Where is the Democrats' Paul Revere?

Why rely on persuading the voters when you can rig the game

Jun 07, 2021

It's part of the mythology now in the Republican Party that there's widespread voter fraud all across the country. In fact, there's not.
-Steve Schmidt

Framing the Argument

Elections are contests in the same way as games between sports teams are contests- there can only be one winner. There are no silver or bronze medals for those who come up short. When the stakes are high, the incentives to bend or break the rules to win are proportionately high. In sports, players seeking to earn high salaries or prolong a career have often cheated- pitchers doctoring the baseball or teams stealing the opponents’ signals, for example. Even the great quarterback Tom Brady was suspended for using under-inflated footballs. In politics, the motivation to test the limits of ethical behavior is the power and money that accrues to office-holders. When the standard campaign fare of persuasion, promises, and pandering are not sufficient, cheating is tempting.

From the beginning of the Republic, Americans have voted in many different ways. As a result, there been many different ways to cheat in elections: ballot box stuffing, intimidating or bribing voters, suppressing the vote, and manipulating returns. Over the course of the 19th Century, the method of casting votes evolved from voice voting to various forms of paper ballots until the lever-operated mechanical voting machine appeared near the turn of the 20th Century. These machines inspired the confidence of the voting public, but over time it became apparent that mechanical problems or willful tampering could produce miscounts. As data-processing technology progressed, it was applied to voting but it too was often problematic. Punch-card voting systems introduced in the 1960s did not fully eliminate the questions of accuracy of some voting tallies, as the “hanging chad” controversy in 2000’s Bush-Gore election proved. Since then, doubt about election results surfaces regularly as various electronic voting processes (touch-screen machines, optical scanners) have been used. Software glitches and hacking of electronic machines continue to raise concerns.

Given all this, the factual record of voter fraud belies the belief that widespread attempts to change election outcomes exist. In-person voter impersonation is infinitesimally small, occurring in 0.00006 percent of instances according to a 20-year study by MIT published in 2020.* While mail-in voting is more susceptible to fraud, the incidence of illegal ballots is still very small. Repeated claims of voter fraud are mostly examples of cynical fear-mongering than actual evidence of wrongdoing.

Show Me the Money, Lebowski

As exemplified in the national campaigns of the last 30 years, the most significant factor in elections is money. Money fuels the campaign machinery. It pays for offices, staff, and related expenses. It pays for advertising buys, for social media campaigns, and for data collection and mining used to identify likely voters. It funds opposition research- the digging up of dirt on an opponent- and, increasingly, the spreading of disinformation. While money always played a part in politics, Supreme Court decisions (Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) opened the floodgates to the huge sums now spent on elections. In the 2020 Presidential race, Joe Biden’s campaign $1.69 billion while the loser, Donald Trump, raised $1.96 billion. These sums do not include money raised by affiliated groups like SuperPACs. What is obvious about these fantastic sums of money is that the prize for winning has obvious value, that make campaign expenditures worthwhile… And, again, provide a reason to cheat.

What are the Republicans Up to?

National races have been especially close the last 6 Presidential cycles. Republicans have won 2 of the 6 with less than a majority of the popular vote. Trump’s 2020 Electoral College win hinged on 77,000 votes in 3 states. Biden’s margin to garner the same 306 electoral votes was even slimmer, 44,000. Control of the Senate has also been close: Only once since 1981 has one party, the Democrats from 2009-2010, held a filibuster-proof supermajority of 60 seats. Political campaigns being zero-sum contests, each party is continually scavenging for the votes that create a winning margin.

According to Ballot-Access.org. , the Democrats have a 35% advantage over the Republicans in registered voters (47 million to 35 million). There are nearly as many independent voters as registered Republicans. The nation’s changing demographic makeup, where whites will be a minority by mid-century, means that a party that has fallen into the hands of a white nationalist cult is operating with the knowledge its present course will prevent it from persuading a majority of voters to select its candidates. Instead, having lost control of the national government and fallen under the spell of a wannabe autocrat, the GOP has decided its path to power lies in reducing the number of Democratic voters by using its control of state governments to suppress voter turnout. 2020 marked the highest turnout in a Presidential-year election - two-thirds of eligible voters- since 1900. Over 80 million people voted for Biden, 74 million for Trump. Rather than trying to increase their total with a broader appeal, Republicans aim to reduce the number of people who might vote for a Democrat.

For the Republicans, the takeaway is not that they lost control of the White House and both houses of Congress because of their failure to win over voters through policy and persuasion. (They presented no party platform for the 2020 campaign.) Instead, their message is the unsubstantiated claim that Democrats stole the election, the Big Lie. Having gained seats in the House, narrowing the Democratic majority, and falling into a tie in the Senate as a result of losing both of Georgia’s Senate seats in a January 5 runoff, Republicans opted to double down on voter suppression. Some states (Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Montana, to name a few) have already enacted legislation severely curtaining voting access including mail-in ballots. Other states are poised to follow suit. This is also the year the Congressional districts are reconfigured to conform with the 2020 Census results and the gerrymandering to create favorable districts for Republicans will be a feature of the process.

And the Democrats?

On the legislative front, the Democrats hold a weak hand. They are most powerless in states where the Republicans have a “trifecta”- control of both houses of the legislature and the governorship. They might delay as they did in Texas by walking out to deny the state Senate a quorum to hold a vote, but this merely symbolic. Their main effort will have to come through the courts, a long process without assurance that Republican laws will be overturned.

Congress, specifically the Senate, does have legislation (the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act) pending that has passed the House and would negate the laws the Republicans are enacting in the states. But with the parties tied 50-50 and the Democratic majority depending on a unified caucus and the vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democrats cannot afford defections. As I have written several times before, the Democrats have no realistic chance to garner 60 votes to overcome a Republican filibuster, especially with Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin vociferously opposed to eliminating or weakening the filibuster.

So it will come down to the voters. The get-out-the-vote campaigns of 2020 will need to achieve historic turnouts in the 2022 mid-terms to thwart the anti-democratic actions of the Republicans.

Where is Our Paul Revere?

It is worrisome that those observers of the American political scene who are sounding the alarm about the threat to our democracy coming from what was once the Grand Old Party are former Republicans. The party no longer represents traditional conservatism. It is an autocratic-bent cult whose operating principles are at odds with the foundational principle of representative democracy, namely that the majority rules. Free and fair elections are the mechanism by which the people choose who will be in the majority and are what I like to call the “blessed sacraments of democracy”. The refusal to accept this is to step onto the slippery slope.

So I think it is unfortunate that conservatives, perhaps typified by Rep. Liz Cheney, recently drummed out of the Republican House leadership for the apostasy of rejecting the Big Lie and voting to impeach Trump, are the loudest voices warning about the GOP’s descent into white nationalistic fascism. Where are the Democrats on this? No one has stepped onto the national stage to passionately alert the nation to the perils of the anti-democratic forces hiding in plain sight. Instead, we get quibbling over an arcane Senate rule rather than bold action.

I understand and respect the approach President Biden is taking to restore faith in the institutions of government by governing effectively. I do fear, however, that the Democrats are applying a fresh coat of paint to a termite-infested house.

*Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_impersonation_(United_States)

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