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

Sun Jan 17 21:16:54 PST 2021

The fraud in the story in Braden’s link appears to have been committed by local election workers. It’s important to note that this is NOT the sort of fraud that Trump and others—including, in the past, some state chief election officials, political appointees in Bush’s DOJ, Sen. McCain in 2008, etc.—usually allege; nor is this the problem that many policy efforts from the right target when they talk about election fraud.

Instead, a conspiracy theory has been around for years that fraud is being committed by large numbers of voters or orchestrated by groups (or, bizarrely, by George Soros) operating—in some shadowy way—on a vast scale. Policies are then suggested by people peddling or buying into these theories that would limit access to registration or to voting. The NYT article does a good job reporting some of the history of these claims in the 21st century. Here’s another good article on that history from 2009: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/2009-acorn-scandal_n_5ae23fa6e4b02baed1b86696<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.huffpost.com_entry_2009-2Dacorn-2Dscandal-5Fn-5F5ae23fa6e4b02baed1b86696&d=DwMFaQ&c=HUrdOLg_tCr0UMeDjWLBOM9lLDRpsndbROGxEKQRFzk&r=xr_OjwGHtP-zw6I-DJj_MQ4cusLbiVT1bScGa0c8ZJo&m=cIfHwrPp33nGGv1RVn8StoivUmx4Utzm7oDy5ufOGew&s=lS1wQwxQDwg7cm8C1sbcH3eGnrA3TDvSJUaHCuCR5nQ&e=> and one more from last fall: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/magazine/trump-voter-fraud.html.  (That the NY Times was not so careful in its reporting and editing back in 2008 when McCain and others were attacking ACORN’s voter registration drives is tragic and frustrating. And, no, those registration drives had nothing to do with voter fraud.)

Moreover, there will always be some dead people, felons, etc. on even the most well-maintained voter registration rolls. There is no way to keep a “perfect” list and attempts to “clean” lists zealously eventually create, or risk creating, greater harm by removing valid registrations inappropriately. In short, problems with voter rolls have nothing to do with conspiracy theories of vast amounts of fraudulent voting.

It’s frustrating when people argue against some (never specified) others who they allege state that there is no fraud. This is a strawman argument that seems to get repeated every year on this list. The claims that most, by far, officials and election scholars make are that VOTER fraud is extremely rare (compared to the total votes cast), that most claims of voter fraud are wrong or grossly exaggerated (once all the investigating is done), and that claims of sizeable voter fraud are often made for partisan purposes by people who show little regard for the accuracy of their statements or for the quality and relevance of their suggestions for policy change.

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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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From: Braden Boucek <braden at beacontn.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 17, 2021 5:06 PM
To: Paul Gronke <paul.gronke at gmail.com>
Cc: law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] “‘Stop the Steal’ Didn’t Start With Trump"

In 2005, I was living in Memphis, TN, working as a federal prosecutor for the United States Dept. of Justice. At that time, Ophelia Ford won a special election for a seat recently vacated by John Ford, a funeral director by trade, and who had stepped down after being indicted for public corruption, a crime of which he was ultimately convicted. She defeated her republican opponent by 13 votes. Dead people, felons, persons registered to vacant lots and persons out of the district were all<https://web.archive.org/web/20060723210829/http:/www.commercialappeal.com/mca/local/article/0,2845,MCA_25340_4792646,00.html> on the rolls. The state ultimately voided the election, a result authorized by then District Court Judge Bernice Donald (a Clinton appointee later elevated to the Sixth Circuit by President Obama, and an otherwise excellent judge in my personal experience). The state later issued 37 indictments, including 3 of poll workers for faking votes for Ophelia Ford.*

However much Bouie or other commentators may hold to the view that voter fraud is fake, reality says differently.

*Ford herself was never charged with wrongdoing.
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On Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 2:50 PM Paul Gronke <paul.gronke at gmail.com<mailto:paul.gronke at gmail.com>> wrote:
Doug

I really liked that column as well. I don’t pretend that Janelle Bouie reads my tweets, but I’ve been trying to remind folks about the Jim Rutenberg story in the Times magazine, “The Attack on Voting” (9/20/2020). https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/magazine/trump-voter-fraud.html It does a comprehensive job detailing a two decade long effort to create a voter fraud narrative. I hope more and more opinion leaders realize this, and don’t think that this is just a Trump phenomenon.

Fake charges of election malfeasance as a political strategy needs to stop, or at least be exposed for what it is: a crass, corrosive, and deeply damaging to our democratic system. I may be too optimistic to hope that demographic shifts in the country and focused mobilization efforts will ultimately turn the GOP away from this strategy, but regardless it’s going to be a difficult transition.

Some under 50 may not remember Kevin Phillips — he worked on the Nixon campaign in 1968, and his work there and subsequent book, The Emerging Republican Majority, are often pointed to as key moments in the emergence of the “Southern Strategy.” Today we call it by it’s real name: white identify politics / white supremacy politics, reaching far beyond the Southern states.
---
Paul Gronke
Professor, Reed College
Director, Early Voting Information Center
http://earlyvoting.net

General Inquiries: Jane Calderbank calderja at reed.edu<mailto:calderja at reed.edu>

Media Inquiries: Kevin Myers myersk at reed.edu<mailto:myersk at reed.edu>

On Jan 17, 2021, at 9:18 AM, Lorraine Minnite <lminnite at gmail.com<mailto:lminnite at gmail.com>> wrote:

Margaret Groarke reviews fraud claims and the 1970s/Carter proposed reforms.  See, Groarke, "The Impact of Voter Fraud Claims on Voter Registration Reform Legislation," Political Science Quarterly 131(3): 571-595.

On Sat, Jan 16, 2021 at 11:14 PM Brian Landsberg <blandsberg at pacific.edu<mailto:blandsberg at pacific.edu>> wrote:
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<mailto: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…”

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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<http://www.douglasrhess.com/>
-----------------------

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