Let's play some word association. Ready?
"Election fraud".
Well? What's the first thing that comes to mind?
In the aftermath of the 2020 election day(s), it was all anyone could talk about, write about or even think about. On and on it went, the insistence from Team Trump that it was all rigged, the equal insistence from Biden HQ that it was actually the most free and fair election in American history.
The hyperbole coming from left and right, the court cases piling up and shifting out, the anger growing day by day as a black hole seemed to open over the whole process of administering elections, stretching and strangulating credibility across the board as opaque procedures and wild speculation butted up against each other.
The seething frustration let out at the Capitol building - a topic with plenty of its own fertile ground for examining two totally different narratives of what went on there on the 6th January - bubbled and troubled onwards afterwards, and so as we toil towards election day in the USA for 2024, many Americans believe it will be impacted by fraud.
So what's going on with that? Where has all this come from? This article is an attempt to explain some of the long history behind American elections being not exactly as 'free and fair' as advertised, so that we can then examine - in some detail, but not completely comprehensively as I do not have that much time - 2020.
Originally, this article was actually just part of my preview for the 2024 US presidential election. But it was getting big on me, and both topics really deserve their own space. So, let's talk about free and fair elections in the land of the free and home of the brave.
America the Bizarre
People tend to make one of two mistakes when watching US elections. International observers will often assume that American elections are run essentially in the manner of elections in their own country, apart from the oddity of the primaries and the Electoral College. Americans, on the other hand, will take the manner in which elections are run for granted. Yes, they may quibble with the amount of money being spent or some inefficiencies in the process, but for many, that's just how it is.
Both of these positions completely miss just how atrocious the American election process really is, and I'm not talking about the Electoral College, or the primary system. If anything, that's the part of the whole process that functions as it was designed to.
No, the problems actually lie with the logistics of voting, and of counting those votes, which are the most basic parts of running an election. The United States, like many western countries, routinely sends independent observers to watch elections in developing nations that have perhaps struggled to adhere to 'democratic norms' in the past. The idea behind this that a democratic system requires elections to be free, and to be fair. No intimidation in the voting booth, no locking voters out of the system unfairly, no changing the tally of ballots cast.
Yet if these same observers were to watch over American elections without knowing they were in the US, they would likely report back that there are numerous ways in which that country's elections fail to pass the very same tests they apply to other countries.
One may think this argument is a new phenomenon, borne out of the last election. In 2020, the results were so hotly contested that polling afterwards consistently showed a third or more of Americans believing that the election was, in one way or another, rigged, with further polls indicating that an absolute majority of likely voters (66% or more) expect the upcoming election to involve cheating.
But this is not new. The irregularity of US elections is par for the course, and creates a contradictory reality. The narrative of elections is that - being 'free and fair' - they are to be conducted in a way that rightly leads to the correct person being chosen as leader according to the consensus, for which there are rules to follow.
The reality of American elections, however, is that they are a game to be played by stretching or ignoring the rules wherever possible in order to get your faction's person into power instead of the other faction. In order to keep good order in the country, voters must believe that the system is above board, and the results should mostly reflect the reality of what was put in.
But it doesn't require wholescale rule-bending to shift an election, especially not with the Electoral College. And so, time and again, American politics has taken a dark path in order for one side to get 'their guy' to the top of the tree.
Don't just take my word for it. Here's Andrew Gumbel writing in the Guardian in 2018:
American history is hardly lacking in examples of real voter manipulation and electoral skulduggery, especially in the segregation-era deep south. To this day, the US electoral system is widely viewed as an anomaly in the western world because of persistent problems with the reliability of its voting machinery, frequent bureaucratic incompetence, the lack of uniform standards from state to state or even county to county, the systematic exclusion of more than 6 million felons and ex-prisoners, and the tendency of election officials to adopt rules that benefit their party over democracy itself.
To grasp the scale of this democratic travesty, one must understand that a US presidential election is not one single election. There is no national oversight body ensuring the election is run by uniform standards across the country and organising neutral volunteers to run proceedings in every station, in every district, in every state in the country.
Rather, the whole point of the electoral college is that each state is responsible for deciding how it will choose which candidate it supports for the presidency. That alone already gives you fifty different elections taking place at once, as every state has their own processes. What's more, while state legislatures establish the rules under which elections are to be run in their state, it is up to each county board to actually run the election within their area. They print the ballots, provide the polling stations, select the people who count the votes, and so on, and the person in charge of ensuring it happens will themselves have been elected (usually on either a Democratic or Republican ticket) at a previous election.
There are over 3,000 counties in the United States, which means there are, in reality, over 3,000 elections being run simultaneously, just for the presidency, every four years, and those counties are using at least 50 different sets of rules and thousands of slightly-or-very different procedures to each other to do so, with the overseers having been largely elected or selected on party lines.
You can see how this may cause structural issues in the running of elections.
Gaming the system
Now, consider the cultural side of things. If elections were established early in American history to be a sacred institution, one dealt with fairly and in an orderly fashion, this may not have been a problem, but within a decade after the first US presidential election, the process was already degenerating.
