election integrity Archives

The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on September 20, 2021, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on “Critical American Elections.”

Sixteen years ago, in 2005, the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform issued a report that proposed a uniform system of requiring a photo ID in order to vote in U.S. elections. The report also pointed out that widespread absentee voting makes vote fraud more likely. Voter files contain ineligible, duplicate, fictional, and deceased voters, a fact easily exploited using absentee ballots to commit fraud. Citizens who vote absentee are more susceptible to pressure and intimidation. And vote-buying schemes are far easier when citizens vote by mail.

Who was behind the Carter-Baker Commission? Donald Trump? No. The Commission’s two ranking members were former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James Baker III, a Republican. Other Democrats on the Commission were former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton. It was a truly bipartisan commission that made what seemed at the time to be common sense proposals.

How things have changed. Some of the Commission’s members, Jimmy Carter among them, came out last year to disavow the Commission’s work. And despite surveys showing that Americans overwhelmingly support measures to ensure election integrity—a recent Rasmussen survey found that 80 percent of Americans support a voter ID requirement—Democratic leaders across the board oppose such measures in the strongest terms.

Here, for instance, is President Biden speaking recently in Philadelphia, condemning the idea of voter IDs: “There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today—an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are—who we are as Americans. For, make no mistake, bullies and merchants of fear and peddlers of lies are threatening the very foundation of our country.” Sadly but predicably, he went on to suggest that requiring voter IDs would mean returning people to slavery.

But the fact is that the U.S. is an outlier among the world’s democracies in not requiring voter ID. Of the 47 countries in Europe today, 46 of them currently require government-issued photo IDs to vote. The odd man out is the United Kingdom, in which Northern Ireland and many localities require voter IDs, but the requirement is not nationwide. The British Parliament, however, is considering a nationwide requirement, so very soon all 47 European countries will likely have adopted this common-sense policy.

When it comes to absentee voting, we Americans, accustomed as we are to very loose rules, are often shocked to learn that 35 of the 47 European countries—including France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—don’t allow absentee voting for citizens living in country. Another ten European countries—including England, Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, and Spain—allow absentee voting, but require voters to show up in person and present a photo ID to pick up their ballots. It isn’t like in the U.S., where a person can say he’s going to be out of town and have a ballot mailed to him.

England used to have absentee voting rules similar to ours in the U.S. But in 2004, in the city of Birmingham, officials uncovered a massive vote fraud scheme in the city council races. The six winning Labor candidates had fraudulently acquired about 40,000 absentee votes, mainly from Muslim areas of the city. As a result, England ended the practice of mailing out absentee ballots and required voters to pick up their ballots in person with a photo ID.

Up until 1975, France also had loose absentee voting rules. But when massive vote fraud was discovered on the island of Corsica—where hundreds of thousands of dead people were found to be voting and even larger-scale vote-buying operations were occurring—France banned absentee voting altogether.

On the topic of buying votes, I should point out that we in the U.S. did not always have secret ballots. It wasn’t until 1880 that the first state adopted the secret ballot, and the last state to adopt it was South Carolina in 1950. Perhaps surprisingly, when secret ballots were adopted, the percentage of people voting fell by about twelve percent. Why was that? Prior to the adoption of the secret ballot, lots of people would get paid for voting. In those days, people voted by placing pieces of colored paper in the ballot box, with different colors representing different parties. Party officials would be present to observe what color paper each voter put into the box, and depending on the color, the voter would often get paid. Secret ballots put an end to this practice.

France learned in 1975 that the use of absentee ballots led to the same practice—it allowed third parties to know how people voted and pay them for voting a certain way. This same problem is now proliferating in the U.S. in the form of “ballot harvesting,” the increasingly common practice where party functionaries distribute and collect ballots.

