Chapter 1
Dead Men Tell GOP Lies
Michigan voter Roberto Garcia got the unpleasant shock of his life at the close of the presidential election in November 2020. He found out that he was one of 10,000 or so deceased Michigan voters who voted. That is who voted for Biden.
He was called out by name by the local Michigan GOP. The claim of Garcia’s death fit in with Trump’s charge that the Democrats dredged up hordes of dead people from the cemeteries and crematoriums to vote for Biden. Fox News shill Tucker Carlson quickly latched onto the claim and cited it as fact. The inference was that a “dead” Roberto Garcia and thousands more of the dearly departed in Michigan were dumped on the voting rolls by cheating Democrats to vote for Biden. If so, then the Democrats could empty the cemeteries in the other states that swung to Biden.
The claim, even by the GOP’s abominably low standards, was so incredible that investigators easily and quickly debunked it. A beaming and very much alive Garcia fittingly had the final word. He posed in his yard holding a gigantic Biden-Harris sign. He couldn’t resist adding: "I'm definitely alive and I definitely voted for Biden!"
As for Carlson, he ate crow again, and offered yet another shame-faced apology, saying that he was “duped” by the Trump camp into reporting the lie that a supposed “dead” Georgian also voted. Like Garcia, he also turned out to be very much alive. Like Garcia, he voted for Biden.
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The GOP’s dead person vote myth though pitiable and laughable has been often trotted out as one of its vote fraud canons. Every one of them has been painstakingly investigated to determine if there is anything to the charge. NYU’s Brennan Center for
Justice has taken the lead in debunking the GOP’s vote fraud lies. The Center in countless reports has found that that deliberate, designed vote fraud is virtually non-existent in state and federal elections.
It put the incident rate of actual larcenous vote fraud at between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. This is not to say that voting mistakes and errors don’t occur. They do. However, they can be attributed in almost all instances to something that can never be purged. That’s human error, clerical errors, and sloppy or erroneous data matching.
The Center drove the point of the absurdity of the claim home with the proverbial quip that one stands a better chance of being struck by lightning than getting away with or even attempting to impersonate another voter at the polls. One study found a total of 30 impersonation vote fraud cases in fourteen years from 2000 to 2014. This is out of more than 1 billion ballots cast. Studies found there were almost no prosecutions for impersonation vote fraud.
Even more telling is the study that noted the likelihood of where vote fraud when it occurred was likely to come from. The accuser was almost always the loser of a race. The other big, but favored GOP lie, is the Democrats' herd packs of illegal, ineligible workers in the U.S. to the polls to vote Democrat. The Government Accounting Office, Columbia University, the Washington Post, and even the Republican National Lawyers Association, found little to support this perennial GOP allegation.
GOP officials dismiss these studies as simply more partisan propaganda by Democrats, liberals, and Democratic-leaning think tank researchers and the press. The GOP insists they have an ax to grind by downplaying alleged widespread vote fraud.
Vote fraud cases as a result almost always end up in the courts. The GOP’s record here in trying to make the case for vote fraud has not been much better.
Several federal district courts have ruled that the strict photo ID laws in Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Indiana, were racially discriminatory. There have been all of two convictions under the law out of tens of millions of votes in elections in these
states. Even when vote suppressing GOP state officials claim to know of hundreds of voter fraud cases and demand the right to prosecute the offenders, the results have been embarrassing. Kansas is a typical example.
In November 2012, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach got the legislature to grant him special power to prosecute voter fraud. He claimed to know a hundred cases. He brought six prosecutions and won four. Overall, prosecutors have filed 14 vote fraud cases in 22 states out of 84 million votes cast. The prosecution rate amounted to a whopping 0.00000017 percent fraud rate.
In a bitter irony, a few years later Kobach’s tenure as chair of Trump’s so-called Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, ended abruptly in 2018. The Commission was disbanded by, yes, Trump. Why? Because the states said no to giving any credence to the Committee’s vote fraud witch hunt.
The Department of Justice fared even worse when it scoured for cases of federal election fraud presumably to prosecute during the 2002 and 2004 federal elections, it found 0.00000013 percent of ballots cast were fraudulent. The SCOTUS is packed with Trump-friendly justices. These justices would be the most likely to find something to hang a phony vote fraud hat on. Trump got nowhere with them when he demanded the high court toss the results of the 2020 election based on fraud. This was even too much for the court. In a terse ruling in December 2020, the court tossed out his lawsuit that not surprisingly was backed by 18 GOP states attorneys general.
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Trump and the GOP were unfazed. The GOP-controlled state legislatures simply doubled down with a fresh wave of vote suppression proposals. There were two narratives running side by side with their assault. The first was the GOP’s contention that the supposed widespread vote fraud was almost exclusively among African American voters in the big, urban areas such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta. The legal briefs filed in the courts by Texas and the GOP run states that backed Trump’s contention of widespread vote fraud concentrated almost entirely on the same
cities with heavy minority populations in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and potentially, Texas.