The first two elections had seen Washington elected unopposed, and he presumably could have continued on in the presidency until his dying day, but he chose to conclude his time in the role at the end of his second term in 1796 to prevent him becoming an elected monarch in all but name. Vying for his place were two of his fellow founding fathers (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson), supported by factional systems that quickly evolved into political parties - much to Washington's disgust.
In his farewell address, he made a prescient prediction:
[Political parties] are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
Another founding father, Alexander Hamilton, attempted to subvert both candidates through newspaper and pamphlet campaigns to try and convince electors to inadvertently choose Thomas Pinckney, Adams' running mate, as president instead. This effort nearly worked, as the electoral college of the time did not distinguish between presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Whichever candidate received the most votes from electors would become president, and whoever received the second-most became vice-president.
Because electors in the Electoral College were given two free votes each (regardless of what the states they represented voted for), they could theoretically shift their votes around if they felt there was good reason to do so.
With Hamilton having unlocked the strategy to gaming the election, the Federalist and the Democratic-Republican parties evolved his strategy in the 1800 presidential election. Multiple state legislatures changed the selection method for electors to try and ensure that their governing party would get their party's candidate into the White House. South Carolina's electors very nearly ignored the voter's will in their state to instead split their votes between Jefferson and Pinckney, were it not for Pinckney's refusal to agree to the scheme.
This, combined with the viciousness of the campaigns in 1796 and 1800, was to set a pattern in American politics that closely fit with what Washington imagined would happen.
Twenty-five years in to America's two-party system, the next and most enduring form of election chicanery was dreamt up in Massachusetts in 1821: gerrymandering. Named after Elbridge Gerry - Governor of Massachusetts and future Vice-President - gerrymandering is the process of redistricting congressional seats in a way that massively advantages one party, often creating absurd district boundaries that ensure a party can win a majority of seats even if they receive a minority of votes. Districts affected in this way will often have nothing in common or, alternatively, everything in common except their geography - for example, areas of a city with a particular ethnic group present may all be carefully drawn into the same district, no matter how far away they are from each other.
The unwillingness of so many states to even attempt to undo the existence of gerrymandering puts paid to any idea that one party is saintly and the other sinners. Both parties eagerly use this method of districting whenever they think they might need it and can get away with it. Increasingly, the problem with it has less to do with changing the makeup of congressional representation, and more to do with it being used to create safer and safer seats for both parties, leading to a less responsive Congress (as congressional re-election is generally secured without needing to work hard), and a more partisan electorate. Republicans tend to make far more use of this method, owing to their more rural, thinly spread voting population. The Voting Rights Act has been called upon by the Supreme Court to deal with some particularly bad redistributions, but on other occasions judges have ruled that gerrymandering is not, as a general practice, illegal, even when agreeing that it exists.
Back to the White House, Andrew Jackson fell short of a majority in the 1824 election despite gaining the largest percentage of popular and electoral college votes, and John Quincy Adams was selected by Congress for the presidency instead, which could well be argued to have been another gaming of the system. This, in turn, was partially the result of a political compromise which meant that three-fifths of slaves would be counted for the electoral college in slave owning states, despite the fact that they couldn't vote. Were it not for this, Adams would have had more votes in the Electoral College, and thus, this was also a gaming of the system.
Jackson's fury at Congress for preventing him from entering the White House led to the creation of the Democratic Party, the first of America's modern parties. The extension of the voting franchise to all white, non-slave adult men accelerated during and after Jackson's presidency from 1829 to 1837, which led in turn to the next major evolution in electoral gamesmanship: political machines - and this is where the story of American elections begins to move from the unfair but legal, to the blatantly illegal.
Praesidens ex machina
From around the middle of the century, large metropolitan areas (which had seen a huge influx of new residents as industrialisation began, partially from rural areas but mostly from overseas) had become far more politically advantageous thanks to the extension of voting rights, and thus parties sought to exploit them through getting large amounts of the population organised under 'machines'. These groups would be organised much like a mafia and would often be characterised as an army; led by a 'boss' with hierarchy of lieutenants, the machine would seek to have people elected to positions of influence within their city and state in order to get things done that were to the benefit of the machine.
At the lowest level, poor (often migrant) workers would be leveraged to vote for the machine's candidate through a patronage system. Money or job opportunities would be offered in return for voting a particular way, and if the whole factory floor voted that way, all the better for the group. While these existed to an extent in smaller towns, the most successful, notorious and, ultimately, corrupt machines were in large, urban areas, usually controlled by Jackson's Democratic Party that had largely enfranchised those groups in the first place.
The most famous of all these machines was Tammany Hall in New York City. A common first port of call for Irish migrants in particular, the Tammany Society (as it was originally known) was formed in the late 1700s and was involved with the aforementioned scrap fight during the 1800 election, and was seen as crucial to ensuring John Adams did not win New York that year. Under the guidance of future US president Martin van Buren, Tammany began their migrant enfranchisement model of holding political power, and met with Jackson prior to the 1828 election, agreeing to support him in return for Jackson allowing Tammany to allocate certain jobs in the federal government to their people.
