logistics of holding an election during a
pandemic also has many Democrats on
edge. “The Trump Administration is a cor-
rupt Administration,” Berthilde Dufrene
said on Aug. 28 at a racial- justice protest
on the anniversary of the 1963 March on
Washington. “I see what they are doing
with the post office and voter suppression,
so I am concerned that they will cheat,
they will steal, they will lie to keep this
man in power.”
These fears were worsened by Trump’s
recent promise to send law enforcement
to the polls to monitor for voter fraud.
“We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re
going to have law enforcement, and we’re
going to have hopefully U.S. Attorneys,”
Trump said on Fox News on Aug. 20. The
President has no control over local law en-
forcement, yet the mere threat could de-
press turnout if voters believe it.
Voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the
U.S., according to a 2017 Brennan Center
for Justice review of more than a dozen
studies. A Trump- appointed commission
disbanded in 2018 after it was unable to
find evidence of widespread voter fraud.
“The truth is that after decades of look-
ing for illegal voting, there’s no proof of
widespread fraud. At most, there are iso-
lated incidents—by both Democrats and
Republicans,” veteran GOP election law-
yer Benjamin Ginsberg wrote in the Wash-
ington Post on Sept. 8.
Yet Trump’s claims have found a will-
ing audience in his party. The GOP has
long promoted the idea that fraud is ubiq-
uitous in order to support legal efforts to
restrict ballot access, which dispropor-
tionately affect voters of color who tend
to vote Democratic, and to justify a need
for close election monitoring. While both
parties regularly use poll watchers, this
year will mark the first presidential elec-
tion in decades in which Republicans will
have the freedom to pursue their poll-
monitoring plans without prior approval
from a court, after a federal consent de-
cree that limited the Republican National
Committee’s operations ended two years
ago. The consent decree had its roots in
voter intimidation. It was put in place by a
federal court when the party was accused
of menacing minority voters in the 1980s
with a “National Ballot Security Task
Force” in New Jersey. “We were really
operating with one hand tied behind our
back,” Trump deputy campaign manager
Justin Clark told the Conservative Politi-
cal Action Conference this year, detailing
how Republicans planned to leverage an
army of 50,000 volunteer poll watchers in
2020.“There’s all kinds of ways people can
steal votes,” said Clark. “We are going to
have scale this year. We’re going to be out
there protecting our votes and our voters.”
The misleading claims promoted by
Trump and other politicians have domi-
nated national headlines. But their effect
at the grassroots level is no less important.
In Davenport, Iowa, Roxanna Moritz, a
Democrat who serves as the Scott County
auditor, has decided not to bother with
social media as a primary method of
communicating information to voters.
Misinformation is too rampant. In one
Facebook post, a man shared a photo of
an address with seven absentee-ballot re-
quests, claiming this was “their plan to rig
the election” and calling the applications
a “danger” to democracy. Moritz looked
up the address and found a simple expla-
nation: there were seven voters registered
to that address.
“Ten years ago, perhaps your normal
citizen would get a lot of their informa-
tion from their local news channel, but
Brian Corley, supervisor of elections,
Pasco County, Florida (Republican)
‘IT’S TOUGH TO PUT THE GENIE
BACK IN THE BOTTLE.’
MORITZ: DAVID GUTTENFELDER FOR TIME; CORLEY: CHRISTOPHER MORRIS
—VII FOR TIME
63
