[EL] “‘Stop the Steal’ Didn’t Start With Trump"

[Brian Landsberg]

The obsession led then US Attorney Jeff Sessions to prosecute the Marion Three for voter fraud following the 1984 election. This Ill considered prosecution and the speedy acquittal cost Sessions a federal judgeship. Lani Guinier led the defense and described the case in her book.

Sent from my iPhone

On Jan 16, 2021, at 7:33 PM, J Morgan Kousser <kousser at caltech.edu> wrote:



The Bouie article misses the fact that the Republican "voter fraud" push began earlier.  In 1977, Jimmy Carter introduced a fairly comprehensive voting reform law, which grew out of failures to pass such bills that began in 1969 or even earlier.  The most innovative part of the Carter Administration bill was same day registration.  A great many Republican members of Congress had previously favored at least some of the components of the measure, including House Minority Leader John Rhodes.  Suddenly, Republican activists began to attack the bill, with Kevin Phillips contending that it would "blow the Republican Party sky high" and the Heritage Foundation alleging that it might allow "eight million illegal aliens in the U.S. to vote."  Gov. Ronald Reagan asserted that the bill, if successful in registering more voters, would "render the Republican Party as dead as the dodo bird."  Although RNC Chair Bill Brock had previously called universal registration "a Republican concept," after meeting with Reagan, he denounced it as "the Universal Voter Fraud Bill" and "a Democratic Power Grab."  The quotations are from Rick Perlstein's "Reaganland," pp. 93-95.  The bill, HR5400, was never brought to a vote in either house.  See CQ Almanac, 33 (1977), 798-800.  So far as I know, there is no comprehensive academic study of this and other precursors of the NVRA.

On 1/16/2021 6:05 PM, Hess, Douglas (Doug) wrote:
A good article in the NYTimes by Janelle Bouie about ACORN and the history of “Stop the Steal” rhetoric and conspiracy theories:
“‘Stop the Steal’ Didn’t Start With Trump”  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/opinion/voter-fraud-capitol-attack.html?referringSource=articleShare

Excerpt:

“Over the ensuing years, under pressure from the White House ahead of the presidential election in 2004, the Justice Department ramped up its crusade against voter fraud. Of particular interest was ACORN, a now-defunct advocacy organization that was working — as the presidential election got underway — to register hundreds of thousands of low-income voters. Swing-state Republicans accused the group of “ manufacturing voters ,” and federal prosecutors looked, unsuccessfully, for evidence of wrongdoing. Later, Karl Rove would press President Bush’s second attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, to fire a number of U.S. attorneys for failure to investigate voter fraud allegations, leading to a scandal that eventually led to Gonzales’s resignation in 2007.

ACORN and voter fraud would remain a bête noire for Republicans for the rest of the decade. Conservative advocacy groups and media organizations produced a steady stream of anti-ACORN material and, as the 2008 election campaign heated up, did everything they could to tie Democratic candidates, and Barack Obama in particular, to a group they portrayed as radical and dangerous. ACORN, Rush Limbaugh said in one characteristic segment , has “been training young Black kids to hate, hate, hate this country.”

During his second debate with Obama, a few weeks before the election, the Republican nominee, John McCain, charged that ACORN “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” And his campaign materials similarly accused Obama, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party of orchestrating a vast conspiracy of fraud. “We’ve always known the Obama-Biden Democrats will do anything to win this November, but we didn’t know how far their allies would go,” read one mailer…”


-----------------------
Douglas R Hess
Assistant Professor, Political Science/Policy Studies
Grinnell College
On sabbatical until fall 2021
My latest op-ed using Grinnell College National Poll: https://bit.ly/hesshess102020

Website: http://www.douglasrhess.com
-----------------------




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