As immigration increased, so did Tammany's power in New York, and their model was followed in cities across the north and mid-west. Crucially (for the sake of keeping political power), Tammany's position as a port-of-call for new migrants meant they were able to get identification details for future voters on their records. Even better for the Democrats, in many cases the Society would help people receive instant citizenship, which immediately added them to the voter pool as well. Once Tammany's people were controlling the voting halls and ballot boxes, curious cases of vote numbers began to crop up.
Soon enough it was considered an open secret that Tammany Hall and other machines were not merely corrupt, but actively interfering in the voting process. Ballot stuffing (creating fake votes that all go to one candidate) and falsifying electoral returns were common in the wards of New York, and reached a point that in 1888, Republican Senator Matt Quay spent months organising a complete list of voters in the city, then publicly advertised two weeks prior to the election that he had such a list and would catch any fraud taking place. While the Democrats still won New York City that year, their margin was so small compared to 1884 (with no wards reporting more votes than voters, as happened in the previous election) that the Republicans were able to carry the state and, with it, the presidency.
There were other failings as well. Fake ballots were easily produced, as they were printed, pre-prepared by the parties themselves and handed out at the ballot box for voters to simply place inside, which in turn allowed machine members to spot which local voters were taking ballots from hawkers of a particular party. This, in turn, meant they could intimidate anyone voting for the opposite party by threatening them economically through the loss of work. The latter was especially common for factory workers, and probably swayed the 1896 election towards the Republicans. Thankfully, with the introduction of the secret ballot by that stage and the backlash against the excesses of that campaign, that election was really the last of its kind.
In earlier years, physical intimidation was more common, such as through the use of 'cooping'. Machine men and gangsters would kidnap voters, ply them with booze, and get them to vote under assumed identities in multiple locations. If they didn't co-operate, they received a beating. It is widely speculated that cooping was the cause of Edgar Allen Poe's death in 1849. During the 1864 election, at the height of the Civil War, army officers granted leave for Republican soldiers to vote, but would keep Democrats from doing likewise. It was widely felt that soldiers were being intimidated into voting Republican through that and other means, and in turn that they were even used to intimidate citizens into doing likewise. A group of Democratic supporters, meanwhile, were caught while enacting a scheme to forge mail-in votes for soldiers, whether alive, dead, or not-existing.
This may all seem rather distant to us now, but political machines were not simply a phenomenon of the 19th century. If anything, they merely crystallised the electoral gamesmanship that had been set up by the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties at the turn of the century. While in the 20th century Franklin D. Roosevelt overcame, and Thomas Dewey defeated, Tammany Hall, other machines lasted and evolved.
Dewey's opponent in the 1948 presidential election, Harry Truman, was a friend of Kansas City machine boss Tom Pendergast, who got him elected first as a county judge, and then into the Democratic primary for the Senate seat up for grabs in Missouri in 1934. That year, St. Louis had its own machine for its own candidate, John Cochran, and the primary became a battle to see which one could out-machine the other. Truman received 137,529 votes in Jackson County, 92.8% of all votes cast. Cochran could only manage 90.5% in St. Louis and a measly 77.9% in the surrounding county, coming to 121,048 votes from 'his' area in total.
Truman duly won election to the Senate, and leapfrogged from there to Vice-President of the United States, then to President following the death of Roosevelt. Cochran did not feel aggrieved at losing out, as the movements of the machine were just part of the game for many at the time - never mind that the general public found it all rather appalling, and machine bosses were often closely linked with other bodies of corruption. (As an aside, Truman was felt by many to be of good character, despite the dubious means of his receipt of power in Missouri. The selection of capable leaders may explain why people largely found the system bearable despite suspecting or knowing it was wrong.)
A generation later and the game was still being played, with the 1960 presidential election almost certainly affected by fraud. In Texas, the machine that got John F. Kennedy's running mate, Lyndon B. Johnson, elected to the Senate in 1948 appeared to work again to get Kennedy over the line (Johnson himself likely having been cheated by the same kind of system when first running for the Senate in 1941). Multiple counties reported more votes than they had voters. County electoral boards flouted laws regarding discarded ballots, with some counties having disproportionally high rates of spoilage. The Democratic-controlled state electoral board refused to conduct any recount or examine the breaking of electoral laws, and so Kennedy was called the winner.
Similar things happened in Illinois, which Kennedy narrowly won thanks to an enormous turnout in Chicago, some 25% higher than in the country overall. This was unprecedented in any urban area, and just happened to take place in a city known to be controlled by a Democratic machine. At its peak, that machine is estimated to have involved as many as 60,000 government employees. Don Rose, long time Democratic campaign consultant, recalled to a journalist how the machine would rig elections in Chicago in that era. But, he insists, the mayor of Chicago and head of the machine, Richard Daley, would've kept it clean in 1960.
