn't a singular kind of a database that tracks cases of voter fraud. So I had to go through a process of looking for it where I thought it would show up. So I would start with asking secretaries of state and attorneys generals in the state. And I sent a survey to every district attorney in the United States. I asked them, you know, how many cases do you have of X, Y, Z, you know, registration fraud, of double voting, voter impersonations? I did interviews with election officials, and I just kept looking and looking and looking and couldn't find it. I couldn't find it.

And I will say, since 2010, when my book was published, I have served as an expert. witness in eight federal voting rights cases and a state case. So there have been nine cases that have been dealing with, say, challenges to voter ID laws. You can read the legislative record in the states when they debate the voter ID laws that have been passed. You can look at the court records on these cases. No one, no state has been able to show that they've had any kind of a problem with voter fraud. So it's not just me, you know, looking for it and maybe making mistakes somehow and not finding it. I mean, I have looked for years and I have looked in multiple ways and I have tried to reason through where would it show up if it were happening

and look there. And no one else has come up with it. But you take a pretty significant stand on it. I mean, the title of the book is the myth of voter fraud. Right. And so if this is a kind of mythology, then what exactly are we talking about here? Well, I think it's tapping into attitudes that are, you know, really deep in American culture and racially charged and class-based attitudes that, you know, certain people shouldn't be allowed to vote. And so we perpetuate the idea that there's all this corruption, and that justifies stricter rules about access, and those stricter rules have disproportionate effects on people who are poor. So as we talk, there is the kind of swirling issue of the presidential voter fraud initiative, and Chris Coback attempting to. get voter data from the various states. And if voter fraud is not common or rare in American politics, why does it have the kind of political appeal that it does? Well, I think there's

a kind of institutional bias in our party system. We have this party system with two parties. We don't have proportional representation. We have winner take all. So the lot of of that is that you just have to get one more vote than your opponent. That creates incentives to think about demobilizing your opponent's voters. So, you know, this is targeting a particular population. You might call it the more marginal population in the United States because it has a partisan overlay. Those people are perceived to be more friendlier to the Democratic Party. And so you have the Republican Party, almost everywhere, these laws have been adopted in the United States, pushing for voter ID laws, proof of citizenship laws, because there's an electoral advantage to them if they can keep down the vote of the opponents rather than try to enlarge their majority around their own policy agenda. So, you know, it's got a very partisan overlay.

Well, I think it's interesting that there's this long history that we can look at with African-Americans, particularly around poll taxes and grandfather clauses and literacy tests and outright physical intimidation to prevent people from voting. But we've also seen that language applied increasingly to Latinos, particularly around the idea of people who are undocumented, who are participating in the electoral system. And one of the things I think I found interesting in your book was you talking about the idea of voter fraud being fundamentally more irrational an act than voting itself is. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. Sure. Yeah, it's in the sort of professional study of politics by political scientists, scholars, analysts sort of apply the idea of costs and benefits to voting. and they sort of count up the benefits, and then they look at the cost. And the costs would be in time or effort or, you know, education.

You have to have resources and so forth. And they sort of come to a conclusion that actually it's not that rational for any individual, you know, to vote, especially, say, in a national election, because the likelihood of your one vote determining the outcome is so small that, you know, you would say, well, why bother? Right. And so the question of committing voter fraud says, well, let's take an almost irrational act, which is voting. And then to say, and, you know, what I'm then going to do is I'm going to break a law. I'm going to possibly face, you know, even a felony conviction.

If I am a non-citizen or certainly an undocumented non-citizen, I'm going to face, deportation, to cast one more vote. What do you get for it? You know, what do you actually get for your voting? So let me say the opposite, the other side of this. In 2012, when Mitt Romney was questioned about why he thought he lost, he made the indelicately phrased statement about Obama having given massive financial gifts to minorities. Isn't that part of the equation when people talk about this about what the person would benefit would be? There's some guy in a seedy part of town with an envelope full of cash and he's just kind of distributing it around to get people to show up to vote. Well, there are cases of that.

I mean, there are cases of something called vote buying, in particular in some poor isolation. communities, there have been examples, you know, even not that long ago of exactly what you just described, which the problem with that is that with the secret ballot, it's not a very efficient way of trying to re-enlection because, you know, anybody could take the money and go in and vote any way you want, right? So how do you guarantee that you're getting what you're paying for? So that's another example of why this is sort of, you know, boneheaded a thing to do. I do want to think about this historically, though, for a minute. You started this work in 2000, but there have been, you know, scandals and questions around voter integrity in the United States for a long time.

And we could look at Tammany Hall or, you know, Huey Long, that kind of incandescently colorful figure of Louisiana politics as well. No, in the past, we certainly have a colorful history of electoral manipulation, of, of election fraud broadly, of, you know, stealing of ballots and so forth. But that's not where we're at today. Many things have changed since the 19th century and even since, you know, the 1920s and the 1930s. Or even going back to the colonial era, where, you know, candidates would, you know, for the colonial legislatures would kind of literally go to the saloons and, you know, get everyone beer and then roll them over to the back. Alice. Yes, this is very entertaining and interesting history.

But even those stories we can tell about Tammany Hall or about even Lyndon Johnson's, everybody likes to talk about Lyndon Johnson's first race for Senate when, you know, mysteriously, the voters of Alice, Texas kind of lined up in alphabetical order to sign in. That is a testament to great local. party organization. That's right. One of the points that you raise in your book that I found really interesting was about this myth that the eight, I think, of the 19 hijackers on September 11th were registered voters

which I hadn't heard before I read your book. But as I was reading this, I thought, you know, of course someone has said this. This is like, why would someone not make up this idea? But this was an idea that was going around, and it became kind of a stand-in for people's fears about having, I guess, a voting system that was too lax. Yes, yeah. And that was partly, we can trace it right to the motor voter law, right? Which mandates that state agencies that do motor vehicles provide an opportunity for people to register to vote. This was a signature feature of that 1993 piece of legislation.

It was one of the first bills that Bill Clinton signed. These are the first or the second. So, you know, the sort of conservative right-wing, you know, people who went after Clinton, his whole time in office, were pretty obsessed with the National Voter Registration Act. And the idea that it would allow for fraudulent registrations, illegal registrations, mistakes, problems. They're going to pollute the registration rolls. So this idea that the 9-11 hijackers were registered to vote came in part because some of them had used fake driver's licenses or I think in some cases there were some who had actually like legally obtained driver's licenses. So the question was, hey, if they got a driver's license, they had to have been asked,

would you like to register to vote? So they could be registered to vote. They are registered to vote was said on, you know, a couple of television shows in particular. And this turns out to not be true. Right. What do you think we'll see from this commission that's being led by Chris Colback? Well, I think we'll see more of what certainly I've seen and other people who study this issue have seen happen, which is to mash up a lot of data as a pretext to arguing that the voter rolls are so polluted and corrupted and, you know, people could be lurking around using

false IDs to come in and, or false names, you know, to get on the rolls and then, and register. And so, I mean, I think it's about trying to create ongoing chaos on election day in a way. You know, in other words, created an environment in which the public actually is losing confidence, not gaining confidence. I don't think the public is going to gain confidence from whatever comes out of that commission. So the book is the myth of voter fraud by Lorraine Menidi. And thank you. It's a very pertinent topic.

You're welcome. You're welcome to talk with us today. Lorraine Menidi, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. She spoke with Jalani Cobb of The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

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