Trump’s Fraud Claims Died in Court, But the Myth of
Stolen Elections Lives On
For
years, Republicans have used the specter of cheating as a reason to impose
barriers to ballot access. A definitive debunking of claims of wrongdoing in
2020 has not changed that message.
By Jim Rutenberg, Nick Corasaniti and Alan Feuer
- Dec. 26, 2020Updated 3:20
p.m. ET
President Trump’s baseless and
desperate claims of a stolen election over the last seven weeks — the most
aggressive promotion of “voter fraud” in American history — failed to get any
traction in courts across seven states, or come anywhere close to reversing the
loss he suffered to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
But the effort has led to at least one
unexpected and profoundly different result: A thorough debunking of the sorts
of voter fraud claims that Republicans have used to roll back voting rights for
the better part of the young century.
In making their case in real courts and
the court of public opinion, Mr. Trump and his allies have trotted out a series
of tropes and canards similar to those Republicans have pushed to justify laws
that in many cases made voting disproportionately harder for Blacks and Hispanics, who largely
support Democrats.
Their allegations
that thousands of people “double voted” by assuming other identities at polling
booths echoed those that have previously been cited as a reason to impose
strict new voter identification laws.
Their assertion that large numbers of
noncitizens cast illegal votes for Mr. Biden matched claims Republicans have
made to argue for harsh new “proof of citizenship” requirements for voter
registration.
And their tales about large numbers of
cheaters casting ballots in the name of “dead voters” were akin to those
several states have used to conduct aggressive “purges” of
voting lists that wrongfully slated tens of thousands of registrations for
termination.
After bringing some 60 lawsuits, and even offering financial incentive for information about fraud, Mr. Trump and his allies have failed to prove definitively any case of illegal voting on behalf of their opponent in court — not a single case of an undocumented immigrant casting a ballot, a citizen double voting, nor any credible evidence that legions of the voting dead gave Mr. Biden a victory that wasn’t his.
“It really should put
a death knell in this narrative that has been peddled around claims of vote
fraud that just have never been substantiated,” said Kristen Clarke, the
president of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a
nonprofit legal group, and a former Justice Department attorney whose work
included voting cases. “They put themselves on trial, and they failed.”
Yet there are no signs that those
defeats in the courts will change the trajectory of the ongoing efforts to
restrict voting that have been core to conservative politics since the disputed
2000 election, which coincided with heightened party concerns that demographic
shifts would favor Democrats in the popular vote.
The false notions have lived on in Mr.
Trump’s Twitter and Facebook feeds; on the television programming of Fox News,
Newsmax and One America News Network; and in statehouse hearings where
Republican leaders have contemplated more restrictive voting laws based on the
rejected allegations.
In Georgia, Republican legislators have
already discussed toughening the state’s rules on voting by mail and
on voter identification.
In Pennsylvania, Republican lawmakers are considering reversing moves that had
made it easier to vote absentee, and their counterparts in Wisconsin are
similarly considering tighter restrictions for mail voting, as well as
for early voting.
If anything, President Trump has given
the movement to limit ballot access new momentum while becoming the singular,
charismatic leader it never had.
After declaring outright that
high levels of voting are bad for Republicans, he persuaded his base that the
election system is rotten with fraud, and to view that fiction as a bedrock
party principle. Several recent polls have
shown that majorities of Republicans think the election was fraudulent, even
as election officials across the country report that
it went surprisingly smoothly even in a pandemic,
with exceptionally high turnout and no evidence of
fraud aside from the usual smattering of lone wolf bad actors or mistakes by
well-intentioned voters.
A
losing streak of 59 out of 60 cases
In the past month and a half of court
rulings, voter-fraud allegations have been rejected again and again as lacking
proof or credibility, often by Republican-appointed judges.
Mr. Trump and his
allies have argued that the 59 losses they faced in 60 lawsuits filed since
Election Day were based on procedural rulings, complaining that judges refused
to look at the particulars of allegations they have sought to use to overturn
an election Mr. Biden won by 7 million votes (and by 74 in the Electoral
College).
But according to a New York Times
analysis, they did not even formally allege fraud in more than two-thirds of
their cases, arguing instead that local officials deviated from election codes,
failed to administer elections properly or that the rules in place on Election
Day were themselves illegal.
In the single case Mr. Trump won, his
campaign challenged a state-ordered deadline extension in Pennsylvania for the
submission of personal identification for mailed ballots, affecting a small
number of votes.
In nearly a dozen cases their fraud
accusations did indeed have their days in court, and consistently collapsed
under scrutiny.
Despite the definitive nature of those
rulings, the Republican response has been to hold fast to the president’s fraud
fictions.
Republicans in Congress have promoted
them, too, as Mr. Trump pushes senators and House members to reject the
Electoral College results at what is supposed to be a procedural vote to affirm
Mr. Biden’s clear victory over the president on January 6.
In a Senate hearing on Dec. 16, for instance, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma reprised a series of Trump campaign lawsuit claims about illegal voting in Nevada.
“Forty-two thousand
people in Nevada voted more than once, according to your work,” Mr. Lankford
said during questioning of a Trump campaign attorney, Jesse Binnall. Mr.
Lankford went on to repeat the Trump campaign’s claims that dead people,
out-of-state residents and noncitizens had cast illegal ballots in Nevada in
substantial numbers. The campaign had based those charges on analyses that
matched voting lists with records from commercial and governmental sources.