As it happens, Democrats accused Republicans working their own machine in the rest of Illinois, but if so they had neither the numbers nor the organisational skills to match the Democrats.
For every dead person who votes Democrat in Chicago, a cow votes Republican downstate. - Old Illinois election maxim
As with Cochran and so many others before him, Nixon publicly agreed to accept the results, though privately he believed he was cheated. As it happens, the Chicago machine was back at it again in 1982. Perhaps there is reason to wonder whether it has ever truly gone away.
It goes on
By this stage, gaming the system of supposedly free and fair elections had been taking place for over 150 years, but it didn't stop there. In 2000, the famous Bush vs Gore recount came down to Florida, controlled by Republican Governor Jeb Bush - younger brother of George Jr. There were a litany of small 'mistakes' with the voting machines, electoral rolls and ballot papers in that state that just so happened to add up in GWB's favour, and the Gore team miscalculated in their re-vote requests, giving Bush the state and the presidency. Gore followed in the tradition of those before him in conceding regardless.
During the certification of results that year, a number of Democratic congressmen (including well known names like Maxine Waters and Jesse Jackson Jr.) raised objection to the certification of electors from Florida, and only through the refusal of any Democratic senators to get involved did it fizzle out - preventing any awkwardness for Gore, who was presiding over the certification as the sitting Vice-President.
In 2004, claims came thick and fast from the Democratic Party again, this time due to voting machine errors in Ohio. One Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote a lengthy article in Rolling Stone detailing the accusations. Watch the congressional debate for yourself - there are some more familiar names objecting to certifying, and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, while agreeing that Bush won, makes some objections to the way the voting was run in Ohio that sound very similar to what Trump supporters have been saying.
An investigation by Mark Hertsgaard for Mother Jones a year on from that election concluded that while people could disagree on how to interpret the evidence, there was a sufficient case to make that something was wrong with Ohio that year. Interestingly, there are a number of parallels from that case to certain cases from 2020. This makes sense: are we meant to believe that in the space of only sixteen years, electoral fraud goes from 'real possibility' to 'totally impossible and a threat to democracy to even suggest' when the processes involved have barely changed at all?
Of course not. The actions in the early 2000s were a continuation of this ongoing thread of American politics. Fraud - real and imagined - is part and parcel of the political discourse in the United States because they are ingrained in its history. That's why, when Hillary Clinton pushed a narrative (complete with fake dossier) that Russia had physically interfered with voting machines in 2016 election to get Donald Trump elected, one poll showed that 42% of people (including two-thirds of self-identified Democrats) thought it was true two years later. By 2020, the dossier, despite being completely discredited by the Inspector-General, was still believed to be accurate by a majority of those polled.
Yet while Clinton's claims were taken very seriously despite being based on precious little, they don't seem to have had the same sticking power as the similar claims made by Trump and his supporters four years later - at least not in American mainstream media, and all who rely on them. This is rather peculiar, as Clinton claimed that the election had essentially been stolen from her, and there was rioting across the country in the aftermath of the election, including in the nation's capital, that involved serious outside attempts to prevent Trump from being inaugurated. There was also, naturally, objections again from Democratic representatives to the certification of electors, though much like in 2000 there was no senatorial support for it.
The big one
This brings us to 2020 result. That election, thanks to unusual circumstances surrounding it, put a spotlight on a lot of the problems with the American electoral system(s) to the foreground, for three reasons: firstly, there was an overwhelming abundance of problems across multiple states simultaneously in a close election during the social media era; secondly, turnout was exceptionally high and the electorate highly engaged due to being locked away at home for some time; and thirdly, the losing candidate refused to accept the possibility of being cheated out of victory as in any way acceptable, historical precedence be damned.
So, we're going to use 2020 as a case study to examine exactly what is wrong with the administration of American elections, which will hopefully help us understand what went on that year that made it so fraught.
I've mentioned before that in the current political environment in the United States, the two major parties tend to focus on different aspects of 'free and fair' elections. For the Democratic Party, Republicans are guilty of voter suppression. The logic here is that, given the opportunity, a majority of Americans would obviously vote for the Democratic Party, and so results that favour Republicans in close elections must be the result of Republican legislators ensuring that people without access to personal identification are unable to vote, or that people who are registered to vote are wrongly removed from voter rolls.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, argues that the Democrats are guilty of voter fraud. The logic here is that, given the opportunity, a majority of Americans would obviously vote for the Republican Party, and so results that favour Democrats in close elections must be the result of Democratic legislators ensuring that votes connected to people without personal identification are counted regardless, or that people are registered to vote despite being ineligible to do so on account of living elsewhere or being dead.
In one sense, these are equal and competing claims, and could well both be true to the same extent, thus cancelling each other out. As detailed above, we certainly know that there is a long history of electoral fraud in the US, and it is even true that the Democratic Party has been at fault for much of it, due to the party's preponderance in inner-urban areas where such actions are most politically possible and beneficial.
