The Republication preoccupation with voter fraud didn’t start with Donald Trump.
It’s been a GOP concern for decades and led to a major scandal in the previous Republican administration that forced the resignation of the attorney general and several other top officials.
Allegations of voter fraud have also preoccupied GOP officials in several states, including Texas under Attorneys General Greg Abbott, now governor, and Ken Paxton.
Neither found anything beyond scattered cases of individuals seeking to vote illegally. But that hasn’t stopped their contentions that it is a major problem.
At least two past national GOP efforts against alleged voter fraud ended badly.
In the 1980s, the Republican National Committee created a National Ballot Security Task Force to prevent voter fraud during a New Jersey governor’s race. It sent armed, off-duty police officers to voting sites, especially in minority areas, prompting a suit by the Democratic National Committee alleging voter intimidation.
The RNC agreed to a federal court consent decree requiring it to stop such tactics. The agreement expired in 2017, making the 2020 election the first in decades that any aggressive monitoring of polling places was freed from federal court scrutiny.
The scandal occurred two decades later, after former President George W. Bush and White House aides pressured their Justice Department to prosecute more voter fraud.
Their efforts became public around the 2006 midterm elections. But the resulting controversy was overshadowed by Bush’s larger second term problems – such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the 2008 financial meltdown.
The administration’s concerns about voter fraud started during the disputed 2000 presidential election in Florida, where Bush narrowly clinched the presidency. In 2002, his first attorney general, John Ashcroft, launched a Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative, designed to train U.S. attorneys to investigate and prosecute voter fraud cases more vigorously.
Four years later, the department reported that, because of the initiative, “nationwide enforcement of election crimes has increased dramatically.” But its own numbers belied that conclusion – only 119 people had been charged and 86 convicted over four years.
After Bush’s 2004 re-election, Republicans in some states accused the administration of failing to investigate Democratic voter irregularities. The issue came to a head in the fall of 2006.
In a conversation that October with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino later disclosed, Bush believes “he may have mentioned” he had received complaints about some U.S. attorneys not energetically pursuing voter fraud investigations.
But she said White House officials including Bush “did not direct DOJ to take any specific action.” Gonzales said he didn’t recall the conversation.
After weeks of consultations between the Justice Department and the White House, the administration fired seven U.S. attorneys. Five others were either fired later or considered for dismissal.
The Washington Post said the top White House political operative, deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, criticized some attorneys for failing to act more aggressively against voter fraud, including failure to prosecute local Democrats.
U.S. attorneys can be fired at any time. But the firings raised the question of White House interference in the Justice Department, the same issue involved in Trump’s efforts to pressure the department to help overturn his defeat.
The resulting uproar led to the forced resignation of Gonzales and other top officials, plus several investigations.
In 2008, the department’s inspector general found “significant evidence that political partisan considerations were an important factor” in the firings. The new attorney general, Michael Mukasey, named a special counsel who subsequently found “insufficient evidence” to warrant criminal charges against Gonzales.
In Texas, both Abbott and Paxton alleged voter fraud was a major problem. “Voter fraud is rampant,” Abbott said in 2016.
However, a study by News21, an investigative journalism project at Arizona State University, examined Texas records from 2001-11 and found only 104 cases of voter fraud among 35.8 million votes cast in general elections.
The web site of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, currently lists just 103 cases in which Texas individuals have been convicted or otherwise sanctioned for election fraud since 2005.
Another Republican, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, contended for years there was widespread voting by illegal immigrants. The Heritage site shows just 14 convictions there, most for attempted double voting.
In 2017, Trump named Kobach vice chair of a commission headed by Vice President Mike Pence to investigate fraud allegations after he contended votes by millions of illegal immigrants produced Hillary Clinton’s 3 million popular vote margin.
The panel collapsed within a year, roiled by allegations of secret meetings, improper demands for state voter data and a controversial New Hampshire hearing at which some members alleged – but were unable to prove – that Democrats bused thousands into the state to cast illegal votes in 2016.
In 2020, as in 2016, Trump started alleging voter fraud weeks before the election, contending it was the only way he could lose to Joe Biden. He expanded his complaints after he did lose to Biden.
As recent congressional hearings documented, Trump spent two months unsuccessfully trying to convince state authorities, federal courts and his own Justice Department of sufficient fraud to overturn Biden’s victory.
He continues to make such claims and, according to polls, has persuaded millions of Republicans that the 2020 results were fraudulent.
It’s no wonder so many Republicans have bought Trump’s siren song. After all, they’ve been hearing it for years.
