How Hard Is It to Rig an American Election?

0:00While the United States has a long history of peaceful democratic elections, questioning the legitimacy of election results has become a recurring feature of American politics. The only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged. Remember that. The only way we're going to lose this election. Who won the 2020 election? You know, I'm not going to do this with you. I believe he knows he's an illegitimate president. Some common narratives include voter registration fraud or purposefully miscounting votes, while others blame the system itself. You can run the best campaign. You can even become the nominee. And you can have the election stolen from you. I think the appearance of impropriety is enough to put questions and doubts on them. But for the most part, I really don't believe that there are a whole lot of synonygons

1:03happening. I do believe that election fraud is a problem in this country because there is not consistent custody between the ballot of the voter and the identification of the voter. But how hard is it really to rig an American election? Are any of these claims funded by evidence? Find out with us today. I'm Stephen Rowe. And this is the Cato Weekly Podcast. For this episode, I'm joined by Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, who has an amazing body of research on the American electoral system. Walter, welcome to the show. Glad to join you. Thank you for being here. Yes. And so let's dive into it. The biggest headline from your work seems to be that concerns about election fraud are overblown. If that's the case, why do fraud claims seem to hit all the news headlines? A couple of reasons.

2:04First is that we have a president, Donald Trump, who has never given up trying to re-litigate the 2020 election and who spreads every theory can about election fraud in an attempt to somehow prove that he actually won. But beyond that, there are aspects of how we do and how we report elections that seem to play in two people's fears. Just to name one, the way we count, a lot of countries, they know a final count by election night. And that means that people move on, in most cases. And in the US, it's state-by-state because states control how elections are done and some states count very slowly. To the point where they don't know who won a lot of races for a couple of weeks. And that feeds the suspicion. It's understandable and yet the more you know about the system, the less likely you are to think that it was actually a crooked. It's very far from optimal because I think we should be like those other countries and

3:06change our rules a little bit so that we get certain day-on-election tonight. But that's different from being dishonest. The examples you will often hear the most are the ones that are bounced around the internet the most. You can tell by my describe that way. These are not the most reliable single stories. When Trump or someone says that hundreds of thousands more votes were cast in a state than there are registered voters, that makes people sit up. Wait a minute, if it was that obvious, why didn't they blow the whistle on the night of it? Of course, the answer typically is because it didn't happen that way, because maybe you're comparing one database or one photograph of how many people in the state versus one taken at a different time. We know that of the 2020 claims, thousands of them went to court and the courts uniformly found that the results were not fraudulent. We also know that it was studied very extensively by people who are specialized in voting behavior, political scientists, election lawyers and others. And they concluded the same thing, which is that there was very little uncertainty as

4:11to how the different states came out. So that having been said, what you find though is that things that don't actually make a difference in the volume of fraud, get on people's nerves and often quite understandably get on people's nerves. For example, the voting roles in some states are clean and up to date. The voting roles in other states are not clean and not up to date so that you can, as happened to a friend of mine, you can examine the voter roles for your state, which has a lot of old people in it and realize they haven't canceled the rest of the restrictions of a bunch of people who have died. That saps the confidence in the system even though he found no evidence that any of them had voted, quote unquote, after their death. So not an integrity problem, but on the other hand, a very far from best practices problem because we should have current and up to date voter roles. And then it gets one degree worse or maybe three or four degrees worse if you're in a state that nails ballots to everyone. I'm kind of dubious about that practice, not so much because it's going to cause elections

5:16to be stolen as because it shakes public confidence for you to get a couple of ballots for people who moved out of state and the state hasn't somehow caught up with that. There's always one of those situations. Right. Or you've been divorced or your kid has moved out of the house or whatever. And the ballots arrive and the state doesn't seem to know it's one thing from its other thing. So that's where I say we are far from perfect in how we administer elections. And I like the states. We have this 50 state system. I like the states that aren't doing it as well to learn from the best practices of the states that are doing well. Because the fact is that almost every one of these practices, there are a bunch of states out there doing it very, very well. So let's learn from their example. Yeah. I mean, one of the beautiful things about this republic that we have is you can kind of copy the homework of other people that are doing it properly. And it's totally acceptable. There are states that are absolutely nailing this. Florida is kind of a moral lesson because of course in the year 2000, Florida was the

6:20laughing stock because it had the very close Bush Gore election and the hanging chat. The hanging chats, a bunch of things were exposed as being very poorly thought out, the ballot design and a bunch of other things. And so I guess sometimes if everyone is laughing at you, you clean up your act because with the Floridians, Republicans and Democrats got together governors and let us flush us out together, checked around the rest of the country for what was working best as different things. Florida turned itself from a somewhat dysfunctional voting system to one of the best. And I think that it continues to have some of the best results. Okay. Well, if other states are listening to this podcast, they have to see what Ford is doing because it seems to us that that's happening properly. And so I know you want one thing you also said is that elections, no elections are perfect, but irregularities and questioning the legitimacy of our electoral system altogether are not the same thing. Why do you think these rigged elections, quote unquote, claims seem more pervasive than

