^
White House
press secretary
Kayleigh
McEnany
speaks to
reporters on
Sept. 24later that none of the discovered mail included any
ballots from Wisconsin, a crucial swing state, not one
of the Republican officials revised their statements.
None of these stories amplifying the purported scan-
dal was corrected or updated. Many are still being
widely cited as evidence of voter fraud. The Wis-
consin station’s follow-up story on the incident was
shared just 33 times.
Republicans have spent decades searching for and
cataloging purported cases of voter fraud in a push
to justify stricter voting laws, which studies show
would serve to disenfranchise voters, especially mi-
norities. But even the best-funded efforts have come
up short. Using data going back to 1982 on everything
from presidential elections to state and local votes—
potentially hundreds of millions of ballots cast—the
conservative Heritage Foundation found a grand total
of 1,298 instances of voter fraud. In a disclaimer, it
says its review “does not capture reported instances
that are not investigated or prosecuted.”
The 2020 election has provided no shortage
of fodder for voter-fraud sleuths. Because of the
expansion of mail-in voting during the pandemic,
there’s an ample supply of confusing postal issues,
human errors and lost ballots. More important, fed-
eral, state and local authorities increasingly usegovernment agencies as megaphones to elevate local
stories into mainstream news.
Often this involves turning small, isolated in-
stances of possible bad behavior into national scan-
dals. In early September, for example, ICE issued a
press release announcing charges against 19 non-
citizens for allegedly voting illegally in the 2016 elec-
tion. Republican members of Congress immediately
seized on it to make a broader case against mail-in
voting. “If universal mail-in ballots are allowed, more
of this will happen,” Representative Brian Babin, a
Texas Republican, wrote in a Facebook post.
The ICE release mirrored a set of charges against
more than a dozen noncitizens announced right be-
fore the 2018 midterms, also for allegedly voting two
years earlier. “Both sets of indictments came out right
before elections,” says Helen Parsonage, an immigra-
tion attorney who represents four defendants in the
most recent case. “Investigations were apparently
commenced in 2017, yet nothing was done with the
cases until right before a presidential election. I find
the timing of these charges to be highly suspect.”in several states, Republican government of-
ficials have also launched “election integrity” task
forces, which critics say spread unfounded fears
about participating in the election. After forming
such a group in April to investigate voter fraud, Geor-
gia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger on Sept. 8
announced a probe into 1,000 alleged incidents of
people voting twice during the state’s 2020 prima-
ries. He offered no evidence and when pressed by
reporters acknowledged he did not know whether
any of those cases were intentional.
The claim followed a familiar pattern: fling an
explosive rumor into the conservative media eco-
system, where it inevitably circulates and feeds a
larger narrative even if it is never borne out. In the
end, the Georgia inquiry concluded many double
voters likely cast in-person ballots because they
thought their absentee ballots didn’t count. “It looks
like there’s no conspiracy, no massive intent, no im-
pact on election outcome, and yet it’s baked into the
psyche of the Georgia public now,” says Cathy Cox, a
Democrat who served as the state’s secretary of state
from 1999 to 2007.
Meanwhile, back in Pennsylvania, officials
continue to watch Republicans across the country
cast the Luzerne case as an example of pervasive
voter fraud. In an interview with TIME, the
state’s attorney general was blunt. “There is a big
difference between a clerical issue and a criminal
issue, and it turns out this was a clerical issue,”
says Josh Shapiro, a Democrat. “The problem
here is you have a President who is trying to
create a false narrative to suit his political aims.”
—With reporting by A lAnA AbrAmson/WAshington
ERIN SCOTT—BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES and AnnA PurnA KAmbhAmPAty/neW yorK □
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