Analysis | Republicans promise that, this time, they’ll find all the illegal voting

“I feel like there’s going to be fraud and cheating in the Democratic Party,” one of them told me.

As it happens, another member of the group, Larry Stange, was interviewed by the local newspaper after Election Day — in that period between when voters cast their ballots giving Joe Biden a victory in Pennsylvania and when the state finished counting those ballots.

“They’re a good team,” Stange said of the group running the polling place that day. “I haven’t seen anything but them trying to do what is right.”

This makes sense. There was no rampant voter fraud in the 2020 election, and people such as Stange — encouraged by the Trump campaign to show up at polling places to uproot it — ended up seeing nothing but the normal, dull machinations of an orderly voting process.

But then Pennsylvania reported its results. Trump lost the state, along with the presidency. And suddenly the idea that rampant fraud had occurred became a central line of rhetoric as Trump sought to explain his performance. It was rhetoric embraced even by Stange, despite his experience.

Trump and his allies have attempted to argue that Democrats cheated and fraud occurred, but they rarely note that this purportedly occurred even after they had pushed their supporters to go monitor polling places. The campaign claimed to have 50,000 people ready to keep an eye on things — but zero of those 50,000 spotted the alleged rampant fraud on which Trump blames his loss.

Fast-forward to 2024. Now the thinking is this: If 50,000 poll watchers spotted zero fraud, twice as many poll watchers can spot twice as much fraud!

Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law who is now a co-chair of the Republican Party, told an audience at a right-wing conference over the weekend that the party was planning to have 100,000 people watching polling places this November.

“We have a unique opportunity right now that we have not had in 40 years as a party,” she said. “For 40 years, there was a consent decree placed on the RNC that did not allow us to train people to work as poll workers.” Now, she said, that had been lifted.

That consent decree followed the GOP’s efforts several decades ago to influence an election in New Jersey by having off-duty cops patrol heavily non-White polling locations. (Even Fox News described this as “Republican-backed voter intimidation efforts.”) But it’s not the case that this has been newly lifted; it was set aside in 2018, which is why the Trump campaign focused on poll-watching in 2020.

“What we need to ensure is integrity in our electoral process,” Lara Trump said at the event. “We can never go back and repeat 2020, but we can learn the lessons from 2020.” Except the one about poll-watching, apparently.

It’s obvious why the Trump campaign wants to pretend it didn’t try the same thing four years ago: It makes obvious the difference between claiming fraud had occurred or will occur, and showing that fraud occurred. In 2020, like now, Republicans insisted that there would be enormous fraud that they could and would obstruct. After 2020, though, they ignored that they had had thousands of people like Stange in place watching polling places because they needed the “illegal voting” excuse to explain Trump’s loss.

They still need that excuse, that idea that elections are unreliable. And they still get allies hyping the idea without evidence.

Over the weekend, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) warned in a social media post, “Voter fraud is real.”

He noted that a judge had overturned the results of a judicial election because of “illegal votes.” But this is misleading, if not intentionally false.

Judge David Peeples decided in May that the results of a 2022 election in the state would be set aside and that a new one would be held, after finding enough illegally cast votes to call the results of the election into question. (Why Abbott shared a month-old story isn’t entirely clear.) The governor’s presentation that this showed “voter fraud,” though, is incorrect.

The race was decided by 449 votes. Peeples determined that “1430 illegal votes were cast in the race for the 180th District Court and that it is not realistic or feasible to determine which candidate received those,” a snippet from the decision that appeared in Abbott’s post.

But Peeples’s decision also notes that “[i]n this title, ‘illegal vote’ means a vote that is not legally countable.” It’s not that the votes were submitted by people attempting to illegally sway the election; it’s that the votes shouldn’t have been counted.

For example, 983 of the 1,430 votes at issues were thrown out because of errors with voters’ “statements of residence,” or SORs. About 230 of those errors were that people filled out the SORs incompletely. The others were SORs that indicated that people lived outside of the election’s jurisdiction.

In other words, these voters honestly indicated that they lived somewhere that rendered them ineligible to cast a ballot in the race. They might have moved within the county without re-registering, for example, or have been living somewhere temporarily in the pandemic year. But this is not “voter fraud” as Abbott and Lara Trump would suggest, unless we’re talking about people knowingly committing felonies who were tripped up by honestly offering their home address.

What it is, though, is a useful way to perpetuate the idea that election results should not be trusted. That is a very useful fiction to promote if you believe that holding power is more important than respecting the results of a democratic election.

So good luck to those 100,000 people who the RNC claims will be watching elections. Should Biden win again, each of them will be in the relatively awkward position in which Stange found himself: insisting that it was everyone else who failed to stop the rampant fraud that necessarily occurred.