7:23ever? Well, as I say, you've got particular political forces. It's always hard to admit that you lost an election. And that's true across the board. And for everyone, it's just a human character. You have more because there is this attempt to go on really getting the 2020 election. But the what you don't have is evidence that there is actually more fraud. And let me talk a little bit about history because America is no shining example as far as behavior. It has had intimidation and violence at the polls to keep people from voting. It has had grossly unfair rules in many states that barred people from voting. And it has also had fraud and ballot box stuffing at different times. If you go back to the Guldedade so-called, the very corrupt period in the late 19th century, tons of it. And in fact, for a long time, there wasn't a secret ballot. Do you showed up and you had to take the ballot of one or the other party? And the bosses were sitting right there. That's intimidating.

8:24Right. So you didn't have the freedom of the private ballot, where it's just you and all on in the voting booth. So lots and lots of problems. And when you talk about stealing elections by in some way, switching or manufacturing votes, that continued with big city political machines down into around the 70s. Maybe a bit of it was going into the 80s. What is left is what I call low level fraud. And I'm going to start with the lowest level because people don't even think of it as fraud, which is a lot of people own more than one house. Yes. A vacation house. It is very tempting. I even happen to people I know, although I run with a very honest crowd, to check which has the more interesting election, the Euro vacation house or your other house in a different state. And the vote, the one with the election is more interesting. Make sure that you've registered, but a lot of people aren't very careful about making sure they're only registered in one of the two states, which is probably illegal.

9:26But so people don't see that two house sold fraud as being, you know, you want to put someone in jail for that, people just don't take it very seriously. And yet by numbers of instances of unauthorized votes being cast, that probably is the single largest number of crimes that we see committed. That's very interesting. That's. So that's minor and then it gets a little more major. I think of two or three recent or semi recent crimes that have actually been more or less proved. And they indicate a couple of things that I want people to know about the voting fraud that we do have, which is that it's mostly involving small amounts of votes in local races, most often primaries and nonpartisan races. Now why is that? Why would people be more likely to cast unlawful ballots in a nonpartisan or primary race? Well, it's because that's where if you can get away with 10 unlawful votes, you might actually change the outcome.

10:26Yeah. Infilted off voting. Yeah. Yeah. Infilted off here where there were convictions in one of the last of the great big city machine cases. They were generating some unauthorized votes from people they knew were going to show up and they had someone post as them. But the numbers were like dozens because that's all it took to elect one person to the party central committee rather than another. No way you're going to swing a Senate or a House race about changing a few dozen votes. Yeah. That makes sense. I actually want to throw one at you too, because this happens all the time when I'm reading comments on social media or we're hearing pundits on the news. They're saying claims have been more focused on foreign people being able to vote in federal elections, which is prohibited by law. Of course, US elections are for US citizens only. How many illegal votes are okay? I don't think a single person in this room, if they, if they really are being honest with yourselves, should, should agree that non-citizen should vote in American elections no matter where that election is up and down the ticket.

11:27Is this an issue that undermines American election integrity? You know, if it happened a lot, then the answer would be us. But this is one of the best studied issues there is. It has been studied on all sorts of different levels. You look at what prosecutions have there been. It looks almost nothing. Yeah. And when they geared up the one, the federal prosecutors in North Carolina were the one bunch that tried to gear up a bunch of prosecutions. And it was interesting because they got basically ones and occasionally twos. There was no organized effort. There was no one trying to get these foreign people to vote. And foreign people register. It is typically by mistake. And indeed, the sequel is often that they didn't realize they were registered. They are horrified because they realize that they're right to live her market revoked and has gotten revoked. So you've had, at this point, I think it's something like 15 or 20 states that have also done deliberate audits based sometimes on the initial seed lists of people who they suspect

12:34might have been illegal non-citizen voters. Now when they go through those lists, most of it evaporates. And the reason most of it evaporates is that lists are not perfectly up to date. So you get a lot of people who were naturalized in the last year who are showing up in the data base as not citizens. And it turns out they were naturalized in the Macast vote. So those melt away, they don't melt away to zero. And in these states, Ohio, Louisiana, many others that have done that kind of audit, they do discover one. I believe that you discover some of it. I believe Ohio is the highest number. And they found at least in the hundreds of votes successfully cast. And of course, because each state is somewhat different in its security measures, some will lot more through than others. I think it was Utah that said we found two. Now Utah likes to be proud of these things because it's got this very advanced. It seems like it's this high-tech system. They're playing things out of scale. Well, they take a lot of skills. So seriously. Yeah, I mean, you're not even supposed to joke about them.