But there has also unquestionably been many cases of illegal suppression of votes in American history as well, particularly in the post-Civil War era. At the time, the Republican Party was the de facto party of African Americans, and Southern Democrats responded to this with not only following the ballot stuffing and intimidation tactics of their northern counterparts, but also through suppression tactics like stealing ballot boxes, moving poll stations to unknown locations, and inventing reasons not to hold elections in African American-majority precincts.
Prior to the Compromise of 1877 (which enabled many of these tactics to become deeply enmeshed in the political culture of the South until the introduction Civil Rights Act in 1966, which ended Jim Crow laws that prevented black Americans from voting almost entirely), the presidential election of 1876 saw fraud and intimidation take place on such an enormous scale that South Carolina had 101% of eligible voters cast a vote, while dozens of black Republicans were reported to have been killed in political violence.
It's probably little surprise, then, that the most common claims of voter suppression are in southern states with closer margins, like North Carolina and Georgia, while voter fraud is generally claimed to be more widespread. That matches the historical record of where such things are most prevalent. The suppression of votes in the south through literacy tests in particular were something that lasted until the 1960s, benefiting mostly Democrats but also Republicans in states like Arizona.
But while they are competing claims, they are not quite equal. Voter suppression is only partially falsifiable. If an eligible voter is wrongly prevented from voting, that is falsifiable and evidently prevents a truly free and fair election, whether it be through incorrectly being removed from or prevented from registering on electoral rolls, or from being kicked out of voting stations when their legal right to vote says that they can vote provided they have been in line from before the close of polls.
But voter suppression claims can easily enter the field of myth. Anecdotal evidence of such a thing is sparse, because it relies on something that is meant to happen (voting) not happening, rather than something happening when it shouldn't. As a result, the case for the existence of voter suppression often relies on estimations from studies more than anything else. Whenever electoral rolls are purged it usually appears to benefit Republicans at the expense of Democrats, but Democratic voters - being more urban - are far more likely to change addresses often and end up being registered to vote multiple times.
If there were significant changes to the electoral rolls that were seriously affecting real people, like in Ohio in 2004 when the Secretary of State attempted to prevent people from registering to vote unless they used 80-pound stock paper on their registration forms, they would be noted. But it is essentially accepted that the purging of electoral rolls is ridding the system of errors rather than of real voters, and there are sufficient backstops in place to ensure that a voter erroneously removed is not adversely affected - provided someone like Secretary Blackwell isn't trying to get around them.
Similarly - and this was again the case in Ohio in 2004 - if people are kicked out of line or given exceptionally long lines while waiting to vote on election day, that too is a form of voter suppression, with one or both being illegal depending on the state. It is a falsifiable claim.
Votes being suppressed by making it a requirement to provide some form of voter identification, on the other hand, is something where it's not even clear that it negates turnout from minority groups, with turnout actually rising in elections immediately afterwards. Importantly, this kind of claim of voter suppression targeting minorities or convicted felons or the like are not matters where the law has been broken, instead being cases where the argument is over whether the law should be changed. In fact, this was even true of the literacy tests. While grossly unfair, they were not illegal until the Voter Rights Act was introduced at federal level.
Electoral fraud, on the other hand, is wholly about laws being broken. These claims are, in theory, usually falsifiable, as they are either true and evident from what has taken place, or are not. For example, a former US congressman was found guilty of leading a ballot box stuffing operation (among other fraudulence) in Philadelphia only two years ago. That investigation resulted in around 30 indictments in total.
But is such a case the exception, or the tip of the iceberg? The historical direction of American elections doesn't inspire confidence, but if you examine a list of noted examples of fraud, it isn't particularly big at all, full of 'small-time' cases and convictions that would be expected in a system as poorly put-together as America's. In practice, electoral fraud becomes an unfalsifiable claim by having its tracks covered.
Clear as mud
But therein lies the rub: the American electoral system is so opaque when it shouldn't be, so unprofessional, so consistently, that one is easily left wondering if there really is only one congressman to have engaged in such behaviour. This is where the heart of the issue in 2020 rests, for there we find that there is much potential for bad behaviour, but a litany of problems that prevent a clear order of events from being established.
Electoral laws enacted since 2020 across many states have largely focussed on enforcing voter identification for mail-in and absentee ballots, cleaning up electoral rolls, and restricting ballot harvesting. All three of these areas of law are attempting to circumvent means through which theoretical electoral fraud can be most simply turned into reality today.
Voter identification seems an obvious requirement, and around or over 80% of Americans agree with such laws according to most polls done on the issue, but in 2020 many states did not require ID for mail-in ballots. On its own, this may not be considered a large issue, though perhaps unusual. But in 2020, mail-in ballots received a huge amount of use, under the reasoning that Covid would or should stop people from leaving their house to line up in-person, because to do so could be dangerous to their health or the health of those around them.