Defenders of our current voting rules point out that in lieu of absentee voting, some European countries allow “proxy voting,” whereby one person can designate another to vote for him. And while it is true that eight of the 47 European countries allow proxy voting—meaning that 39 do not—there are strict requirements. In five of the eight countries—Belgium, England, Monaco, Poland, and Sweden—proxy voting is limited to those with a disability or an illness or who are out of the country. In Poland, it also requires the approval of the local mayor, and in Monaco the approval of the general secretariat. In France and the Netherlands, proxy voting has to be arranged through a notary public. Switzerland is the only country in Europe with a relatively liberal proxy voting policy, requiring only a signature match.

How about our neighbors, Canada and Mexico? Canada requires a photo ID to vote. If a voter shows up at the polls without an ID, he is allowed to vote only if he declares who he is in writing and if there is someone working at the polling station who can personally verify his identity.

Mexico has had a long history of election fraud. Partly because its leaders were concerned about a drop in foreign investment if it wasn’t perceived to be a legitimate democracy, Mexico recently instituted strict reforms. Voters must present a biometric ID—an ID with not only a photo, but also a thumb print. Voters also have indelible ink applied to their thumbs, preventing them from voting more than once. And absentee voting is prohibited, even for people living outside the country.

Those who oppose election integrity reform here in the U.S. often condemn it as a means of “voter suppression.” But in Mexico, the percent of people voting rose from 59 percent before the reforms to 68 percent after. It turned out that Mexicans were more, not less, likely to vote when they had confidence that their votes mattered.

H.R. 1, the radical bill Democratic Party leaders have been pushing to adopt this year, would prohibit states from requiring voter ID and require states to allow permanent mail-in voting. And mail-in voting, I hardly need to point out, is even worse, in terms of vote fraud, than absentee voting. With absentee voting, a person at least has to request a ballot. With mail-in voting—as we saw in too many places in the 2020 election—ballots are simply mailed out to everyone. With loose absentee voting rules, a country is making itself vulnerable to vote fraud. With mail-in voting, a country is almost begging for vote fraud.

If the rhetoric we hear from the Left today is correct—if voter ID requirements and restrictions on absentee (or even mail-in) voting are un-democratic—then so are the countries of Europe and the rest of the developed world. But this is utter nonsense.

Those opposing common sense measures to ensure integrity in U.S. elections—measures such as those recommended by the bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission in 2005—are not motivated by a concern for democracy, but by partisan interests.

COLUMN BY

John R. Lott, Jr.

John R. Lott, Jr., is founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from UCLA and has held research or teaching positions at the University of Chicago, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, Yale University, and Rice University. He served in the Trump administration as Senior Advisor for Research and Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he studied vote fraud. He has written for numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times, and is the author of ten books, including More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws.

A week into the fiasco over Georgia’s election law, most Americans want to know: just who are these woke CEOs listening to? Not to their shareholders, who can’t make a profit when their companies alienate half of the country. Not to lawyers or legislators, who could set them straight on what the policy actually does. And certainly not to U.S. consumers, who are sending a resounding message that they’re done with businesses who can’t check their radicalism at the door long enough to read a 98-page piece of legislation.

“It’s insanity,” Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) agreed on “Washington Watch.” Like most people, he can’t believe that Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, Delta, and so many others would put the solvency of their companies on the line to make a political point that — it turns out — isn’t even true! When even MSNBC is telling Joe Biden he “needs to keep it honest,” the Democratic Party has reached a low even the liberal media can’t believe. And yet the White House and its field marshals in Hollywood and Atlanta created such a ridiculous narrative about this law that people like Willie Geist are going on the most radical news outlet in the country and insisting it’s impossible to “square the president’s argument.”

“[D]oesn’t it seem that a lot of people jumped the gun?” Joe Scarborough asked in follow-up. They moved the MLB All-Star Game “before actually either reading the bill or understanding how the bill lined up with New Jersey laws, with New York laws, with laws all across the nation,” he said. Then, astounding even more viewers, he took aim at the lynchpin of the Left’s whole argument. “…When you line this bill up with what the laws were before the pandemic and what the laws are in states like New York, it is not Jim Crow 2.0.”