13:35But anyway, so, but a couple of things we conclude from that, which is, yes, where it is happening, it's worth paying attention to see if we can further reduce it. And I've even got ideas about that. But secondly, it's not changing outcomes for the racist people care about. It's not changing seats from one party to another. I see no evidence in the last 30 years that any federal seat for in the House of Representatives or elsewhere has been changed from one party to another. Even during periods where states that didn't have as good methods in cracking down on best. Because there probably was more of this that went on 30 years ago than now just because all the techniques were less good for catching it. Yeah, that makes sense. We've gotten a lot better at it. And I want to hit another topic because some blame the risk of fraud on mail-in ballots. I'm very skeptical about everybody getting mail-in ballots. I think anytime that you're not showing up to the poll and showing your ID, there is a

14:44higher risk. In the instance of places that don't require ID, when you cast your vote verifying who you are and that you're currently on the voter roll. In the case of mail-in ballots, it's even worse. Those should be used rarely and with additional layers of documentation. While others also add that implementing voter ID laws will prevent fraud from happening at all. I always say to people, okay, do you think that the amount of election fraud is 0%. No one thinks that. Yeah. No one thinks it's zero. Democrats really don't think that there's any cheating. Give us voter ID. What are some important considerations around those two things? Mail-in ballots, voter ID laws. I'll start with mail-in ballots and mail-in ballots spread partly because during the pandemic there was a very real concern about congregating on election day or early voting and mail-bellots seem to offer the right solution preferred by most people.

15:45That haven't been said. I caution people over the little about mail-bellots. Oregon and other Western states started them first. People recall that they had to go through quite a few election cycles before they ironed all of the kinks out of it. So there was more chaos than there should have been. There was less planning. And then it became this ideological thing. People believed that if you wanted to go slow, you were in favor of voter suppression. Well, no, that's not a good way to analyze that. Most of these issues are a balance of conveniences. We can allow more mail-belloting, but we should plan for a totally different staff skill to deal with mail-bellots that may be coming in two through weeks earlier. And just to finish off, for the moment, on mail-bellots, Oregon does something that I really like, which says, you've got to have your mail-bellot in by election day. And please, the state wants you to be a good citizen by mailing it a few days early, so that we aren't dealing with the mountain on election day.

16:46Well, this is public-spirited. It's one of the reasons why Oregon gets good results out of mail. It wants it to be a shared responsibility where the voter feels that they are helping the system work well, rather than certain other states. And I'm not going to talk about which ones they are, but certain other states, people have concluded, oh, great, they sent me a ballot. I'll drop it off at 730 in the evening on election day. And then they may not realize that they may think that the voting machines and the booth can just run the machine through. That's not how most mail-bellot-tapleting works. It's going to take someone. And that's why they're there two weeks later. So again, if you were a voter, try to be public-spirited and learn what your administrators are hoping you will do as far as methods you use. Big sign. Yeah. Now, you asked about a second. Like it one was on voter ID laws, but on the mail-in ballot one, it really is like, as it courtesy to others, leave it better than you found it, which is just giving people advanced notice. And then you could come an hour earlier and we could count this faster.

17:48With voter ID, I like to let people down easy because it's not the huge, huge issue as far as results either way. And I'll cut to the chase on the studies that economists have done, which is to look at states that have strong voter ID and states that don't. And they found the states that have strong voter ID don't seem to have reduced fraud particularly. You have this rather loud argument between the conservative saying you're soft on fraud and liberal saying you're soft on voter suppression. You don't care whether people are discouraged by difficult rules. Well, please, everyone, calm down and lower your voices because there isn't a lot of evidence that's making that. I myself have come to be a little pro picture ID on the spot for a couple of reasons. First I talked to election administrators and a lot of them say, book, even if it doesn't make a difference on fraud, the line moves faster if people are showing picture ID. Just more efficient. It's easier than the other things.

18:49Like, please sign this and we'll compare your signature with comparing signatures. It's so unscientific. The person has just had a hand injury. They're not signing the same way. Or the original signature was 10 years ago and that's basically we get old. My signatures changed over time. A lot of the alternatives in ID verification, all these things are imperfect. Some people act nervous no matter what they're doing. If the picture ID helps the one move faster, then it takes us to a couple of other policy issues, which is how can we guarantee everyone a picture ID so that they won't, because it's just the fact that they're not a driver won't keep them, won't hassle them too much when they're voting. There are ways in which you can make a customer friendly ID system, which will also be administrator friendly. I like that idea, but it's partly because I don't invest emotionally in the screaming match between your soft on fraud and your soft on voter suppression. That's very, very, very fascinating. People just need to look at the data.

