When Donald Trump recently asked his supporters in Ohio to keep an eye out for voter fraud on election day, his plea came with a knowing suggestion: “When [I] say ‘watch,’ you know what I’m talking about, right?” Mr Trump’s worry that the election will be “rigged” has inspired repeated calls for volunteers to serve as poll watchers in cities including Philadelphia, Chicago and St Louis. At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, he had this to say: “You’ve got to go out, and you’ve got to get your friends, and you’ve got to get everybody you know, and you gotta watch the polling booths, because I hear too many stories about Pennsylvania, certain areas”. It would be a shame, Mr Trump said, to lose the White House “because of you know what I’m talking about.” What Mr Trump seems to be talking about is scores of black and Latino voters who are unfriendly to his candidacy and—purportedly—not eligible to vote. With little more than a hunch that “of course…large scale voter fraud” prevails in “certain communities”, Mr Trump ignores studies belying the claim. A review of 12 years of allegations turned up just 10 cases of confirmed fraud. Another study found 31 cases of voter impersonation out of a billion votes cast from 2000 to 2014. There are no signs that Democrats are coordinating a national strategy to harness voter fraud to steal the election.
But never mind the facts. Mr Trump has a link on his website where devotees wishing to “volunteer to be a Trump election observer” can sign up to receive information. “Help me stop Crooked Hillary from rigging the election!” the page implores. The Republican Party is doing little to amplify these calls, and for good reason. For years, the Republican Party engaged in widespread voter intimidation and, in 1981, the Democrats called them on it in court. In a gubernatorial election in New Jersey, the Republican National Committee (RNC) targeted racial and ethnic minority voters by, among other things, recruiting armed “off-duty sheriffs and police officers to intimidate voters by standing at polling places in minority precincts during voting with ‘National Ballot Security Task Force’ armbands”. To resolve the lawsuit, the RNC agreed to stop “engag[ing[ or assist[ing] in voter fraud prevention” without the pre-approval of a federal court. This agreement expires next year, as long as the RNC stays clean. But if the party violates the rules this fall, the decree will be extended for another eight years.
The racial overtones of Mr Trump’s appeals are hard to miss, as is their tenuous relationship with basic principles of electoral democracy. (Even former Fox News commentator Glenn Beck, no friend of the left, has compared Mr Trump’s henchmen to the “brownshirts” who helped Adolf Hitler launch the Third Reich.) With the polls increasingly favouring Hillary Clinton, the drama of the race is turning to how Mr Trump’s calls will play out at polling places on November 8th. Some legal experts note that the Republican nominee’s comments are edging closer to “incitement”, a category of speech that enjoys no constitutional protection. The Supreme Court said in 1969 that a speaker who wilfully attempts to whip up a crowd to commit an imminent crime could be subject to criminal prosecution.
Full Article: Entangled in the rigging: Do Trump’s calls for poll watchers constitute incitement? | The Economist.