Americans across party lines entertain grave doubts about cheating affecting the results of elections

BY the time this column is read, the results of the 2024 election will be known. Or at least I hope they will.

For if they are not, it means that once again the election was so close that the winner will likely be determined by lawyers and the courts, and charges of electoral fraud will proliferate. America’s badly frayed social fabric may not survive another such confrontation.

If, however, the polls headed into the 2024 election reflect reality, the United States appears headed for another nail-biter, of the type that has become the rule rather than the exception. In the 2000 presidential election, the result came down to 537 contested ballots in Florida, and was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court. Donald Trump’s winning margin in 2016 in the crucial battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania was less than the number of votes siphoned off from Hillary Clinton by Green Party candidate Jill Stein. And in 2020, a shift of 47,000 votes in three states, out of nearly 160 million cast, would have changed the result in Trump’s favor.

The closeness of our elections puts a premium on public trust in the results. As then-US attorney general William Barr said on the eve of the 2020 election: “We are a closely divided country. People have to have confidence in the results of elections and the legitimacy of the government.” Anything that calls into question the legitimacy of elections, Barr told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, is “reckless and dangerous.”

Yet Americans across party lines entertain grave doubts about cheating affecting the results of elections. In a June 2024 Rasmussen poll, 66% of voters described themselves as very or somewhat concerned that the 2024 vote will be compromised, including 55% of Democrats, 58% of independents, and 83% of Republicans.

Nothing does more to undermine trust in electoral integrity than delays in determining the results. Such delays are the norm in banana republics. And they have become ever more common in the United States, as lawyers engage in intense “after voting” litigation about such things as the treatment of absentee or mail-in ballots with one or more defects — e.g., late arrival, lack of a postmark, failure to place the ballot in a security envelope or to write a date on the security envelope. In 2020, Trump led in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin when voters went to bed, only to eventually lose all four. Control of the Senate was not determined for four days and the House for eight.

Even as trust in our elections declines, it almost seems that there are those doing everything possible to promote doubts about their fairness. In a very long article in Tablet, “Broken Ballots,” Armin Rosen explores what he terms a stealth revolution in voting practices and laws since 2016, and asks, “Is mistrust being built into our system?” He concludes that changes in America’s system of elections are almost “perfectly calibrated” to maximize distrust in the system.

ONCE, ALMOST ALL AMERICANS voted on the first Tuesday in November in private voting booths on paper ballots, which were then placed in ballot boxes. That entire process took place under the purview of election observers. Though one party or another might transport voters they considered likely to vote for their candidate(s) to the polls, they could not possibly know how the voter actually voted or influence his decisions in the voting booth.

Since 2016, that has changed radically, and the changes were rapidly accelerated by the Covid pandemic of 2020. Today, most votes are cast early, with the result that Election Day voting is less and less the kind of binding national civic ritual so badly needed. Thirty-six states now have absentee balloting, with no requirement for a reason, or send mail-in ballots to all registered voters. Those ballots are filled out without oversight, and with no way of ascertaining that they were filled out by the person for whom they were intended and without duress or persuasion from anyone else.

Those new election procedures, however, deviate to an ever-greater extent from the recommendations of the 2005 bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform and those advocated by the Carter Center, which is actively involved in observing elections internationally. And they are dramatically out of sync with the practice of most advanced democracies, including those of Europe.

Yet rather than adopting the Carter-Baker recommendations, Democrats have fought tooth-and-nail against their implementation, whipping up hysteria about voter suppression. For instance, one of the Carter-Baker recommendations was for some form of uniform voter identification to ensure that the person voting, either in person or by mail-in ballot, is the one listed as a registered voter. Forty-six out of 47 European countries require such a photo identification, of the type needed to drive a car, buy a beer, or board an airplane in the US.

But listen to President Biden denouncing efforts to require voter IDs — something supported by 80% of the American public — in a 2021 speech in Philadelphia: “There is an unfolding assault taking place today — an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy....”

That diatribe is of a piece with Biden’s denunciation of a 2021 election law passed by Georgia, which included a photo ID requirement, as a “return to Jim Crow.” In the ensuing hysteria, Atlanta lost the Major League All-Star game, at the cost of millions of dollars to Atlanta businesses, many of them black-owned. Yet it turned out that Georgia’s law allowed more opportunities to vote than Biden’s home state of Delaware, or New York, where major league baseball is incorporated, in terms of the days of early voting and the availability of absentee ballots, without providing any excuse.

Biden received “four Pinocchios” from the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler for claiming that the new Georgia limited election day voting to 5 p.m., too early for workers to vote after their afternoon shift. In reality, 5 p.m. applied only to early-voting days, and was a minimum closing time, not a maximum. Moreover, the statute dramatically increased the number of early-voting days on weekends, when few factory workers are working at all. Far from suppressing the vote, the percentage of those voting in Georgia’s 2022 midterm elections was the highest ever.

