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Disarming Our DemonsThe self-fulfilling prophecy of election-stealing.

By Dahlia LithwickPosted Saturday, May 24, 2008, at 6:44 AM ET

A judge inspects a ballotJust as some sizable fraction of American children firmly believe in the boogeyman in the closet, many adult Americans cling to a paranoid fear of the election-fraud monster. Too many of us believe in the epidemic of pervasive Democratic vote fraud, and others believe in the specter of systematic Republican vote suppression. The notion that present-day Democrats regularly steal elections by engaging in concerted efforts to vote multiple times in funny mustaches is a myth, unsupported by data or fact. Historically, it's true that conservatives have used voter intimidation, poll taxes, and other skeezy tactics to disenfranchise minority voters. It's also true that some of Karl Rove's flying monkeys have attempted to revive that proud tradition with schemes such as "vote caging" (getting transient students and folks in the military bounced off the voter rolls) and pressuring U.S. attorneys to prosecute vote fraud where none exists. But for the most part, modern polling-place election-stealing has just not been pervasive or systemic.

The more we believe the other side steals elections, the easier it becomes to devalue their votes. And I'm not sure that's a road anyone wants to travel. A recent Rasmussen poll showed 17 percent of voters believing that large numbers of legitimate voters are prevented from voting and 23 percent convinced that a large number of ineligible people are allowed to vote. That's a lot of people certain that the other side is cheating. That's a lot of reasons to cheat first.

The seeds of our current hysteria over election fraud were sown during the 2000 election when the nation watched, slack-jawed, as Florida became a still life in Voting Gone Awry. But in a piece for the Atlantic in 2004, Joshua Green explained that the provenance of this anxiety predated Florida 2000. Describing a 1994 judicial race in Alabama, in which Karl Rove advised one candidate, Green reports that in the midst of a tense re-count, unsubstantiated whispers circulated that the election had been stolen by—among other things—a Democratic strategy of "votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to put them on absentee ballots."

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Paranoia about such tactics by Democrats—especially minority Democrats—morphed from a Bush administration extracurricular activity to its college major during the last eight years. Helped along by bogus think tanks and sketchy research, the boogeyman started to look real. This neatly explains last year's firing of at least two U.S. attorneys for their inability to find genuine vote-fraud cases to prosecute. It also accounts for the takeover of the Justice Department's Voting Rights Division—once devoted to expanding rather than contracting the right to vote—by a handful of myopic vote-fraud crusaders.

And yet a brand-new Justice Department initiative to smoke out rampant liberal vote fraud, with 120 federal prosecutions between 2002 and 2006, resulted in only 86 convictions—mostly of Democrats, and mainly for either filling out forms wrongly or misunderstanding their eligibility. A major bipartisan draft fraud report similarly concluded that there's little polling-place fraud in America and no large-scale systematic fraud. Of course, occasional instances of vote fraud occur. But the claim of massive concerted efforts to organize voters to risk felony convictions at the polls is absurd. As professor Richard Hasen has pointed out in Slate, while there is "a fair amount of registration fraud in this country," it just doesn't translate to mischief at the polls in numbers that swing elections, even close ones.

Why persist in believing in a phantom epidemic? The benefits of a widespread campaign to stamp out fraud pretty much speak for themselves: Voter-ID laws to counter vote fraud disenfranchise minorities, the poor, and the elderly. As former Texas Republican Party political director Royal Masset told the Houston Chronicle last year, while he believed the vote-fraud epidemic to be overblown and opposed Texas' then-pending photo-ID law, the bill "could cause enough of a drop-off in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 percent to the Republican vote." Score! That bill collapsed last year, but only after debate degenerated into a psychodrama they'll be talking about in Austin for years.

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Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
Photograph of Florida ballot judging by Robert King/Newsmakers.
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