The GOP understood that most Blacks in these cities are rock-solid Democrats. So, it was not so much contesting their party loyalty or affiliation that was the issue. It was the numbers turn out that was the GOP worry. The GOP banked heavily on a lower turnout among African American urban voters. Any ramp-up in the Black vote for Democrats could offset the traditional GOP majority in the predominantly white suburbs and rural areas in these states.
The combination of skilled voter education, registration, and drive with the deep loathing of Trump by Blacks provided the perfect storm for a greater than usual voter turnout in urban areas in 2020. Trump got a higher percentage of the overall vote in the states he lost. But he lost because many more people went to the polls in the urban areas. He lost in these areas by 13.2 million votes, compared with 11.1 million in 2016.
The GOP’s deliberate targeting of Black voters in the urban areas in the swing states wasn’t lost on voting rights advocates, "They are directly attacking Black voters and voters of color that live in these cities," says U.S. Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, "And I think the comparison of cities versus neighboring counties demonstrates the degree to which this is in a lot of ways reminiscent of Jim Crow voting exclusions, where they are seeking after the fact to undermine or discount Black voters."
One judge on the Wisconsin Supreme Court made the same point when Trump attorneys challenged the ballots in Milwaukee and Dane (Madison) counties, the state's two largest urban centers. Judge Jill Karofsky told Trump lawyers, "In your lawsuit what you have done here is target the vote of 250,000 people — not statewide, but in two of our 72 counties that have diverse populations, because they are urban, and because they vote Democratic. This lawsuit ... smacks of racism."
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The not so thinly disguised racist-tinged fear that Trump stoked among his base, was that they were in mortal danger of losing their long-standing political and economic power and privilege. Their fight to preserve power was far more than a fight over the usual old-time cultural war issues--abortion, gay rights, gay marriage, and school prayer. This was hard down in the trenches’ political warfare over maintaining GOP political dominance.
The cruder far-rightist groups, hectored by Trump, repeatedly voiced that fear, and made clear they were determined to do something about it. They engaged in countless marches, demonstrations, harangues, harassment, and ultimately the mass assault on the Capitol Building, January 6. 2021 Trump made no pretense about his aim when he shouted to a mostly white crowd his usual bluster in the moments before the riot, "This is our country. And you know this, and you see it, but they are trying to take it from us through rigging, fraud, deception, and deceit."
Hard right long-time top mouthpiece, Rush Limbaugh, went one better. He flatly said, "I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York." It would be a bad mistake to think that this was just the sensationalist, audience-grabbing antic of an ultra-right talk show instigator. Trump doubled down on this theme when he told a campaign crowd in Valdosta, Georgia December 5, 2020 (population 56,457), that the Democrats were trying to "steal" the election.
The Overwhelming Majority of Republicans across all income, gender, and professional groups bought into it some surveys found up to three-fourths of Republican voters agreed.-This was about the same percentage of Republicans who bought into Trump’s long-standing Birther claim that Obama was not an American citizen, and therefore was ineligible (and in the minds of many unfit) to be president.
There was a third reason why the voter fraud scam has played so well among Republicans. It serves a hard-edged, calculated political purpose. That is as an organizing tool to rally and motivate GOP voters to turn out in greater numbers on Election Days.
There’s yet a fourth reason the GOP vote fraud ploy has had so much currency. It touches deeply the American sense of fair play. Many Americans still remember when elections were bought and paid for, yes rigged, especially in big cities and rural areas, and especially the South. A small clique of party bosses would handpick candidates and a small army on the payroll of party loyalists, hacks, and bagmen would fan out on Election Day with money, favors, and even intimidation to ensure that thousands of voters dutifully voted for the “chosen candidate.”
Election corruption and manipulated elections were the rule in these places. So, by continually harping on the notion of widespread vote fraud, the GOP can pose as the American man on the white horse battling for fair and honest voting. This coats their vote fraud scam with a veneer of plausibility, credibility, and integrity. What could be racist about wanting to ensure fair elections? They simply claim to have the noblest of aims.
There was a revealing exchange on CBS between newly minted Georgia U.S. senator Raphael Warnock and Georgia state senator Butch Miller over Georgia’s ultra-restrictive voting rights bill the GOP legislature passed in March 2021. The CBS moderator didn’t even get the question of racism out of his mouth about whether their racist intent, To those who call it Jim Crow 2.0 or Jim Crow in a suit and tie, you say—
BUTCH MILLER: That is just sad that someone would stoop to that type of name-calling. We want everybody to have a chance to vote.
In every lawsuit, challenge, and legislative initiative the GOP has initiated, one will never find any mention of race. The legislation is solely about defending and preserving voter fairness.
Trump was aware of the blitz the GOP made in the courts and through state organizations to vote suppress. He, and GOP shills, in the conservative media, have badgered many into buying the myth of massive fraud and elections stolen by the Democrats. Yet, there is not a word from the supposed protectors of voting integrity and honesty about the very real legacy and history of vote suppression, let alone the out and out near century-long racial disenfranchisement of Blacks in the South. A history that is very much still alive and well in more than a few places in America