THE CARTER-BAKER COMMISSION identified absentee ballots as “the largest source of potential voter fraud.” That finding comports with experience around the globe. Of 47 European countries, only 35 allowed absentee voting for those living in the country, as of 2021. Larry Diamond, a Stanford political scientist and the founder of the Journal of Democracy, termed Taiwan the highest-functioning democracy in the world, in a conversation with Rosen. Taiwan has no absentee voting, no early voting, and requires a strong ID.

Great Britain had absentee voting similar to that currently prevalent in the US until 2004, when 40,000 fraudulently obtained absentee ballots were discovered in Muslim areas of Birmingham. Today, British citizens must appear in person with a photo ID to obtain an absentee ballot. France had similarly loose standards for absentee voting, until hundreds of thousands of deceased voters and vote buying schemes were discovered in Corsica. As a result, France banned absentee voting entirely.

And the problems with absentee ballots, which must be requested by the voter, and where there is at least a theoretical possibility of checking the signatures on the ballots against those on the request form, pale compared to mail-in ballots sent to all registered voters. For one thing, voter registration rolls are notoriously out-of-date. And given that 10% of Americans move every year, the potential for multiple ballots being sent to a single address is large. Stefan Niemann, a US correspondent for the German national broadcaster, reported in 2020 receiving ballots for three people at his rental apartment, none of them eligible — one a previous renter, the other the landlady who lived in Puerto Rico, and a third for her deceased husband.

The same year, Judicial Watch published a study of 353 US counties, in which the number of registered voters exceeded the voting age residents by a cumulative 3.8 million people.

The potential for so many ballots to be floating around potentially facilitates numerous unsavory practices, including vote-buying, group voting, and vote-harvesting — subsequent collection and deposit of the ballots by partisan third parties, and undue influence on those filling out their ballots in the presence of those vote harvesters.

The mailing of ballots to those who may have moved creates the potential for them to vote in their new residence and a second time in their former residence. Hans von Spakovsky, a former federal election commissioner, found that at least 8,000 people voted in at least two states in 2016, based on an analysis of voting data from 21 states.

The Carter Center’s best electoral practices inveigh against vote-buying, group voting, and vote harvesting. But when the temptation is there, it will be acted upon. A 2018 congressional election in North Carolina was overturned upon a showing that an enterprising vote-harvester had fraudulently requested 1,200 absentee ballots, which he then collected and filled out. That number was larger than the winning candidate’s margin of victory.

Project Veritas videos from 2020 uncovered widespread vote-harvesting fraud in Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s Somali community in Minneapolis. In one video, the interviewee boasts of possessing 300 absentee ballots in the trunk of his car. In another, cash is exchanged for absentee ballots, with the recipient of the ballot being told, “When I fill it out, I’ll bring it back to you for your signature.”

Rosen cites an egregious example of how the elderly, infirm, or poor are particularly vulnerable to vote-harvesting. VoteER, a nonprofit founded by a former Harris adviser, instructed doctors how to assist their patients in psychiatric hospitals and other in-patient facilities on how to vote by mail.

Remarkably, rather than move to curtail these abuses, a number of states and courts have seemingly acted to make them more likely. Nevada, for instance, legalized third-party collection of multiple absentee ballots. In California, New York, and Nevada, it is legal to possess an unlimited number of absentee ballots, without any explanation of their provenance.

Marc Elias, formerly of the Perkins Coie firm — yes, the same firm that paid for the infamous Steele Dossier that haunted President Trump’s first two years in office — may well have been the MVP of the Democrats’ 2020 ground game. Elias and his underlings filed suits across the country to force states to loosen their election rules in light of the pandemic. In many cases, those suits were collusive in nature, with Democratic secretaries of state entering into settlement decrees to loosen state rules.

In Minnesota, for instance, Secretary of State Steve Simon entered into a consent decree to suspend his state’s requirement that a signed affidavit accompany absentee ballots. A Pennsylvania court determined that a requirement that absentee ballots be dated violated the state constitution’s requirement of “fair and free elections,” based on a far-fetched theory that such rules have a disparate impact on minority communities, and thus amount to voter suppression.

It is clear that any widescale system of mail-in voting minimally requires accurate and updated lists of voters. Yet everywhere that states have undertaken to weed out ineligible, deceased, or non-citizens from the rolls, they have been met with lawsuits. Just a week prior to the election, it took Supreme Court intervention to overturn a lower court stay on Virginia’s efforts to prune 6,000 self-identified non-citizens from its voter lists. As Walter Olson, an election expert at the Cato Institute, told Tablet’s Armin Rosin, “A credible mail-based system is undermined by legislation that prevents states from doing state of the art voter roll maintenance.”

As Judge Cardoza famously remarked in a case involving fiduciary duties, “not honesty, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive” is required. And so too with elections.

It does not matter that election fraud may not be widespread and has not yet demonstrably determined the result of any election. As long as millions of citizens across the political spectrum believe — not without reason — that it is widespread and has or will determine presidential outcomes, American democracy is in grave danger.  

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1035. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)