As a result, numerous states sent out mail-in ballots at will. As it so happens, many states had 'dirty' voter rolls, with multitudes of dead people and no-longer-in-residence voters being sent ballots to their former addresses, along with non-citizens who end up on the rolls in some states due to automatic registration. In Michigan, 7.7 million ballots were posted to every address where voters were registered. Of those 7.7 million, only 3.3 million were recorded as being used, which leaves millions of ballots outstanding. Similarly, Nevada passed a law in 2020 that every registered voter would be sent a ballot, piling up in apartment complexes and offices. Georgia got in on the act as well.
As far as ballots sent to wrong addresses, many would undoubtedly ignore them. But among millions and millions of voters, it doesn't take many bad actors to send in multiple ballots without ID being required before the system is inundated with fakery.
With voter identification for mail-in ballots, the misuse of these could undoubtedly have been reduced. But in Michigan, the Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson first blocked the introduction of ID requirements by saying that signature matching was preferable and more accurate (which it isn't, and there's no reason not to use both in any case), and then gave guidance that signatures could be 'presumed' by clerks to always match - that is, they should not actually check that the signatures do match.
This second action was found to have been a violation of state law after being brought to caught, but that judgement was in March 2021, four months after the election and long after this decision would have had any impact on the election.
In Nevada, an unusual law was passed which allows absentee ballots to be accepted when received up to three days after the election, with no postmark required to indicate when it was sent. In fairness, Nevada has long been a state where mail-in voting is the norm rather than the exception, but when every man and their dog is receiving a ballot paper that seems like a recipe for disaster. One journalist decided to test out the only method of identification they were using in Nevada in 2020 - signature matching - and discovered that the method almost entirely failed to catch his work. Clark County, where Las Vegas is, did not allow signatures to be challenged.
Ballot harvesting is the practice of allowing third-parties to collect absentee ballots from voters to then deliver to ballot collection sites. It should go without saying that this system is blatantly open to abuse just on the surface. Most places that have allowed it do so only for family members or other people specifically registered to do so. But same states have increasingly expanded the laws to allow basically anyone to become harvesters.
The LA Times editorial board wrote a scathing critique of California's introduction of looser harvesting in 2018. While denying (naturally) that the Republicans who claimed fraud was taking place through harvesting, the Times nevertheless raised the critical point: "the Democrats set themselves up for exactly these kinds of allegations when they passed what really is an overly-permissive ballot collection law. It was written without sufficient safeguards, and suspicions of abuse were inevitable."
The whole point of election laws should be to make elections transparent, protected from manipulation, and equally available for all voters.
But in claiming to make voting as easy as possible, American elections have the appearance of an honesty test more than a fairly regulated election. If you had the opportunity to cast four or five or ten votes for a candidate in other peoples' names without being caught, knowing that the votes would probably count, and you really wanted your candidate to win or the other candidate to lose, would you do it?
One polling company decided to ask that question of voters last year, surveying their use of mail-in ballots during the 2020 election. Despite the headline, the most interesting part of the survey is further down. The headline figure is about filling in a ballot for a family member or friend, which is illegal but you can potentially explain away as being mostly households where everyone discusses their vote already, or some such.
But 11% of voters "say a friend, family member, co-worker, or other acquaintance has admitted to them that they filled out a ballot on behalf of another person in 2020," 10% "have a relative or acquaintance who has admitted that they cast a mail-in ballot in 2020 in a state other than their state of permanent residence" and 8% "say that a friend, family member, or organization, such as a political party, offer to pay or reward them for voting in the 2020 election."
Extraordinary figures. Even if these are overstated by two or three times as much as reality, these are still millions of votes cast that would be, for one reason or another, invalid. Interestingly, Republicans were more likely to be guilty of voting in another state, while Democrats were more likely to fill in ballots for others whether the other person was aware or not (!), but this just means that the entire system of voting-by-mail was unable to rightly and transparently handle being used to run a 'free and fair election'.
Personally, I don't doubt for a second that the system was used for ill, and probably in large numbers by voters of both parties, simply because there was no real way to catch it in so many states. Weigh up what you know about humans act, especially if they think that their actions might be life-changing. Consider how badly the western world was hyperventilating about government, particularly the US government, in 2020.
It is not at all a stretch to assume that people might be willing to bend or break the rules when they know they won't be caught, and that what they are doing is for the good of the country. That's just human psychology.
If we assume that an equal proportion of mail-in ballots were illegitimate, even 2% of each, that would likely have a serious effect on the election result (in favour of the Republicans, who overwhelmingly voted in person).
That's why reading articles like Time's Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election seems a little like entering the Twilight Zone. The protagonists of the story are written to be saving democracy from the fascists-in-all-but-name that are attempting to stop votes everywhere, and the moment when Trump is leading the voting on election night is presented as a moment when the villain has nearly won and the blackshirts are about to march through the streets.
But if the means used to save democracy is one that makes democracy all the more open to being abused, what is actually being saved? Parts of the article read more like the Democratic Party is synonymous with 'true democracy' than anything else. But such is the hyper-partisan nature of the way in which politics is spoken of in such quarters, even in supposedly impartial places like Time Magazine.