19:50It's very interesting that you're citing that. I think in common discourse, you're not seeing that as a part of any side's argument. I do want to get to one other thing though. And basically it's, are there any other claims that you think are worth addressing? Because in the era of social media and 24, seven news in the palm of our hands, what about media bias or foreign interference? Is there any credible new evidence that could emerge at the 2020 election was stolen? No, this is pure fantasy, of course. He lost the election by more than seven million votes to Joe Biden. There was an effort in 2016 of foreign forces, specifically Vladimir Putin, to interfere in our election. And there was overwhelming evidence brought forward by our intelligence agencies. And Donald Trump rejected that overwhelming evidence. If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late, we're looking

20:51at them very strongly. But a lot of votes came in late. I've already decisively won many critical states, including massive victories in Florida. I'd love for you to comment on those two things. Media bias, I'm going to say, is present. It has been present throughout American history. There is nothing new under the sun as far as the fact that you're going to get. And in some ways, of course, our first amendment means that we get the upside of this, which is that we can see a range of different unfair partisan views. And somewhere in the middle, we might be able to detect something that they agree is true. But it is frustrating. Foreign interference is also interesting. And it also dates back to the founding period. Because if you look at the Federalist papers, they were super worried about foreign powers exercising various types of influence over the President or Congress. So that's been tried for a long time. I will say as general rule that don't worry about the voting machines.

21:52The idea that someone is beaming off a satellite, and honestly, the things that I hear. Because I have to follow this 24 hours a day. But they really believe that psychic beams are being sent in boundstaff Elon Musk satellites and are changing. You really have to believe in something higher than God to believe all of these things. And that it's all being done by some combination of the former Venezuela dictator. Yes. And the Chinese. That's not not the part of foreign interference that I do think we should always be keeping half an eye on. It is softer influence in which they, and we saw it, you know, we saw it certainly in the 2016 election in which the Russian intelligence agencies had gotten their hands on a bunch of sensitive material and released it in certain ways. And we've seen it from other powers at other times in other elections. And worth knowing about, we don't want that kind of manipulation to be going on in the

22:55United States. I don't always have that many occasions to agree with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, but he had the single best answer because someone came out with a report that foreign power was influencing some American election. I think in the direction that he would have wanted as far as wanted in the sense of the candidate that he liked. And he just gave very flat statements saying, this is a threat to America for this to happen. We should all be against it just as equally whether we like or dislike the candidate. We must not stand for it because we're Americans. I like that quote. And I'm imagining Bernie Sanders right now. This must not happen. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he's got that manner too. Yes. Oh, he's great. I think he's got that kind of a great question for you. Why is it important to have a certain degree of faith in our electoral institutions? If faith is undermined without good reason, that is if the institutions are working properly and yet people are convinced they're not. Whole bunch of bad things happen. People do not trust the legitimacy of the next government that gets elected.

23:58And from that flow, a lot of bad things as far as believing, perhaps, the laws they've enacted may not be binding that we can defy or ignore laws because it wasn't a real Congress or the president who signed it wasn't a real president. And so you can quickly get to not the kind of energy that you see in utopias where everyone minds their own business, but energy in the sense that things break down. The rule of law breaks down if people don't believe the laws have been properly enacted. And beyond that, you get distrust within communities. This is all, of course, done locally. And because it is done locally to bring into question the conduct of elections means painting some of your neighbors and often the ones that have been involved in community activities for a long time because that's who tends to be the volunteers, the election judges and so forth. And then we're seeing them as in some big conspiracy against you.

25:00And that undermines the trust. You know, economists, political scientists, others talk about high trust versus low trust societies. Believe me, you want to live in a high trust society because everything from how stores treat you and you treat stores to how your neighbors treat you and you treat neighbors, that all works so much better in a high trust society. And this is so symbolic. I think the libertarians too, a high trust society means the world. The libertarians in particular have so much at stake with high trust society. If they want private ordering, then private ordering is going to work so much better in a high trust society. A dear to McCluskey is written about this beautiful. Oh, incredible. Well, at the end of the day, even though no election process is flawless, identifying and addressing real problems versus dismissing the outcome of an election are very different. Our ability to choose our leaders through free and fair elections is the foundation of any democratic society.

26:02Ricking a major American election would require a level of coordination and evidence as we've talked about that has never been demonstrated when the evidence shows an election was conducted fairly, protecting that legitimacy is part of protecting that democratic process itself. Walter, thank you so much for joining us today. You are a real treasure. Thank you so much for having me on. Absolutely. And thank you for listening to the Cato Weekly Podcast. If you enjoyed today's discussion, please subscribe, smash that like button, and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about the ideas and research discussed here, visit kato.org. The Cato Weekly Podcast is a production of the Cato Institute dedicated to advancing individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. Join us next time for more insights and conversations on the issues shaping our world.