Voting fraud

SIGNIFICANCE: Although the US political system was founded on principles of equal rights and democratic rule, voting fraud has influenced the outcomes of political elections through the nation’s history and has thereby threatened the legitimacy of the nation’s democratic institutions.

While the allegations of improprieties surrounding the 2000 presidential election and the 2020 presidential election were highly publicized, voting fraud has a long and rich history in the United States. In large part, voting fraud stems from the primary rule in politics: Get elected. Whether political candidates have been motivated by their thirst for power or their desire to serve their fellow citizens, the American political landscape has often reflected the importance of getting elected at any cost. This attitude has led to innumerable creative attempts to gain office, many of which fall outside the bounds of legality, as well as accusations of instances of voting fraud as a potential means of swaying or contesting an outcome.

Political Machines

Early American politics, particularly in urban centers, was dominated by what came to be known as political machines—informal organizations, commonly aligned with political parties, that were designed to control the governments of local jurisdictions. Because of the elitist nature of early American politics and the high levels of poverty in American cities, most citizens had little knowledge of the inner workings of the political system. Meanwhile, the “machines” worked to deliver votes to particular candidates and parties by both legal and illegal means. From the early nineteenth century until the late twentieth century, such machines exercised a powerful influence on the American political sphere.

The best known and most infamous political machine was New York City’s Tammany Hall. After the American Revolutionary War, that organization took its name from the Delaware Native American leader Tamanend, who was said to have signed a peace treaty with William Penn. Tammany Hall was simply one part of a larger organization of Tammany societies that were located throughout the United States. Its motto was “freedom our rock,” and its members fought primarily for the rights of poor citizens and immigrants. Although the political goals of the Tammany societies were noble, the societies were also pioneers of voting fraud.

The ways in which Tammany Hall bosses ensured allegiance were similar to those of groups that conducted organized crime. In exchange for political loyalty, the organizations helped members secure jobs, and they provided food, clothing, shelter, and even legal representation for both immigrants and poor Americans. In addition, the organizations helped immigrants to become citizens—always in exchange for voter loyalty. When those inducements were not sufficient to win support, Tammany Hall simply offered voters money. By the 1830s, the practice of buying votes was firmly established within America’s cities. The going rate at the time was five dollars per vote—an amount roughly equivalent to one hundred dollars in the early twenty-first century—but it could go as high as twenty dollars or more. Although the practice of vote buying was no secret to anyone, it was difficult to detect.

Although Tammany Hall was the best known political machine to buy political loyalty, it was by no means the only group to do so. Throughout much of American history, all sides of the political spectrum actively participated in what was viewed as the most efficient manner to secure the votes of apathetic citizens. The dimensions of voting fraud can be seen in the results of a New York City election in 1868. An audit of that election found that of the 156,000 total votes cast, 25,000 were fraudulent—a figure large enough to decide most elections.

Another creative and illegal means of winning elections was the practice of repeat voting. The phrase “Vote early and vote often” is now merely a jest; however, it was a serious admonition during the days of machine politics. Individual machine loyalists often managed to find ways to vote several times in a single election. One technique was simply to bribe poll watchers to turn their backs while casting extra ballots. A more devious technique was to vote under the names of people who had recently died, before those names were removed from voting registers. Because few people carried personal identification on them during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one merely had to present oneself at a polling place under the name of a recently deceased person. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Philadelphia’s Gas Ring Machine not only had many dead people voting for its candidates, it also counted the names of horses, cats, and dogs among its voters.

If buying off voters and polling place workers was not sufficient to secure victory, political machines might attempt to buy off the election officials. Once a machine purchased or won the loyalty of the people who actually counted votes, it did not matter who actually voted for whom; victory was assured. When carried out properly, this practice was the most efficient means to secure political office.

Modern Voter Fraud

Modern voters are far more politically savvy and sophisticated than their nineteenth century and early twentieth century predecessors; however, that fact has not immunized modern voters from political fraud. As late as the 1950s, political machines continued to exert influence over the election processes. For example, when Lyndon B. Johnson was running for the US Senate in Texas in 1948, the Democratic Party’s local machine is said to have secured votes through bribes, intimidation, and even ballot burning. When it appeared that Johnson had lost the election by only 112 votes, another 201 votes for him were suddenly found that gave the Senate seat to him.

The presidential election of 1960 has also long been believed to have been tainted by fraud. According to charges that have never been substantiated, associates of Joseph Kennedy , the wealthy father of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy , went through West Virginia doling out cash to local sheriffs in return for voter loyalty. It has also been charged that Kennedy received considerable support from dead voters in Chicago.

While electoral reforms and improved voting technology have offered the promise that voting fraud is in the past, allegations of fraud have continued. The US presidential election of 2000 and the congressional elections of 2002 were rife with accusations of voter intimidation and unconstitutional election practices. Even at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, at the time of the 2020 presidential election, the democratic process was overshadowed by what was seen by many as an organized effort to influence the election through claims of voting fraud. Because of the restrictions on activities such as in-person voting due to the public health crisis of the ongoing coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic that had been declared earlier that year, it was determined that, unlike in previous years, mail-in voting would be made widely available to all voters as an option for those who preferred not to go to polling places and risk potential exposure to the virus. In what many commentators perceived as an attempt to discredit the election's integrity and limit voting accessibility in his favor, Republican incumbent president Donald Trump repeatedly tried to spread the idea on social media as well as in debates leading up to the election that mail-in ballots would lead to massive instances of fraud; at some points, he made unsubstantiated and ultimately disproven claims that a number of ballots were being thrown out or sold. Following the declaration of his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, as president several days after Election Day, Trump's legal team launched legal challenges alleging widespread voter fraud, especially in states where the race had been close. Even as these legal challenges and investigations did not turn up any evidence to support those claims, and in early December Attorney General William Barr had announced the same conclusion, Trump and other Republican politicians continued to promote the claim and argue that the election had been "stolen," impeding the transition of executive power for weeks until Biden's inauguration in January 2021.

During the Biden administration, accusations of voting fraud continued. The calls remained especially strong among Republicans. In Florida in 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis made headlines when he announced that twenty people—who had all been convicted of a felony—had been arrested on charges of voting illegally in the 2020 elections, though most were later found to have done so unintentionally. Meanwhile, ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, officials in battleground states were on high alert for potential issues at the polls related to voting fraud. Individuals who have been swayed by election conspiracy theories and other misinformation were expected to make efforts at polling places to disrupt the election. Experts warned that, while numerous studies have shown voting fraud to be very rare, such allegations make it more difficult for those who are eligible to vote in the US to participate in elections safely and fairly.

Shortly before the 2022 midterm elections, AP News reported a large presence of misinformation campaigns on several social media platforms centered on spreading election-related misinformation, causing many to anticipate further interference in the 2022 midterms. However, after the polls had closed, the New York Times reported that the misinformation campaigns, which included allegations of voting fraud, had failed to take widespread root and that voting across the country was essentially free of any major incidents.

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