Is “Voter Fraud” the Most Dangerous Political Lie in American History?

Why does a lie that has never been proven, never worked, and never been real still hold the power to undermine an entire democracy?

Get ready.

At yesterday’s hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, Arizona Republican Congressman Eli Crane lied through his teeth, saying of Democrats’ opposition to the SAVE Act:

“They let millions of illegal aliens into the country. They set up sanctuary cities so you can’t enforce these federal laws that are on the books that Congress has passed.

“Now they won’t vote to stop these illegals from voting in our elections. If the American people don’t understand what this is about, it’s about one word. It always has been. That is power.

“They want power and they need illegals to vote in our elections. That’s why they don’t care about fraud either. They need those votes as well.”

And it’s not just a lone crackpot congressman from Arizona. As Walter Olson wrote for the Cato Institute in 2024:

“If you believe Elon Musk, ‘Democrats’ are permitting large numbers of immigrants into the country on purpose in order to win elections. By ‘ushering in vast numbers of illegals,’ he wrote on X March 5, ‘they are importing voters.’ …

“Musk’s co-thinker on this topic, former president Donald Trump, said in January in Iowa: ‘That’s why they are allowing these people to come in—people that don’t speak our language—they are signing them up to vote.’ And a television ad from Ohio Republican Sen. J. D. Vance claims that current border policies mean ‘more Democrat voters pouring into this country.’

“‘Treason indeed!’ exclaims Musk.”

Donald Trump has made good use of the propaganda technique known as the Big Lie, famously claiming that the 2020 “election was stolen” from him. And now he’s preparing to use one of the GOP’s favorite perennial Big Lies to disrupt this November’s midterm elections.

If he can find an excuse (Tulsi Gabbard is working on it, from media reports) to seize ballots and voting machines in congressional districts that may flip from Republican to Democratic this fall, his lickspittle Squeaker Mike Johnson can refuse to seat the newly-elected Democrats in the House, keeping it in GOP hands.

After all, Johnson was in the middle of the conspiracy to steal the 2020 election by organizing Republicans in the House to refuse to certify Joe Biden’s Electoral College votes that year, and he held up Adelita Grijalva’s swearing-in for over a month just because he could.

All he’ll need is for Tulsi (or others) to find even one questionable ballot among the ones they took from Georgia — or insert one — to wave around like a bloody shirt and, if history is any guide, the corporate media will fall into line, saying, “Ah, ha! He’s found voter fraud!”

And then Johnson can claim “election irregularities,” just like Republicans did in the election of 1876, and refuse to seat Democratic winners in the House, giving their seats instead to the Republican losers. Congressman Ro Khanna mentioned this exact scenario on my radio/TV program yesterday, saying Democrats are seriously concerned House Republicans may be actually planning for it.

All to keep Democrats from taking over the House and having the power of the subpoena so they can investigate Trump’s massive corruption, self-dealing, bribe-taking, Putin-bootlicking, and possible exploitation of young girls with his “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein.

The driving force behind all of this is a classic GOP Big Lie, the false allegation of widespread “voter fraud” in America.

Republicans have been using this lie to attack the heart of our democracy right out in the open ever since the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, the year they responded by rolling out Operation Eagle Eye, yelling about nonexistent “illegal alien voter fraud” and using it as an excuse to intimidate minority voters in the Goldwater/Johnson race.

It’s a phrase Republicans essentially invented, although it was occasionally used by the Confederacy during its later years (the 1850s) when they used it to suppress the votes of poor whites who opposed that oligarchy. And the GOP has been using it for more than sixty years now with barely a peep from either Democrats or today’s media.

Back in the day, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s Arizona arm of Operation Eagle Eye was one of dozens of such formal and informal Republican voter suppression operations that exploded across the United States that year. As The New York Times noted on October 30, 1964:

“Republican officials have begun a massive campaign to prevent ‘vote fraud’ in the election next Tuesday, a move that has caused Democrats to cry ‘fraud.’

“The Republican plan, Operation Eagle Eye, is designed, according to party officials, to prevent Democrats from ‘stealing’ the 1964 election. Republicans charge that the election was stolen in 1960.”

