Part of the reason Republicans hadn’t more effectively fought the election integrity battle before now is somewhat shocking. The 2020 contest was the first presidential election since Ronald Reagan’s first successful run in 1980 in which the Republican National Committee could play any role whatsoever in Election Day operations. For nearly 40 years, the Democratic National Committee had a massive systematic advantage over its Republican counterpart: The RNC had been prohibited by law from helping with poll watcher efforts or nearly any voting-related litigation.
Democrats had accused Republicans of voter intimidation in a 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race. The case was settled, and the two parties entered into a court-ordered consent decree limiting Republican involvement in any poll-watching operation. But Dickinson Debevoise, the Jimmy Carter-appointed judge who oversaw the agreement, never let them out of it, repeatedly modifying and strengthening it at Democrats’ request.
Debevoise was a judge for only 15 years, but he stayed 21 years in senior status, a form of semi-retirement that enables judges to keep serving in a limited capacity. It literally took Debevoise’s dying in 2015 for Republicans to get out of the consent decree. Upon his passing, a new judge, appointed by President Obama, was assigned the case and let the agreement expire at the end of 2018.
This is from Mollie Hemingway, “If Republicans Win on Tuesday, Thank the Election Integrity Movement,” The Federalist, November 4, 2022.
I think of myself as someone who pays a lot of attention to U.S. political issues, but I had had no idea that the Republican National Committee had been prevented for almost 40 years from engaging in poll-watching. That’s a huge disadvantage.
Another excerpt:
The RNC got involved in 73 election integrity cases in 20 states for the midterms, with plans to expand. They won a lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson for restricting the rights of poll challengers; got Maricopa County, Arizona, to share key data about its partisan breakdown of poll workers; won an open records lawsuit against Mercer County, New Jersey, for refusing to share election administration data; won a lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections for restricting the rights of poll watchers; and reached a favorable settlement against Clark County, Nevada, in which the county agreed to share information about its partisan breakdown of poll workers on a rolling basis.
The whole thing is worth reading.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Nov 6 2022 at 5:23am
Why is this important? Does anyone really believe that an important number of people are voting fraudulently?
David Henderson
Nov 6 2022 at 8:04am
Lots of people believe it. I have no idea whether it’s true. But with Trump having lost by only about 43,000 votes, it wouldn’t have taken much cheating to put Biden over the top. Do I believe that that was the margin of cheating? No I don’t. But to answer your question, many people do.
And certain the Al Franken win over Coleman by a razor-thin margin could easily have been due to fraud.
robc
Nov 6 2022 at 9:49am
The Franklin-Coleman recount ballot interpretation, while not cheating, was pretty questionable, in both directions.
I am pretty sure “Lizard People” got screwed out of multiple votes.
That last sentence literally isnt a joke.
Jon Murphy
Nov 6 2022 at 9:09am
Yes, and a rather significant share of people think so. According to an AP-NORC survey from early 2020, about 74% of Americans believe there is some voter fraud going on, with 35% believing “there is a great deal of fraud, like voting by people who are not eligible and people casting multiple ballots.” I have seen more recent surveys that report similar numbers, though a quick (less than 15 seconds) Google search cannot find them.
Mark Brophy
Nov 6 2022 at 8:25pm
An important number of people are voting fraudulently in mail-in elections. Everyone should be required to vote in person except overseas military personnel and government employees who are working on Election Day.
Phil H
Nov 6 2022 at 9:23pm
My rule of thumb on this is that whenever one political actor starts to get agitated about something other people are doing (that no one else noticed) it’s usually because they’re doing it themselves, and trying to get in a pre-emptive strike. When the dust settles on this, in 20 years’ time, I would not be at all surprised to learn that Republican efforts to fraudulently sway the vote are under way, and the ‘anti-voter fraud’ media circus is mostly a smokescreen to cover illegal actions that the party’s senior members know all about.
BS
Nov 8 2022 at 11:24am
What should one make of the Democrats’ agitation when common-sense voting integrity reforms are proposed?
Daniel Klein
Nov 6 2022 at 7:24am
Based on the penultimate paragraph of Mollie Hemingway’s piece:
It’ll be disturbing as heck if PA, WI, NV, and NC are where counter-wave, protracted, razor-thin Dem victories occur.
And it will be reassuring if none such are seen in those four states.
David Henderson
Nov 6 2022 at 9:59am
That would be an interesting test.
Jon Murphy
Nov 6 2022 at 7:41am
Fascinating. Despite this major disadvantage, the Republicans still managed to control the White House for 24 years, the Senate for 22, and the House for 20 during this time period.
To me, this really demonstrates the importance of the Electoral College and the structure of the Senate (2 reps from each state).
David Henderson
Nov 6 2022 at 8:05am
Good point.
nobody.really
Nov 6 2022 at 8:59am
The consent decree expired in 2018. Prior to that, as Murphy observed, Republicans managed to win PLENTY of elections while struggling under the burden of not sending armed people to polling place to intimidate voters.
In contrast, in the very first election when the decree was lifted, Republicans managed to lose the White House, the Senate, and the House.
…as a refresher in right-wing paranoia.
Jon Murphy
Nov 6 2022 at 9:10am
What’s the paranoia here? Be more specific.
MikeW
Nov 7 2022 at 5:43pm
You seem to be implying that Republicans are or want to send armed people to voting places to intimidate voters. Really?? I haven’t heard of anything like that. The last time I heard of anything like that was with regard to the New Black Panthers several years ago, and they were certainly not Republicans.
