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The Ingredients for “Voter Fraud” Conspiracies

Part of: Forum: Fear and Loathing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 April 2018

George Derek Musgrove
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Keywords

Race and EthnicityPolitics and GovernmentConservatism and the RightVoting and DemocracyPolitical Culture
Type
Forum: Fear and Loathing
Information
Modern American History , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , July 2018 , pp. 227 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Cambridge University Press 

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References

1 Mark Murray, “Who Is Gregg Phillips, The Man Trump Name-Checked to Prove Voter Fraud?” NBC News, Jan. 27, 2017, (accessed Oct. 24, 2017); Philip Bump, “The Twitter-Born Conspiracy Theory Driving Donald Trump's Explanation for Losing the Popular Vote,” Washington Post, Jan. 27, 2016, (accessed Oct. 25, 2017); Paul Joseph Watson, “Report: Three Million Votes in Presidential Election Cast by Illegal Aliens,” Infowars, November 14, 2016, (accessed Oct. 24, 2017).

2 “Schooled on Benghazi and Pizzagate, Trump Team Is Heavy on Conspiracy Theorists,” Washington Post, Dec. 22, 2016, (accessed Jan. 17, 2017).

3 Jenna Johnson, “The Tale of a Trump Falsehood: How His Voter Fraud Claim Spread Like a Virus,” Washington Post, Jan. 31, 2017, (accessed Oct. 25, 2017).

4 Abby Phillip and Mike DeBonis, “Without Evidence, Trump Tells Lawmakers 3 Million to 5 Million Illegal Ballots Cost Him the Popular Vote,” Washington Post, Jan. 23, 2017, (accessed Oct. 25, 2017); Aaron Blake, “Donald Trump Claims None of Those 3 to 5 Million Illegal Votes Were Cast for Him. Zero,” Washington Post, Jan. 26, 2017, (accessed Oct. 25, 2017); Jenna Johnson, “Trump Seeks ‘Major Investigation’ into Unsupported Claims of Voter Fraud,” Washington Post, Jan. 25, 2017, (accessed Oct. 25, 2017); White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Presidential Executive Order on the Establishment of Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity,” May 11, 2017, (accessed Oct. 24, 2017); “Kris Kobach, The ‘King of Voter Suppression,’ Will Lead Trump's Sham Voter Fraud Commission. Be Afraid, Very Afraid,” American Civil Liberties Union, May 12, 2017, (accessed Oct. 24, 2017); Ari Berman, “The Man Behind Trump's Voter Fraud Obsession,” New York Times Magazine, June 13, 2017, (accessed Oct. 25, 2017). In early January 2018 the President abolished the commission in the face of many states’ refusal to share voter data. See “Trump: Democrats Sabotaged Voting Fraud Panel,” Roll Call, Jan. 4 2018, (accessed Jan. 17, 2018).

5 Knight, Peter, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X Files (New York, 2000), 2Google Scholar.

6 Davis, David Brion, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, 1971), xv–xviiGoogle Scholar. Several subsequent historians have noted a shift in the target of paranoid thinking from the aforementioned “them” to the federal government in the late twentieth century. See Knight, Conspiracy Culture; Olmsted, Kathryn S., Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (New York, 2009)Google Scholar.

7 Several journalists and scholars have ignored this advice and posited that the paranoid style is a trans-historical American character trait or the psychological affliction of certain sub-groups. In the 1980s and 1990s, for example, many African Americans’ embrace of black elected officials’ claims of state repression, as well as journalist Gary Webb's allegations that the CIA was connected to the importation of drugs into the United States via the Contra rebels, moved some commentators to argue that African Americans were uniquely susceptible to conspiracy theory. See “Though Evidence Is Thin, Tale of C.I.A. and Drugs Has a Life of Its Own,” New York Times, Oct. 21, 1996, A14; D'Souza, Dinesh, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York, 1996)Google Scholar. For studies of black Americans’ uses of rumor or embrace of conspiratorial thinking that do not attempt to pathologize their subjects, see Turner, Patricia A., I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African American Culture (Berkeley, CA, 1994)Google Scholar; Musgrove, George Derek, Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics: How the Harassment of Black Elected Officials Shaped Post-Civil Rights America (Athens, GA, 2012)Google Scholar.

