IF IT AIN'T BROKE

Don't Fix It

I’m not sure whether today’s title is a “Southernism” or a “My Dad ism”, but I’ve heard it my entire life; “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Oh how I wish those running our various levels of government would heed that advice, but they don’t.

In my humble opinion, government tends to fix things that are not broken more than things that are because 1) fixing REAL problems requires REAL solutions, and those solutions often require compromise, and 2) it is easy to convince the voting public that something else is a serious problem when it really is not.

CASE IN POINT: VOTER FRAUD

A long time ago in a state far, far away I knew a fellow who was a part of the county’s political apparatus. Over coffee one morning he laughed and told me he and the county registrar had once gone through a local cemetery taking names off tombstones and adding them to the voter registration list. When he asked the registrar why they didn’t just make up names, the reply was: “hell no…we have to make this legitimate!”.

I also knew a fellow who was registered to vote in both Virginia and West Virginia, and voted in both.

Voter fraud has been a problem as long as people have been voting, but now a large number of Americans have been convinced that voter fraud is more serious than ever and that government must immediately and aggressively address it to ensure fair elections. That is not the case at all. There is absolutely no evidence of massive voter fraud on the national, state, or local levels of government, but at least 100 new voter registration laws have been imposed during the last ten years to deal with this imaginary problem.

And before you get all upset and start accusing me of spouting liberal propaganda, the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation could find very few instances of non-citizens voting between 2002 and 2023. In Texas, a state with a large population of immigrants who might be suspected of voting illegally, the Heritage Foundation found 103 total cases of confirmed voter fraud between 2005 and 2022, during which time 107,000,000 votes were cast. So the instance of voter fraud was 0.00009 %. In Arizona during the 2020 presidential election they uncovered only four fraudulent votes, and The Heritage Foundation found NO cases of fraud in Georgia in 2020 or 2022. Of course the Heritage folks correctly argued that we should minimize any fraud, and we should, but this its NOT America’s most significant problem.

But you KNOW the 2020 election was stolen as a result of voter fraud. Right? The Associated Press conducted a thorough study of the six battleground states from that year (Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) and found fewer than 475 potential instances (not verified) of voter fraud out of 25.5 million votes cast, and that doesn’t come close to changing the election’s outcome.

Further, another study by Columbia University also concluded that voter fraud is rare. The study found that in most instances when voter fraud is alleged, it is because of “unsubstantiated or false claims by the loser of a close race, mischief and administrative or voter error”. In addition, the study concluded that the more complex are a state’s voter registration laws, the more likely “voter mistakes, clerical errors, and the like will be wrongly identified as ‘fraud.’” Finally, the authors concluded that both the Democratic and Republican parties have historically passed voter registration laws to make it more difficult for other party members to vote. Southern Democrats did so with Jim Crow Laws making it difficult for blacks to vote, for example.

If you are interested, the Brennan Center, a liberal public policy institute, offers links to numerous other academic studies and federal court rulings demonstrating the insignificance of voter fraud. And a very thorough study by Project Vote found the same, concluding that “…partisans use the threat of voter fraud as an intimidation tactic”, and that the “threat of fraud… is enough to scare most people into accepting new rules that undermine the electoral participation of other voters - the unfortunate price, we are told, we must pay to keep our elections clean. The unraveling logic of this argument should be obvious”.

Unfortunately, reason flies out the window when we’re scared. Is voter fraud something about which we should be concerned? Of course. In local elections a handful of fraudulent voters could swing the outcome, and we obviously want to avoid that. We want EVERY vote to be valid. However, in 2020 almost 155,000,000 citizens turned out to vote, and anyone believing we can stop every single instance of voter fraud in an electorate that large is living in a fantasy world. I agree that we should take reasonable steps to ensure voter integrity and that offenders should be severely punished, but this absolutely is NOT the number one problem facing our country, although some would have us believe otherwise.

It is so much easier to convince folks that voter fraud is a significant problem than it is to address school shootings, child poverty, public education, failing bridges, a national debt of $35 trillion, declining life expectancy, overflowing prisons, the over use of plastics, alternate energy sources, or the NFL’s silly new kickoff rule. Voters are gullible.

Thanks for following along.

David