Early voting is underway, and according to Donald J. Trump, so is voter fraud. Almost daily, he proclaims that “large-scale voter fraud” is happening and that the election is “rigged.” Politicians across the spectrum have criticized this nonsense as divorced from reality, deleterious to our democracy and unprecedented in our elections. It’s good to see such a strong, bipartisan pushback, but the critics are wrong on that last point. Thinly supported allegations of electoral malfeasance have been deployed throughout American history, often by those who want to restrict the vote. In the Jim Crow South, discriminatory devices from poll taxes to all-white primaries were justified as a means of fraud prevention. In 1902, Texas adopted a poll tax. Its champions argued in The Dallas Morning News that the tax would prevent fraud and protect against “corrupt methods at the polls.” Their reasoning? If casting a vote is free, then poor people will sell their votes “for a trifle.” … In itself, there is nothing wrong with poll monitoring. States often allow certified observers to watch polls. Trained poll monitors can help prevent mishaps on Election Day, like ensuring that eligible voters don’t slip through the cracks because of poll-worker error. But undisciplined poll watching can degenerate into voter intimidation.
In 2013, a Texas federal court found that voting practices in Harris County, home to Houston, had “a dilutive effect” on Latino voting power, crediting testimony that “poll watchers have intimidated Latino voters at the polls, such as inquiring about the voters’ citizenship status.”
There is still cause for concern. A Trump supporter recently told The Boston Globe that he would racially profile “Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American.” And he wasn’t shy about what he’d do next: “I’m going to go right up behind them,” he said, and “make them a little bit nervous.”
We’re witnessing merely the latest round of efforts to delegitimize and exclude minority and immigrant voters with baseless allegations of fraud. But our commitment to universal suffrage demands that every eligible voter who wants to vote has the chance, free from intimidation and harassment. In this election, unnecessary barriers to the ballot and calls to racially profile voters are the real threats. Voter fraud is not.
Full Article: The Voter Fraud Lie We Can’t Shake – The New York Times.