8 Sam Corbett-Davies, Tobias Konitzer, and David Rothschild, “Poll: 60% of Republicans Believe Illegal Immigrants Vote; 43% Believe People Vote Using Dead People's Names,” Washington Post, Oct. 24, 2016, (accessed Oct. 25, 2017).

9 The RNC tested Operation Eagle Eye in the 1962 election in several large cities around the country. Chandler Davidson, Tanya Dunlap, Gale Kenny, and Benjamin Wise, “Republican Ballot Security Programs: Vote Protection or Minority Vote Suppression - or Both?” (Center for Voting Rights and Protection, 2004), 25–39.

10 Ibid., 25–44; Folder Ballot Security, box 1, Robert Visser Papers, Gerald Ford Library, Ann Arbor, MI; folder Ballot Security, box D2, General Counsel's Office, President Ford Committee Records, Gerald Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, MI.

11 Richard J. Meislin, “Jersey Controversy Widens over G.O.P. Patrols at Polls,” New York Times, Nov. 7, 1981, 25–6; Adam Clymer, “GOP to Expand to Other States ‘Ballot Security’ It Used in Jersey,” New York Times, Nov. 9, 1981, B6.

12 “Republicans Agree in Lawsuit to Avoid Intimidating Voters,” New York Times, Nov. 7, 1982, 52; Thomas B. Edsall, “‘Ballot Security’ Effects Calculated: GOP Aide Said Louisiana Effort ‘Could Keep the Black Vote Down,’” Washington Post, Oct. 25, 1986, A1, A6; Michael Isikoff, “Justice Dept. Investigates GOP Mailing to Voters,” Washington Post, Nov. 6, 1990, A6; Ron Nixon, “Turning Back the Clock on Voting Rights,” Nation, Nov. 15, 1999, 11–7; People for the American Way and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, The Long Shadow of Jim Crow: Voter Intimidation and Suppression in America Today, (Washington, DC, 2004), 9–11.

13 Since the 2000 election, journalists, social scientists, and political hacks have penned a mountain of books exploring these vulnerabilities and the ways they could be exploited by the other side. For example, the conservative journalist John Fund has made a veritable cottage industry of this genre. See Fund, John, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (San Francisco, 2004)Google Scholar; Fund, John, How the Obama Administration Threatens to Undermine Our Elections (New York, 2009)Google Scholar; Fund, John and von Spakovsky, Hans, Who's Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk (New York, 2012)Google Scholar. For more nuanced explorations of the complicated nature of vote buying, absentee ballot abuse, fraud, and suppression, see Minnitte, Lorraine C., The Myth of Voter Fraud (Ithaca, NY, 2010)Google Scholar; Barry, Mary Frances, Five Dollars and a Pork Chop Sandwich (Boston, 2016)Google Scholar.

14 Minnitte, The Myth of Voter Fraud, 1–19.

15 Krissah Thompson, “2008 Voter-Intimidation Case Against New Black Panthers Riles the Right,” Washington Post, July 15, 2010, (accessed Oct. 25 2017); Ryan J. Reilly, “His Poll-Watching Video Became a GOP Obsession. Now He Wants Trump to Rein in ‘Rigged’ Election Talk,” Huffington Post, Oct. 19, 2016, (accessed Oct. 24, 2017).

16 Nicole Hemmer, “The Conservative War on Liberal Media Has a Long History,” Atlantic, Jan. 17, 2014, (accessed Oct. 24, 2017); Brock, David, The Republican Noise Machine: Right Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy (New York, 2004)Google Scholar.

17 “Fox News Has Hyped Phony New Black Panthers Scandal at Least 95 Times,” Media Matters for America, July 16, 2010, (accessed Oct. 24, 2017).

18 Carter, Dan T., The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge, LA, 2000)Google Scholar; López, Ian Haney, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (New York, 2014)Google Scholar; Norton, Michael I. and Sommers, Samuel R., “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 3 (May 2011): 215–8CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Hua Hsu, “The End of White America?” Atlantic, Jan.–Feb. 2009, 46–55.

19 Marie Brenner, “How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn's Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America,” Vanity Fair, June 28, 2017, (accessed Oct. 25, 2017).

20 Charles Homans, “The Conspiracy Theorists’ Election,” New York Times Magazine, Sept. 27, 2016, (accessed Oct. 24, 2017); “Conspiracy Theorist in Chief,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 6, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-ed-conspiracy-theorist-in-chief/ (accessed Oct. 24, 2017).