Electoral integrity in the United States

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“Electoral integrity refers to international standards and global norms governing the appropriate conduct of elections,” according to a Wikipedia article by that title and a source it cites. Assessing electoral integrity has proved difficult for a variety of reasons.

Research

Quantifying electoral integrity is not easy. The “Electoral integrity project” at Harvard University and the University of Sydney published a “Perceptions of Electoral Integrity dataset” whose validity was questioned, because "Democracy in New York (which scored a 61) and Virginia (60) is supposedly more imperiled than in Rwanda (64), though Rwanda is controlled by an autocrat. The worst-performing state [in the US], Arizona (53), is outranked by Kuwait (55), Ivory Coast (59) and Kyrgyzstan (54)."

Propaganda

Beyond questions of research methodology, however, serious research suggests that there has been substantial propaganda discussing various types of voter fraud, making rare exceptions seem routine. This seems to have been done to justify increasing restrictions on the right to vote.

The rationale behind this was expressed by Republican Christian Conservative strategist Paul Weyrich in a talk in a 1980 strategy conference: “I don't want everybody to vote. [O]ur leverage in the elections ... goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Starting in 1981 Democratic party organizations repeatedly hauled Republican party organizations into court for voter caging and other forms of voter suppression. Democrats won a series of consent decrees in which Republicans promised not to do it. Except they continued. On 2018-01-08 the US District Court for the District of New Jersey decided that “the DNC did not prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, a violation of the [1982] Consent Decree before December 1, 2017”.

Increase in political polarization

Meanwhile, US society and politicians have become less polarized racially but more polarized politically, and the courts have become more reluctant to intervene in electoral practices, according to Harvard Law Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos. He wrote, “the half-century in which federal courts have decided redistricting cases can be divided into two periods: one lasting from the 1960s to the 1980s, in which voters and politicians were both comparatively nonpartisan; and another reaching from the 1990s to the present day, which amounts to perhaps the most hyperpartisan era in our country’s history.”

This increase in partisanship has coincided with other changes, which may explain this phenomenon:

Figure 9. A graph of the incarceration rate under state and federal jurisdiction per 100,000 population 1925–2008 (omits local jail inmates). The male incarceration rate (top line) is roughly 15 times the female rate (bottom line).

This graph shows the income of the given percentiles plus the average from 1947 to 2010 in 2010 dollars. The 2 columns of numbers in the right margin are the cumulative growth 1970-2010 and the annual growth rate over that period. The vertical scale is logarithmic, which makes constant percentage growth appear as a straight line. From 1947 to 1970, all percentiles grew at essentially the same rate; the straight lines for the different percentiles for those years all have the same slope. Since 1970, there has been substantial divergence, with different percentiles of the income distribution growing at different rates. The gap between the mean and the median American family income is $39,000 per year (just over $100 per day): If the economic growth during this period had been broadly shared as it was from 1947 to 1970, the median household income would have been $39,000 per year higher than it was in 2010. The 99th, 99.9th, and 99.99th percentiles were computed from US Internal Revenue Service data by Piketty and Saez.

1. Between 1975 and 2000, the mainstream commercial broadcasters fired nearly all their investigative journalists and replaced them with the "police blotter". People thought that crime was out of control, when there had been no substantive change in crime. And the public voted in a generation of politicians on a platform to "get though on crime". This reduction in investigative journalism meant that the public received less honest information than before, especially about what the government was doing to reward the people who made major contributions to political campaigns. That, in turn drove a five-fold increase in incarcerations. It also contributed to increases in income inequality that began around 1970 and continue to the present, presumably because voters are less well informed and therefore less able to defend their interests in the political arena.
2. In 1987 the US Federal Communications Commission eliminated the fairness doctrine , which had required the holders of broadcast licenses to "present controversial issues of public importance" in a way that was "honest, equitable and balanced". Its repeal provided an opportunity for a kind of partisan political programming with commercial appeal that had not previously existed.
3. Facebook and other “antisocial media” have so much information on people's beliefs that it is profitable to target ads to groups as small as 20. Vaidhyanathan (2018) Antisocial Media claims that Facebook is “undermining democracy everywhere.” They have “become complicit in the rise of nationalists such as Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, and ISIS”. “[S]mall, cheap advertisements [appear on] platforms like Facebook and Instagram that disappear after a day”. “Facebook is explicitly engineered to promote items that generate strong reactions.” If you want to motivate someone via Facebook to do something, first “choose the most extreme, polarizing message and image. Extremism will generate ... 'engagements.' This design feature ... ensures that the most inflammatory material will travel the farthest and the fastest. If, for example, you mention “illegal aliens” on Facebook, you will likely get ads telling you about how terrible they are. And you will likely NOT see posts mentioning research saying that sanctuary cities are on average safer and have higher median incomes than non-sanctuary cities. If, conversely, you discuss problems that “undocumented” people have, you will NOT likely see posts about “illegal aliens.”

For more on how the media contribute to this partisan divide, see “Confirmation bias and conflict”.

Interviews

Three videos with transcripts of interviews relating to electoral integrity are as follows:

1. Five categories of voter suppression.
2. Voter suppression and the American Legislative Exchange Council.
3. Election integrity, the Missouri Voter Protection Coalition, and the Kansas ACLU.