Keep in mind, this was novel back then. The GOP’s “voter fraud” Big Lie was brand new. Nobody had been talking about “voter fraud” outside of a few southern states for a century; the phrase usually appeared in quotation marks as it was so unusual. The 1964 Times article continued:

“The Democratic National Chairman, John M. Bailey, has criticized the Republican plan as ‘a program of voter intimidation.’ He has sent a protest to all 50 state Governors and has alerted Democratic party officials throughout the country to be on their guard.

“‘There is no doubt in my mind,’ Mr. Bailey wrote the state chairmen yesterday, ‘that this program is a serious threat to democracy as well as to a Democratic victory on Nov. 3rd.’”

But that one NYT article was about it for the media taking on this particular Republican Big Lie.

In the sixty years since then, no major American news media has seriously and persistently challenged the Republican “voter fraud” lie. Even though for the last few decades they have routinely used it for blocking minority and woman voters, and purging voting rolls the way, for example, Brian Kemp and Ken Paxton did in Texas and Georgia.

Weirdly, the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation and CATO Institute have both weighed in on the issue, and not in a way that makes Trump happy.

Over at Cato, Stephen Richer last week wrote an article titled, “Trump’s Claims About Noncitizens Voting Are False. We Can Prove It.” And, as Reuters reports, “The conservative Heritage Foundation found 24 instances of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections between 2003 and 2023.”

That’s 24 instances total over a period of twenty years! And if you go all the way back to 1982 in the early years that Reagan was talking about “undocumented alien voter fraud,” you’ll discover, as Heritage did, a total of 99 cases in 44 years.

Not a single election in modern American history has ever been even slightly affected by a non-citizen voting. None.

And in the past few years, in response to Trump’s squealing about 2020, multiple Republican governors have audited their own voter rolls with a fine-toothed comb. Utah, it turns out, had one non-citizen on its rolls. Idaho found 36, Louisiana had 79, and Montana 23. Most were probably errors.

After all, what kind of idiot is stupid enough to risk going to prison to cast one vote out of millions? What immigrant wants to draw the attention of law-enforcement by voting? What possible payoff is there to that?

It defies common sense, although that’s never stopped Republicans from pushing a good conspiracy theory.

Among functioning democracies, this Republican Big Lie and its use to make it harder for people to vote is unique to America. No other functioning democracy in the world worries about “voter fraud” because it’s every bit as nonexistent in other modern democracies as it is here.

The only three major countries in the world that use “voter fraud” as an excuse to make it harder for minorities and women to vote are Hungary, Russia, and, now, the United States.

Most countries don’t even have what we call voter registration, because they don’t need or want a system to try to cut back on the number of people who can vote. Like with Social Security here, when you’re born you’re put on the list (which is also usually the list for their national healthcare system and their equivalent of Social Security), and when you turn 18 you can vote. In many democracies, particularly across Europe, they simply mail you a ballot and you vote by mail. Everybody who’s on the list gets one.

As I document in The Hidden History of the War on Voting, in all the years since the 1960s when Republicans began this continuous and relentless attack on American voting rights claiming that “voter fraud” was happening in Black and Hispanic communities across America, our media has been totally asleep at the switch.

Most even behave as if the GOP’s phony claims of “voter fraud” are legitimate, so Republicans continue to aggressively use them to make voting hard, reject mail-in ballot signatures, and purge voting rolls of Black and brown people.

As reporter Greg Palast found, the only reason Trump is in the White House and Republicans control the House and Senate today is because Republicans succeeded in preventing over 4 million US citizens from voting or having their votes counted in 2024’s election.

The simple reality is that there’s never been a non-citizen “voter fraud” problem in America — or any other advanced democracy — so there’s no need for a “solution.”

What Republicans know, however, is that the lower a person is on the economic ladder, the less likely they are to have kept or have easy access to the kinds of documentation of birth and citizenship necessary to meet the GOP’s anti-voter-fraud registration requirements.

And the poorer a person is, the more likely they are to vote Democratic.