Into the weeds
Georgia was officially won by Joe Biden by 11,779 votes. An ongoing (yes, it is still being examined four years later) investigation in Fulton County - one of the Atlanta counties that raised suspicions on election night with its infamous 'burst water pipe' that never was - is centred around a little over 20,000 votes which there is strong evidence to suggest were incorrectly counted, contrary to law, due to either ballots being counted twice, or the tabulations not matching up and being 'fixed' without any documentation. The Fulton County Board, which has a 3-2 Democratic majority, has consistently voted against any movement in the investigation, but has repeatedly been forced to do so by the State Electoral Board. They have already been forced to sign by law that 6,695 ballots should not have been counted. This alone is sufficient for a recount to be needed, and for results in Fulton - and therefore in Georgia - to not have been certified.
Furthermore, one member of the Fulton Elections Board testified that his reason for voting against certifying the 2020 election result in his county was because signature matching did not take place on around 147,000 mail-in ballots. He also testified that there was no chain of custody documentation for mail-in and drop box ballots in the county. Furthermore, over 380,000 ballots did not have images taken, contrary to law. Given that Biden won about 82% of mail-in votes in Fulton County, the first investigation alone would be enough to discredit the result in Georgia. The fact that the standard paper trail doesn't exist at all for hundreds of thousands of votes is completely unacceptable.
Adding to the complexity in Georgia is that the Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, is a Republican (who doesn't like Trump) that has consistently argued that everything in the state was above board, and his general counsel during 2020 is now leading the Fulton-appointed team overseeing the current election, contrary to what the Electoral Board had voted on. Said general counsel has vehemently denied any voter fraud ever took place, which contributes to the general feeling that Fulton County does not want to look into their own procedures too closely.
There are other issues in Fulton, like the fact that it had a ballot rejection rate that was seven times lower than the rest of the state, and we haven't mentioned any of the other counties in Georgia like DeKalb that may have had their own problems, but I think you get the idea. Let's move to Arizona. The race there was even tighter than Georgia, won by Joe Biden by a mere 10,457 votes, and like Georgia much of the tension has been over results in one county. In this case, it's Maricopa, the county of Phoenix.
Maricopa received over 20,000 votes after its official deadline for mail-in ballots to be received, with over 19,000 of those counted, contrary to law. Further records show that the law was also violated in the lack of a chain of custody in Maricopa for some 740,000 votes. But if you thought Fulton County seemed rather uninterested in being examined closely, they have nothing on Maricopa, who launched failed legal challenges to block any audit from taking place, and then refused to cooperate with the audits that did occur.
The amusingly named Cyber Ninjas were forced, alongside the Arizona Senate, to spend much of their own money fighting to get access to voting materials, and impeded from accessing computer materials. They were also prevented from reviewing any signatures, which seems quite important in a county where 90% of votes were by mail and the rejection rate of ballots through signature matching was 0.03% - a statistical anomaly. Also anomalous were the fact that 95% of the nearly 10,000 votes from overseas military members, their families, and other overseas residents were for Joe Biden, in a county that was nearly even in its voting. The ballots that they used for these votes were not actual ballots, but copy paper, and there were five times as many as in the previous election.
Anomalous data is, of course, not necessarily proof of anything. But it is proof of the need for further investigation, and the unwillingness of Maricopa to allow the process to be openly examined in full transparency is eyebrow-raising. The fact that the county had widespread issues in 2022 - failing voting machines, misplaced ballots, using ink for votes that bleed through onto ballots beneath - that had previously taken place in 2020 does not raise confidence in their competency, even if we are to exclude the possibility of malicious behaviour.
As in Georgia, there is at least one other county in Arizona where questions have been raised around anomalous data and lack of following legal procedures in record chains. But the data in Maricopa alone is enough to show that the law was not followed, and the results close enough that the election could not be rightly certified.
Another state where certification does not make sense in Pennsylvania, which had more than 200,000 ballots cast than voters registered as voting. State legislators argued this should have barred the state from certifying its results under state law, but it was never pursued by the state government. After the final data rolled in, there were still 121,000 more ballots than voters registered as casting a vote, which is greater than the margin Joe Biden won the state by. The general election report from the Pennsylvania Secretary of State is unhelpful, as it records another 30,000 voters than the 'final tally' at the time of certification does, but without complete records of votes tallied for candidates, write-ins or discarded ballots.
This gives some indication as to the general problem with American election data - everything is opaque. Court battles to make the process transparent simply shouldn't be happening. Insistence that everything is fine without allowing the system to be opened up for inspection to even the biggest sceptic shouldn't be how things are done. But partisanship ruins everything, and there is a general assumption of bad faith involved for all parties - because that's what history says is probably worth believing. It's the American way.
Don't stop 'til you get enough
This lack of transparency only served to become fuel for suspicions of malpractice on election night. The infamous picture uptick in Biden votes at 3 AM has become synonymous with the 2020 election, and was a symbol of how the various decisions of election officials were almost begging Trump voters to take issue with what was happening.