Excerpts from these three interviews were broadcasted on 90.1 FM, KKFI.org, Kansas City Community Radio, on 2020-08-13. A half-hour of excerpts from those interviews is scheduled to be broadcasted in late September on Sprouts: Radio from the Grassroots.

Voter fraud database

The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank, maintains an “Election Fraud Database [that] presents a sampling of recent proven instances of election fraud from across the country. This database is not an exhaustive or comprehensive list. ... It is intended to demonstrate the vulnerabilities in the election system and the many ways in which fraud is committed.” As of 2020-08-30 this databases included 1,296 proven instances of voter fraud including 1,119 criminal convictions. That sounds line a big number, unless you consider that it includes cases from the entire US dating back to 1982. These 1,296 proven instances included 19 prosecutions in Oregon in the 20 years since Oregon became “the first state in the United States to conduct its elections exclusively by mail.” Similarly, FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, insisted, 'There is no evidence to back up Trump’s blanket claim that “mailed ballots are corrupt.”'

Hans von Spakovsky, who manages the Heritage Foundation's Election Law Reform Initiative, discussed, “The risks of mail-in voting”, citing the recent case in Patterson, New Jersey, where, “Four Paterson residents have already been charged with criminal election fraud,” and “election officials apparently rejected 1 in 5 ballots”. A different view of that Patterson, New Jersey, incident was offered in a The Washington Post article on “What alleged voter fraud in Paterson, N.J., tells us about November — and what it doesn’t”. This article says that voter fraud is crudely similar to auto theft, which is not "at a scale in which the system of auto ownership is imperiled.”

Spakovsky testified as an expert witness in Fish v. Kobach, in which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the League of Women Voters sued then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobachon behalf of Steven Wayne Fish and others whose attempts to register to vote had been rejected, because of a Documentary Proof of Citizenship (DPOC) requirement of the Kansas Secure and Fair Elections (SAFE) Act. This "SAFE" act was enacted in 2011 and took effect in 2013. Among other things, Spakovsky testified that “a U.S. GAO study ... 'found that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 individuals called for jury duty from voter registration roles over a two-year period in just one U.S. district court were not U.S. citizens.' On cross-examination, however, he acknowledged that he omitted the following facts: the GAO study contained information on a total of 8 district courts; 4 of the 8 reported that there was not a single non-citizen who had been called for jury duty; and the 3 remaining district courts reported that less than 1% of those called for jury duty from voter rolls were noncitizens.” Julie Robinson, the Chief United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Kansas, who had been appointed to the bench by US President George W. Bush, a Republican, concluded that "his report misleadingly described the only district court with the highest percentage of people reporting that they were noncitizens, while omitting mention of the 7 other courts described in the GAO report, including 4 that had no incidents of noncitizens on the rolls. ... [Mr. von Spakovsky's] clear agenda and misleading statements ... render his opinions unpersuasive. In contrast, Plaintiffs offered Dr. Lorraine Minnite, an objective expert witness, who provided compelling testimony about Defendant's claims of noncitizen registration. ... Her published research on the topic spans over a decade and includes her full-length, peer reviewed book, The Myth of Voter Fraud, for which Dr. Minnite has received grants and professional distinctions, and numerous articles and chapters in edited volumes. ... Although she admits that noncitizen registration and voting does at times occur, Dr. Minnite testified that there is no empirical evidence to support Defendant's claims in this case that noncitizen registration and voting in Kansas are largescale problems. ... [M]any of these cases reflect isolated incidents of avoidable administrative errors ... and / or misunderstanding on the part of applicants. ... For example, ... 400 individuals [in the Kansas Election Voter Information System (ELVIS)] have birth dates after their date of registration, indicating they registered to vote before they were born." Judge Robinson noted that Mr. Kobach was able to document 39 cases of noncitizens registering to vote, and to protect the public from that problem, he rejected 12.4 percent of new voter registration applications while his Documentary Proof of Citizenship law was in effect, disenfranchising over 31,000 citizens.

Bury me in Chicago, so I can remain politically active

There were claims of voter fraud after the 1960 United States presidential election. However, if the fraud had been limited only to Illinois, it would not have changed the election, because Kennedy got 303 electoral votes to Nixon's 219, which means that Kennedy would still have still won with 276 electoral votes if Nixon had won Illinois' 27 electoral votes.

Still, there have been reports of dead people voting in numerous places, not just Chicago. Various people have joked, “bury me in _______, because I want to remain politically active.”

Summary

Various kinds of electoral fraud have almost certainly been problems in the past in the US and even in other countries today. However, the available evidence suggests that in recent decades in the US, the concerns about it expressed by President Trump and his supporters vastly overstates its magnitude.

Meanwhile, it's almost certain that each of Mac Heller's Five categories of voter suppression have a much bigger impact on election results than individual voter fraud -- almost 1,000 citizens disenfrancized by the Kansas Documentary Proof of Citizenship requirement for each noncitizen registered to vote. Kobach said it was the tip of an iceberg. Judge Robinson said it was an icicle.

References

• Julie A. Robinson (18 June 2018), Findings of fact and conclusions of law in Fish v. Kobach (PDF), Wikidata Q97940156.