Republicans also know that millions of women are seriously pissed off about the Dobbs decision, particularly in the 20 Republican-controlled states with bans on abortion. This is on top of the long-term reality that women are 12 percent more likely to vote Democratic than men.

Thus, we now have Republicans pushing federal legislation that would mandate ID all across the nation, and would require that birth certificates carry the same name as driver’s licenses and passports.

This demand for proof of citizenship to prevent “voter fraud” is the main way the GOP is now expanding its suppression efforts to women. The National Organization for Women notes:

“Voter ID laws have a disproportionately negative effect on women. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, one third of all women have citizenship documents that do not identically match their current names primarily because of name changes at marriage. Roughly 90 percent of women who marry adopt their husband’s last name.

“That means that roughly 90 percent of married female voters have a different name on their ID than the one on their birth certificate. An estimated 34 percent of women could be turned away from the polls unless they have precisely the right documents.”

Many women won’t have them, won’t be able to track them down, or can’t afford to replace them, so millions will just shrug and go back to their lives, figuring that “just one less vote” won’t make that much difference.

And women who adopted their husband’s last name at marriage but failed to go before a judge to make a formal, legal name-change will be locked out of the voting process, too. As many as 80 million of them.

Claiming widespread non-citizen “voter fraud” is the GOP’s primary go-to strategy to prevent people from voting or even registering to vote and every day it seems they come up with new ways to exploit it, as Crystal Hill pointed out at Democracy Docket:

“Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) sued one of the state’s most populous counties to block its plan to mail out over 200,000 voter registration forms to residents, claiming the move will ‘facilitate [voter] fraud.’”

Additionally, the GOP has expanded their campaign against “voter fraud” by planning to dispute millions of mail-in votes, particularly in Blue cities, through so-called “exact signature match challenges.”

The GOP is recruiting as many as 100,000 people to examine millions of signatures on mail-in ballots, the majority in Blue cities, so they can reject ballots that, in the observers’ opinions, don’t exactly match signatures and thus could be “fraudulent.” Those ballots will not be counted unless the voters show up at the Secretary of State’s office within a few days of the election to prove that their signature is still theirs.

And it’s all based on the lie that there are non-citizens voting, which is total BS.

Expect this “voter fraud” Big Lie to burst onto the scene over the next few weeks with much sturm and drang — and pontificating Republicans on Sunday shows trying to act like Very Serious People as they wring their hands about non-citizens voting — as the media will almost certainly give Trump and the GOP another pass on this monstrous lie when they threaten to shut down our government this weekend over ICE funding.

There is a way to put an end to this Republican scam, though: a way to fight back.

Here’s FDR’s take on the GOP’s perennial willingness to make things up, as he shared in 1944 with a group of UAW auto workers, complete with his suggestion about how to confront Big Lies the first time Republicans rolled them out:

“The [Republican] opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad.

“Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book—and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan.

“According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible — if only you keep repeating it over and over and over again.”

When Donald Trump started squealing about the 2020 election being “stolen” after his wipe-out 7-million-vote loss and being crushed in the Electoral College, the media ignored FDR’s warning and treated Trump’s Big Lie claim like a joke for years.

As a result — just like Roosevelt predicted — it’s now an article of faith among over 70 percent of Republicans that Trump won the 2020 election but it was stolen from him. That worked for them, so now they’re trying to do it with “voter fraud.”

This situation has reached today’s crisis point because our media has almost entirely ignored the truth about this Republican “voter fraud” scam for 60 years.

No democracy anywhere in the world can long survive if its citizens don’t believe their votes are legitimately cast and counted. This lie about non-citizen voting — that the GOP first rolled out in 1964 — is now a harpoon pointed right at our elections, what Thomas Paine called “the beating heart” of our republic.

If it’s not debunked and destroyed by both the Democratic Party and our national media, it could well signal the end of democracy in America and the beginning of a Putin/Orbán-style fascist reign.

It’s beyond time for our corporate media to do their damn job and point out the evil lie of “voter fraud” before it succeeds in killing American democracy altogether.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Voter Fraud is the Lie”