Congressional Republicans remain sharply divided over objecting to the counting of states’ Electoral College votes this week. Nearly three-quarters of Republican voters believe that the election results are inaccurate, and lawmakers, including Sen. Ted Cruz, have cited such views as the reason why they intend to object on Wednesday.
When stories of the 2020 election are covered in the press, they usually come with assurances such as, “There has been no evidence of election fraud.” Sometimes, the statement is carefully couched, such as, “There has not been evidence of fraud widespread enough to overturn the election,” but the message is clear. It is also evidently not a message that is persuasive to many Republican voters.
It seems unlikely that the debate on the House or Senate floor this week will do much to heal the country or change hearts and minds, either. When you believe that the other side is rotten, as many Republicans do, it makes it very plausible that the integrity of our elections might have been compromised by those willing to do anything to win.
Given this enormous rift, is there any hope of ever coming at least to a shared set of facts about what happened in this election and what didn’t? Might there be hope that the “voter file” (the publicly available listing of who is registered to vote and who has voted in each election) can offer that opening?
I’m a believer that when trying to bridge a divide, it is best to identify at least a few areas of common agreement as a starting point. In doing so, I think it is helpful to divide the claims of election irregularity between three distinct categories: rigged voting machines, unconstitutional voting laws, and illegally cast ballots.
The first type of claim, that the voting machines themselves were rigged to flip votes unbeknownst to voters themselves, is the sort of outlandish assertion that even President Trump’s legal team has tried to distance itself from and has generally avoided making while under oath. Some of the president’s allies have gone so far as to allege voting machine manufacturers are in league with deceased communist dictators. Because things such as the operations of voting machines are fairly opaque to the average person, this is the category where it is hardest to imagine persuading anyone through evidence that the claims are without merit. Any “evidence” can easily be considered just another tentacle of the conspiracy itself. Much like the Democrats who still believe the 2004 election was stolen by Diebold machines, such conspiracy theories are hard to counter.
The second category of claims involves legal questions about the changes to and implementation of voting processes this year. This also seems like a hard place to find common ground, given that our nation’s most polarized debates are often over the very issues left to courts to decide. “How much latitude should election officials in Wisconsin or the courts in Pennsylvania have when it comes to adjusting how we hold elections during a pandemic?” is not a question where evidence can be brought to bear per se; it is a question of the interpretation of law.
This is the sort of concern alluded to in Sen. Josh Hawley’s late-night email to his Republican Senate colleagues, giving as an example Pennsylvania’s expansion of mail-in voting, saying it should not have been allowed under the state’s own sonstitution. Those who object to the count on Wednesday will likely spend most of their focus on these arguments. But with courts having ruled consistently against the president’s team, it seems the audience they most needed to persuade, the judiciary, has been left unmoved.
Which brings us to the third category of claims: voter fraud. This category is the one that is perhaps the most interesting because it is the most loudly amplified by the president and, crucially, because of the voter file, the most easy to assess in the open.
Trump and his allies have alleged votes cast by dead people, people who are not legal residents of the state where they vote, suitcases of ballots being dumped into the tallies overnight, and so on. This sort of claim came into sharp focus on Sunday when audio of the president’s phone call was leaked, confirming he outright asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,870 votes.”
There is a notable exchange in the call in which Trump asks about thousands of supposed dead voters in Georgia. Claims that dead people vote and throw elections are not unique to 2020, but this year, the Trump team has repeatedly singled out individual instances of alleged dead voters casting a ballot. However, nearly all of the names they tout, under further scrutiny, turn out to be people who are very much alive and very surprised to discover they’re supposedly deceased. Notably, when a name floated by the Trump team did turn out to show voter fraud, it was a Trump voter who cast a ballot in Pennsylvania under his deceased mother’s name.
Indeed, out of a list of thousands of supposedly dead voters provided by the Trump team to Georgia officials, Raffensperger noted in the call that only two votes turned out to have been cast by dead voters. Now, I’m not under the impression that Georgia’s analysis will change a lot of Republican minds. The good news is that if you don’t trust Georgia officials or the media to assess these claims properly and to get it right, there are public records that are made available in every state after every election that make it possible to determine if thousands of votes were dumped into the process or if illegal votes were cast: the voter file.
The “voter file” can be used to make sure things add up and find if and when a ballot has been cast by a name that, by all accounts, shouldn’t be voting. It is a publicly available list of exactly who voted and in which elections. It provides critical information, including ages and addresses, and is a tool that is extremely valuable to pollsters, researchers, campaigns, and more. Whether someone is dead or alive, whether the number of people the voter file shows voted in the election is close to the number of votes cast in each race — these are knowable facts.
This information is not accessible only to authorities we are told to trust, it is public and out in the open.
Simply evaluating the voter file and matching it up to records such as death records isn’t perfect and can yield plenty of false positives. But still, identifying with clarity that, say, 119 supposedly dead people voted in Chicago over the course of a decade perhaps gives us a more helpful starting point than massive numbers spun out of thin air or shoddy armchair “statistical analysis.”
While I’m not optimistic that we will heal and come together easily after this election, I’m hopeful that if there’s any way to bridge the divide between skeptical Republicans and everyone else, it will be to start with the things that are rooted in facts that are easiest to assess in broad daylight.