And what’s happened in the meantime? Countless shoppers are walking away from major U.S. brands because the Left’s dishonesty “whipped up a controversy that left millions of people grossly misinformed, frightened voters, mired major corporations in high-stakes public relations frenzies, distracted the political discourse, and furthered the country’s divisions,” the Federalist’s Emily Jashinsky argues. A new survey just released today found that three-quarters of Americans think corporations should stay out of politics. Another 64 percent of them said they’d be less likely to support those who don’t. And this is a poll, incidentally, that talked to more Democrats (34 percent) than Republicans (31 percent)!

Americans of all stripes are fed up. Once they understand what the Georgia law really does, NRO’s Alexandra Desanctis points out, “a majority — again including a majority of Democrats and non-white Americans — also supported the law’s regulations as applied to ballot dropboxes. Almost 80 percent of those surveyed — including a majority of Democrats and non-white Americans — said they support the law’s ID requirement for absentee voting.” The same was true, she explains, about MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred’s unilateral decision to move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta. “A slim majority said they supported MLB’s decision to move the game at first, but after learning more about the specifics of Georgia’s law, a majority said they were ‘less supportive’ of MLB’s decision.”

As for this loud minority deterring other states from following Georgia’s lead — well, the Left was wrong about that too. An astounding 361 election integrity bills have been introduced in 47 states across the nation this year — and that includes a 43 percent increase since February. If Joe Biden and his party were hoping to scare off other states, they might want to try a different strategy.

“I lay the blame [for this uproar] clearly on these corporations who do not have a backbone. They don’t have the guts to stand up and just accept the truth. They are so afraid of what this Left-wing mob could do to them that they’re alienating their very own customers,” Loudermilk fumed. When Major League Baseball pulled out of Georgia, who do you think they’re going to hurt, he asked? “Well, they’re not going to hurt the other big corporations based there. They’re going to hurt the guy who sells hot dogs at the stadium. They’re going to hurt the server at the restaurant who’s not going to get this business.”

A handful of days ago, he talked with some of those business owners who were trying to come back from the brink after the pandemic. “These are businesses that thrive on having these conventions and sporting events. They were all excited about the All-Star Game.” They wondered if this was the one thing — the catalyst — that could bring their businesses back from poverty. “We met last week,” Loudermilk remembered, “and they were concerned about Major League Baseball. But around the table, everyone said, ‘You know, we don’t [think] that baseball would go to that extreme, because none of this is true.’ And here they go. They’re going off the deep end. It’s unbelievable.”

And of course, these same corporations — whether we’re talking about Delta or others — repeatedly come to these same state leaders looking for special subsidies or tax breaks. Major League Baseball has anti-trust immunity that they’ve enjoyed since 1922. They all look to government — and specifically free-market Republicans — to protect them but now bite the hand that feeds them.

“The last day of the legislative session was the day that Coca-Cola came out and made their announcement [against the election reforms],” Barry explained. “Obviously, the CEO never did read the bill. He just took Stacey Abrams and Nancy Pelosi and the extreme Left’s talking points and came out with this asinine statement that had no truth to it whatsoever.” And the irony, he says, is that when Delta publicly opposed it, the legislature was considering — that day — whether to renew the special tax breaks the airline gets for being based in Atlanta. “How brazen it was for the CEO [to do that], knowing that this [could] cost them millions and millions of dollars… They have totally lost all sense of morality to start with. And I think they’ve totally lost their minds as well.”

Liberals may be brazen now, but Republicans from the Senate on down are sending a message that if corporations want to fuel the crazy policies of the Left, then they need to rely on someone else to protect them from the high taxes and regulations Democrats want to force on them. “You can’t placate to the far-Left mob — especially when they come out and they lie,” Loudermilk shook his head, “and then expect us to… support you the way that we have in the past when you’re just going to turn around and stab Americans — not Republican politicians — but stab Americans in the back.”

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