But the trial judge in the Nevada case
had dismissed the suit nearly two weeks earlier, rejecting those analyses as
unsound and unconvincing, declaring that the campaign “did not prove under any
standard of proof that illegal votes were cast and counted.”
Such so-called “list matching,” of the
sort states rely on to pare their rolls of invalid voters, takes careful work
by longtime experts. It is easy to do poorly. It was ill-conceived or badly
executed data analyses that led Georgia and Texas to move
recently to wrongfully eliminate tens of thousands of valid registrations, reversing course only
after voting rights groups and others called attention to the mistakes.
Conservatives have also used such data
analysis to make wild claims about
voter fraud over the years, often hitting stumbling blocks in court as
they were shown to be badly flawed or incorrect.
That pattern held in this year’s
torrent of pro-Trump lawsuits, as well.
For instance, in pressing their cases
across the country, Republicans have referenced data analyses by a
cybersecurity executive and one-time Texas congressional candidate named
Russell J. Ramsland Jr. One of his reports alleged
that various Michigan counties had vote tallies that exceeded their
populations, implying their totals were padded with illegal ballots; the
counties in question, it turned out, were in Minnesota, not Michigan.
Likewise, several specific accusations
that people illegally cast ballots in the names of dead people have been born
of amateurish data analysis that later proved faulty.
In a federal case the
Trump campaign brought seeking to delay certification of the results in
Michigan, the specific mention of a ballot cast by a dead voter was incorrect:
No vote was cast through the dead man’s registration. Rather, a man
with his same exact name voted legally. (Mr. Trump’s team pulled that case from
the docket as Michigan moved forward toward certification.)
That is a common issue in claims about
“dead voters,’’ “double voters” and “out of state” voters — blind comparisons
of official data often lead to “false positives” treating two people with the
same names as the same person.
In Georgia, lawyers for the secretary
of state are seeking to have the court reject an “expert” analysis declaring
that Mr. Biden’s winning result included more than 10,000 ballots from dead
citizens. The state’s own expert analyst in the case, the M.I.T. political
scientist Charles Stewart III,
concluded that the Trump campaign only appeared to “identify the unremarkable
fact that some Georgians who voted share the name and birth year of a different
person who died,” as state lawyers put it. In several other instances, the
“dead voters” in whose names the Trump campaign said ballots were cast proved
very much alive.
This past week in Pennsylvania,
authorities did make one arrest based on an accusation the Trump campaign first
leveled in November. Delaware County prosecutors said a man named Bruce Bartman
cast an absentee ballot in his deceased mother’s name — for Mr. Trump. Mr.
Bartman’s lawyer said Mr. Bartman had done so as a misguided “form of protest,”
and the local prosecutor said it was
nothing more than “evidence that one person committed voter fraud.”
A
complaint ‘void of plausible allegations’
Mr. Trump and his allies have also
attacked election officials themselves. In a new twist on voter fraud
mythology, they have claimed the officials were either complicit in fantastical
fraud schemes or willing participants. In multiple states such accusations were
summarily thrown out by judges.
In Arizona, Republicans filed a federal
lawsuit claiming that both election workers and Democratic officials overseeing
the election “could” have perpetuated any number of fraudulent activities.
Judge Diane J. Humetewa, an appointee of former President Barack Obama,
dismissed the suit, saying “these innuendoes fail to meet” standards for fraud
allegations.
In Michigan, Judge
Timothy M. Kenny, a state judge, was asked to consider the claim that election
officials “coached” people to vote — a claim that was made, the judge noted in
dismissing it, without a location or date or other relevant details.
Few Trump-era claims of fraud, however,
have quite caught on in conservative media like those involving computerized
voting systems allegedly “switching” Trump votes to Biden votes.
One of the wildest of those claims was
an accusation that officials in at least four states used ballot tabulators
built by Dominion Voting Systems to flip hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, of votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.
This improbable plot received its
fullest airing in four lawsuits filed by Sidney Powell, a onetime lawyer for
the Trump campaign.
Her personal record is much like that
of all of the other failed Republican voter fraud suits. Despite refutation
from judges and election officials around the country, her narrative has been
continually repeated in right-wing media, ensuring that the notion of extensive
fraud gained traction unimpeded.
A judge in Phoenix called Ms. Powell’s
complaint “void of plausible allegations.” A judge in Michigan wrote that Ms.
Powell’s belief that voting machines changed the election outcome was “an
amalgamation of theories, conjecture, and speculation.”
The most thorough debunking of Ms.
Powell’s conspiracies came last week in a blistering letter from Dominion that
affirmed the integrity of its machines, which has been verified in independent
audits. The company demanded she retract her statements and accused her of
engaging in “a reckless disinformation campaign.”
Dominion indicated
that it was also mulling legal action against Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has led
Mr. Trump’s postelection legal effort, and several prominent conservative media
figures.
As she continues to press her fraud
myth nationally Ms. Powell has taken her arguments to the Supreme Court, all
the while keeping close contact with Mr. Trump, meeting in-person at the White House.
The city of Detroit is seeking
sanctions against Ms. Powell, and the Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel says
she is considering doing the same because of “intentional misrepresentations”
in Ms. Powell’s legal filings.
Yet for all of that,
the story line lives on, even on Christmas Eve, when Mr. Trump took the time to
write on Twitter, “VOTER FRAUD IS NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY.”