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 is preparing to use Big Lie 2.0 to shut down our government this fall, believing it will 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. 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.
It is a phrase they essentially invented, although it was occasionally used by the Confederacy during its later years when they tried to suppress poor white voters who opposed that oligarchy.
Former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s Arizona arm of Operation Eagle Eye was one of dozens of such formal and informal Republican voter suppression operations that exploded across the United States that year. As “The New York Times” noted on October 30, 1964:
“Republican officials have begun a massive campaign to prevent ‘vote fraud’ in the election next Tuesday, a move that has caused Democrats to cry ‘fraud.’ The Republican plan, Operation Eagle Eye, is designed, according to party officials, to prevent Democrats from ‘stealing’ the 1964 election. Republicans charge that the election was stolen in 1960.”
Keep in mind, this was novel back then. The “voter fraud” Big Lie was brand new. Nobody had been talking about “voter fraud” outside of a few southern states for a century; the phrase usually appeared in quotation marks as it was so unusual. The 1964 Times article continued:
“The Democratic National Chairman, John M. Bailey, has criticized the Republican plan as ‘a program of voter intimidation.’ He has sent a protest to all 50 state Governors and has alerted Democratic party officials throughout the country to be on their guard. ‘There is no doubt in my mind,’ Mr. Bailey wrote the state chairmen yesterday, ‘that this program is a serious threat to democracy as well as to a Democratic victory on November 3rd.’”
But that was about it for the media taking on this particular Republican lie.
In the sixty years since then, with the exception of the past year or two, no major American news media has seriously challenged the Republican “voter fraud” lie. Even though for the last few decades they have routinely used it for blocking minority and woman voters, and purging voting rolls the way, for example, Brian Kemp and Ken Paxton just did in Texas and Georgia in preparation for this November.
No other developed country in the world worries about “voter fraud” because it’s every bit as nonexistent in other modern democracies as it is here. The only country in the world that uses “voter fraud” as an excuse to make it harder for minorities and women to vote is the United States.
Most countries don’t even have what we call voter registration, because they don’t need or want a system to try to cut back on the number of people who can vote.
If you’re a citizen, you vote. You just show up and vote; in many countries because you’re a citizen they simply mail you the ballot and you vote by mail. Everybody gets one.
After all, what kind of idiot is stupid enough to risk going to prison to cast one vote out of millions? What immigrant wants to draw the attention of law-enforcement by voting? What possible payoff is there to that?
And the one time somebody tries to commit voter fraud at scale — like the Republican scheme a few years ago in North Carolina to buy a few dozen mail-in ballots from low income people in a trailer park — it gets exposed because it’s almost impossible to cover things like that up. Not to mention that it would take thousands of votes in most places, sometimes tens of thousands, to alter election outcomes.
In all the intervening years since Republicans began this continuous and relentless attack claiming that “voter fraud” was happening in Black and Hispanic communities across America, our media has been totally asleep at the switch.
Most even behave as if the GOP’s phony claims of “voter fraud” are legitimate, so they continue to aggressively use them to make voting hard, reject mail-in signatures, and purge voting rolls.
Which brings us to Trump’s iteration of Big Lie 2.0 that we’ll all be talking about soon.
He demanded that Republicans insert into must-pass budget legislation that’ll be considered in a provision that would demand 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.
If non-citizen voter fraud was an actual problem, such legislation might make a small amount of sense, but it’s already a felony in every state for non-citizens to cast a ballot. The simple reality is that there’s never been a non-citizen “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. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, one third of all women have citizenship documents that do not identically match their current names primarily because of name changes at marriage. 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 non-citizen “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 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 their 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 they 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.
And it’s all based on the lie that there are non-citizens voting, which is total BS.
Expect this “voter fraud” Big Lie 2.0 to burst onto the scene with much sturm and drang — and pontificating Republicans trying to act like Very Serious People as they ring their hands about non-citizens 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:
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” he cynically lied, “but it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number.”
There is a way to put an end to this Republican scam, though: a way to fight back.
Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walz are all taking a lesson from FDR’s economic policies, and they’ve put our economy back together after the damage Bush and Trump did with their stupid austerity and tax cuts for billionaire donors. They should take a similar lesson from FDR when it comes to calling out Republican lies like “voter fraud.”
Here is FDR’s take on this GOP strategy, as he shared in 1944 with a group of UAW auto workers, complete with his suggestion about how to confront Big Lies the first time Republicans rolled them out:
“The [Republican] opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad. “Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, ‘Mein Kampf,’ written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book—and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan. According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible — if only you keep repeating it over and over and over again.”
When Donald Trump started squealing about the 2020 election being “stolen” after his wipe-out 7-million-vote loss and being crushed in the Electoral College, the media ignored FDR’s warning and treated Trump’s Big Lie 1.0 claim like a joke for more than a year.
As a result — just like Roosevelt predicted — it is 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 non-citizen 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 is 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 is 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.
Alex Brandon (AP) and Yuki Iwamura (via Shutterstock)
© Thom Hartmann, used with permission. Originally published on The Hartmann Report as Trump & the GOP’s Big Lie 2.0: Their Plan to Shut Down America This Fall
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