Get ready. Donald Trump has made good use of the propaganda technique known as the Big Lie 1.0, famously claiming that the 2020 “election was stolen” from him. And now he’s preparing to use Big Lie 2.0 to shut down our government this fall, believing it’ll hurt the Biden administration and thus the Harris-Walz campaign.
That second weapon—this Big Lie 2.0—is the false allegation of widespread “voter fraud” in America. He intends to use it to try to bring the Biden administration to its knees in the next few weeks. And, as a bonus, if it works, he gets to prevent millions of people, particularly minorities and women, from voting.
Republicans have been using this lie to attack the heart of our democracy right out in the open ever since the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, the year they responded by rolling out “Operation Eagle Eye,” yelling about nonexistent “voter fraud” and using it as an excuse to intimidate minority voters in the Goldwater/Johnson race.
In the 60 years since then, with the exception of the past year or two, no major American news media have seriously challenged the Republican “voter fraud” lie. Even though for the last few decades Republicans have routinely used it for blocking minority and women voters, and purging voting rolls the way, for example, Governor Brian Kemp and Attorney General Ken Paxton just did in Georgia and Texas, respectively, in preparation for this November.
Which brings us to Trump’s iteration of Big Lie 2.0 that we’ll all be talking about soon.
Last Thursday, he demanded that Republicans insert into must-pass budget legislation that’ll be considered in the next two or three weeks a provision that would demand that every state require absolute proof of citizenship to register to vote. Right now, this is largely confined to red states. “I would shut down the government in a heartbeat if they don’t get it and if they don’t get it in the bill,” Trump told Monica Crowley on her podcast.
It’s already a felony in every state for noncitizens to cast a ballot. The simple reality is that there’s never been a noncitizen “voter fraud” problem in America—or any other advanced democracy—so there’s no need for a “solution.”
What Republicans know, however, is that the lower a person is on the economic ladder, the less likely they are to have kept or have easy access to the kinds of documentation of birth and citizenship necessary to meet the GOP’s anti–voter fraud registration requirements.
And the poorer a person is, the more likely they are to vote Democratic.
Republicans also know that millions of women are seriously pissed off about the Dobbs decision, particularly in the 20 Republican-controlled states with bans on abortion. This demand for proof of citizenship to prevent “voter fraud” is the main way the GOP is now expanding its suppression efforts to women. The National Organization for Women notes: “Voter ID laws have a disproportionately negative effect on women.… Roughly 90 percent of women who marry adopt their husband’s last name. That means that roughly 90 percent of married female voters have a different name on their ID than the one on their birth certificate. An estimated 34 percent of women could be turned away from the polls unless they have precisely the right documents.”
Many women won’t have them, won’t be able to track them down, or can’t afford to replace them, so millions will just shrug and go back to their lives, figuring that “just one less vote” won’t make that much difference.
Claiming widespread noncitizen “voter fraud” is the GOP’s primary go-to strategy to prevent people from voting or even registering to vote, and every day it seems they come up with new ways to exploit it. As Crystal Hill pointed out Wednesday at Democracy Docket, “Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) sued one of the state’s most populous counties to block its plan to mail out over 200,000 voter registration forms to residents, claiming the move will ‘facilitate [voter] fraud.’”
Additionally, the GOP has expanded its campaign against “voter fraud” by planning to dispute millions of mail-in votes, particularly in blue cities, through so-called “exact signature match challenges.”
The GOP is recruiting as many as 100,000 people to examine millions of signatures on mail-in ballots, the majority in blue cities, so it can reject ballots that, in the observers’ opinions, don’t exactly match signatures and thus could be “fraudulent.” Those ballots will not be counted unless the voters show up at the secretary of state’s office within a few days of the election to prove that their signature is still theirs.
Expect this “voter fraud” Big Lie 2.0 to burst onto the scene over the next few weeks with much Sturm und Drang—and pontificating Republicans on Sunday shows trying to act like Very Serious People as they wring their hands about noncitizens voting—as the media will almost certainly give Trump and the GOP another pass on this monstrous lie when they threaten to shut down our government if they don’t get their anti–voter fraud rider in the budget legislation.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson says he agrees with Trump’s demands, although he has not yet committed to shutting down the government over the next three weeks: “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” he cynically lied last week, “but it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number.”
When Donald Trump started squealing about the 2020 election being “stolen” after his wipeout seven-million-vote loss and being crushed in the Electoral College, the media treated Trump’s Big Lie 1.0 claim like a joke for more than a year. As a result, it’s now an article of faith among over 70 percent of Republicans. That worked for them, so now they’re trying to do it with “voter fraud.”
This situation has reached today’s crisis point because our media has almost entirely ignored the truth about this Republican “voter fraud” scam for 60 years.
No democracy anywhere in the world can long survive if its citizens don’t believe their votes are legitimately cast and counted. This lie about noncitizen voting—that the GOP first rolled out in 1964—is now a harpoon pointed right at our elections: what Thomas Paine called “the beating heart” of our republic.
If it’s not debunked and destroyed by both the Democratic Party and our national corporate media, it could well signal the end of democracy in America and the beginning of a Putin/Orbán-style fascist reign.
It’s beyond time for our media to do their damn job and point out the evil lie of “voter fraud” before it succeeds in killing American democracy altogether.