At the most basic level, whether through sending away poll watchers and then updating the system with newly counted voters hours later; using voting machines that keep spitting out the wrong votes (something that has been a problem for so long that The Simpsons joked about it); having 'secure drop boxes' that are easily missed or broken into (as happened recently, with hundreds of ballots set on fire in Washington and Oregon); not having enough voting machines in certain precincts that lean one way; on and on we could go - all these things fuel distrust, alongside the unique features of the last election that turned the dial up to eleven.
To argue that there is no way 2020 - or any other election - could be corrupted because it would need to be on too grand a scale to take place completely misses the alleged methodology involved. It only takes a handful of counties to swing a presidential election. That's not a lot of people that need to be involved, and as long as a select few in higher positions refuse to let the matter be explored, it's easy enough to get away with.
The legal argument has become a strong weapon of shutting down any doubts, but the ledger is much better for the Republican case than repeated lines of "no evidence" would have you believe. Of the cases that were dismissed, some were dismissed due to jurisdiction; some were dismissed due to the judge believing that the case needed to be brought before the election happened, even though the evidence was not yet available; and some were considered 'moot' because the number of votes in question was less than the margin.
But the majority of cases accepted by the courts for hearing were won, a couple of which I've mentioned above. In any case, there is a fundamental misunderstanding on both sides of what the courts could even do. All they can do is rule on the legality of certain practices. If voters are sending in dozens of fraudulent ballots by mail that were sitting on their doorstep, and the Clark County clerks are just accepting any old signature on any ballot, and they're arriving three days after the election, what could a court even say? If that's the law, that's the law. It may be cheating, but without proof of every individual who did such a thing (and the polling suggests there's quite a lot of such individuals, who would never confess publicly to such a thing), there's nothing to raise in court.
From the evidence in front of us, we can conclude there was definitely legal chicanery taking place, and that there was sufficient room for doubt in the process such that states that swung the election were not necessarily certified correctly. Beyond that, the lack of serious examination of everything that went on means that we have to make our own judgement calls as to whether there was more fraud than usual, and even if there was, as to whether that actually changed the election result. None of this changes the fact the Joe Biden was certified as the winner, just like John F. Kennedy was. It's just about whether he should have been.
After all, when the court throws out a case without hearing it, it doesn't make the election magically perfect and unquestionable. The tone of debate struck by 'democracy defenders' before and after the 2020 election has been rather gross, seemingly more interested with winning and feeling moral superiority than ensuring that U.S. elections are models of transparency and competency.
Bear in mind, Trump was already raising doubts about the system in 2016. There was ample time to sit down with him and his team, find out from them and other interested parties - including the many still doubtful about 2004 - how best to ensure that everyone would trust in the elections going forward.
They did not do that. Instead, they launched an ongoing campaign to denounce any intimation that their elections might not be the best in the world, while also (after Clinton's loss in 2016) alleging that the election was interfered with.
This is just partisan behaviour. It doesn't fix anything. Fundamentally, democratic systems can only work in high trust societies, and high trust societies only exist when people believe there to be sufficient justice and freedom for them to live out good lives.
The United States has been on a decline for some time, and is seemingly wobbling on the edge of disaster. Now, more than ever, it is crucial that voters believe in the system through which they elect their leaders.
When there are so many basic errors in the way a system is run, and so many opportunities presented for unfair and unfree dealings to take place, the right thing to do is not to prevent examination by any means necessary, but to come together to make a commonly agreed system with accepted procedures in place nationally to secure voter rolls, ensure identification is presented, encourage people to vote in person through making it as accessible as possible, all run by an independent commission.
Unfortunately, the two-party system that worried Washington has become so entrenched in gamesmanship and mutual distrust that such a thing appears impossible. Instead, election integrity has far more often been used as a cudgel from the losing side to attack the winners with. The bipartisan Carter-Barker Commission on Electoral Reform in 2005 has been largely ignored. You can read the full report here, and you'll find many of the recommendations for reform are standard across the western world. It is a great shame that they have mostly not been implemented.
The title of the report says it all: Building Confidence in U.S. Elections. That's what the voting system should be geared towards, as a sign of mutual agreement in a country that needs it. Instead, 100-year old Jimmy Carter has instead had to endure being rolled out in his wheelchair from his hospice as an unconvincing non-verbal advertisement for Kamala Harris.
No confidence has been built since that time, which means that the method used to deny the possibility of election fraud - ironically, by calling such questioners 'election deniers' - has not worked.
"So why don't they just fix it?", you may ask. The answer should be obvious once you think about the way politics is usually run: why would you change a system that benefited you enough to get you into power? The whole history of the United States if filled to the brim with this kind of activity. Why change now, when so much is seemingly at stake?
But there's only so long that can last before it blows up in their faces. In the end, Trump still left the White House, despite fears from Democratic supporters that he would try literally anything to stay there. But in another sixty years from now, if U.S. elections aren't cleaned up, who's to say that someone won't come to power that is in reality what Trump's opponents imagine him to be - and what would such a person do if given reason think they were being cheated out of office?
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