Phil H
Nov 7 2022 at 8:43pm
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/10/27/nation/masked-poll-watchers-are-showing-up-voting-sites-with-handguns-kevlar-vests/
MikeW
Nov 8 2022 at 12:47am
Thank you.
David Henderson
Nov 6 2022 at 9:58am
You wrote:
I agreed at first , but I have another thought. Winning or losing an election is endogenous. If Republicans think that there’s an illegitimate margin (say even 1 or 2%) due to lack of poll-watching, they take that into account in the positions they favor and promises they make. After all, they want to be competitive, especially in Senate races, where there’s no gerrymander. So we might have got somewhat different positions and policies (not way different) if poll-watching had reduced the amount of cheating.
Jon Murphy
Nov 6 2022 at 10:19am
Agreed. I don’t think that changes my point. The GOP adapted and overcame a potentially significant disadvantage and maintained control of various branches for over half the period in question.
In my mind, knowing that disadvantage makes their activities all the more amazing
David Henderson
Nov 6 2022 at 10:23am
I didn’t realize you were making just the narrow point. I had thought that you were saying that it didn’t matter much for outcomes.
Jon Murphy
Nov 6 2022 at 10:30am
Nope. Sorry! My fault for not being clearer.
Scott Sumner
Nov 6 2022 at 11:21am
I find it odd to connect “election integrity” with the GOP, given that the party is now being taken over by an undemocratic faction that supports attempts to overturn democratic elections and install Trump as dictator. Like it or not, Trump is the effective leader of the GOP, and anyone who dares oppose him on election integrity is “cancelled”.
Much of the election integrity effort in southern states is a poorly disguised effort to discourage blacks from voting.
David Henderson
Nov 6 2022 at 11:50am
You write:
Indeed, it’s so poorly disguised that black people in Georgia, where many of the reforms took place, are voting in record numbers. See this.
To put it into perspective, by the way, the new voting rules in Georgia are less restrictive than those in many northeast Democratic states.
Dylan
Nov 7 2022 at 7:54am
To be fair, some of us have been protesting the undemocratic voting policies in northeastern states for a long time.
Phil H
Nov 7 2022 at 8:53pm
Both of those links are nonsense, though. The first one contains only one piece of numerical information, and it is this: “Black voters account for nearly 36% of early voters so far, despite only making up less than 30% of active voters in the state.” This is a bizarre bit of statistics, including the totally made-up category of ‘active voter’.
The second makes some interesting but cherry-picked comparisons with northern states before getting to the truth of the matter:
“But in those states, lawmakers have and plan to expand voting access, while in Georgia, access is in some cases being restricted…’It’s about intention and what barriers they’re throwing up and why’”
Neither of the links support the argument you’re trying to make.
zeke5123
Nov 7 2022 at 9:56am
Georgia was the focus of a lot of this criticism. From what I can tell, there is one example people gave that legitimately harmed black voter turnout, and that was changed. Can you articulate say three things that are obviously targeting black voters? Not asking for a lot — three things.
Johnson85
Nov 8 2022 at 3:53pm
Republicans generally haven’t fought to make cheating easier. Except that I think plenty of republicans, along with democrats, pushed for electronic voting. I think some of that was the money available to companies selling machine and software encouraged a lot of lobbying, and some of that was just general bias towards “technology is good” without thinking about what it does to confidence in elections.
And the comment about installing Trump as dictator is so absurd you would assume it’s over the top parody except there are so many otherwise seemingly intelligent people that have lost all sense of perspective. There were people pushing some questionable legal theories because they didn’t have confidence in the elections, and we had some idiots parading in the capitol. There was no serious threat to our government. It is a good reason to push for things that eliminate the opportunity for fraud, rather than making it easier and telling people that you can’t prove it happened. The appearance of fraud is practically just as poisonous to a democracy as actual fraud.
Michael
Nov 7 2022 at 10:33am
This whole story strikes me as, at best, an oversimplification.
One wonders, for example, why the RNC opted to settle the case and enter into a consent decree in the first place, what the terms of the settlement were, whether the settlement laid out criteria that needed to be met in order to get the decree lifted, whether they were met, and whether it was the change of judge or changes in law or facual circumstances that finally did lead to the decree being lifted.
On top of all that, one wonders where exactly Mollie Hemingway things the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and, indeed, the US Supreme Court were while a lower court judge was repeatedly (per Mollie) acting “at Democrats’ request” to strengthen the decree.
Michael
Nov 8 2022 at 8:05am
I’m not surprised no one has weighed in to this thread with a fact-based argument. It’s just “Democrat judge bad” with no discussion at all about the legal basis of the decision.
Thomas Strenge
Nov 8 2022 at 9:54am
Democrats have always been better at inside baseball. Look at the recent census where the errors largely benefited Democrats. I don’t think this poll watching issue was hugely important, but, on the margin, it must have benefited Democrats. How could it not?
AJ
Nov 8 2022 at 5:34pm
David, if you have a few minutes to go deeper, the 40 year decree Mollie cites from the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race was covered recently on “This Day in Esoteric Political History” (link to episode). Might be a little different perspective from Mollie but still a fascinating <20 min (skipping ads) coverage of the case.
David Henderson
Nov 9 2022 at 11:42am
Thanks. I’ll take a listen today or tomorrow.
Comments are closed.