By Eric Redman

​One nearly unremarked failure of George W. Bush was his inability to persuade Republicans that U.S. demographic changes compelled the GOP to transform itself into a party that embraced Americans of all races and ethnicities. He tried. But once his PowerPoint presentations called attention to the demographics, GOP strategists figured it would simpler to hold onto power – at least for a few decades – just by denying various groups the ability to vote, at least at full strength.

​We’re all familiar with some of these denials: Voter ID laws (requiring forms of ID that, disproportionately, the less fortunate among us don’t possess). Challenges to key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Even gerrymandering is a form of voter suppression: Concentrating African-Americans and Hispanic voters in particular Congressional Districts, allowing them to elect one U.S. Representative by a huge margin rather than make several nearby districts competitive, has helped the GOP retain a U.S. House majority despite winning fewer popular votes than Democrats.

​Our GOP-leaning US Supreme Court has helped enable all this, upholding voter ID laws (in a case where Indiana admitted it had never found a single case of individual voter fraud) and striking down the Voting Rights Act’s central protections. The Act has so successfully enabled African Americans to vote that its protections are no longer needed, the Court reasoned – which is like saying reductions in highway fatalities mean we no longer need seatbelts and airbags.

​“Voter fraud,” with Trump’s “Election Integrity Commission” to root it out, is the latest GOP initiative to suppress votes. It will certainly produce great Fox News chyrons. For example, most of us neglect to inform election officials when we die. So dead people’s names often remain on the rolls for some time. “MILLIONS OF DEAD VOTERS STILL REGISTERED!” Fox News will blare. But most of us don’t leave the cemetery or columbarium on Election Day. The GOP and Fox News won’t mention that it’s okay, not fraudulent, for a registered voter, dead or alive, not to vote. (Dead people voting is a long-standing GOP fantasy, as in “My granddad lived in Chicago and voted Republican, but since his death he seems to have become a Democrat.”)

​The fact is that individual voter fraud is a myth. One can say this almost categorically. An isolated case may exist here and there. But in Nevada’s general election last year, the only person caught trying to vote twice was a Trump supporter hoping to prove it could be done.

There are reasons individual voter fraud is almost never attempted. The two key reasons: If caught (and nowadays you are going to get caught) you can go to prison for a long time, and even if you aren’t caught your second vote won’t affect the election outcome any more than your first. For an individual, voting twice is simply not a risk worth running, and perhaps more important, it’s an irrational way to spend time. The ratio of risk plus inconvenience to potential reward is basically infinite.

Remember, even voting the first time isn’t really rational, at least in any mathematical sense. Our one vote isn’t going to determine who wins – not once in a zillion elections. For each of us, voting is rational only as an act of civic participation, a demonstration of faith in democracy, a form of periodic communion and bonding with our fellow citizens.

Which is not to say that elections are never stolen. In the US, certainly, elections were sometimes stolen in the past, and election-stealing isn’t rare in some other countries. But crucially, when elections are stolen the place they are stolen is where votes are counted, not where they are cast. Stuffing the ballot box – in any form – occurs at election headquarters or further downstream within the government, not at the polling place. And the polling place is the only place where individuals can vote, whether in person or by mail.

In 1972, I witnessed a form of “ballot box stuffing,” essentially at first hand. The top McGovern staff in Rhode Island quit a few weeks before the election. Richard Paisner and I – law students at the time – were parachuted in to rescue the situation. Not to rescue McGovern, whose loss was inevitable, but to rescue Senator Claiborne Pell, a Democrat who would be unseated if too many citizens simply pulled the GOP “party lever” in voting machines. The only way to save Pell from that dreaded straight-party voting device was to try to slow the accelerating descent of the plummeting McGovern campaign, at least a bit. (Richard and I were asked to help because we’d worked for US senators who would lose their committee chairmanships if Democrats lost the Senate majority.)

Some Rhode Island voting procedures were charmingly quaint. For example, if a voting machine broke during the day, both Democratic and Republican poll watchers were allowed to see and record the machine’s interim totals before the repair person started work. Consequently, both parties trained and deployed designated voters to go break machines at 10 AM, 2 PM, and 6 PM, just to see how things were shaping up.

After the election Richard and I had coffee with Archibald Cox (not yet Watergate special prosecutor) and regaled him with campaign tales. Cox found politics fascinating. So Richard incautiously told Cox one especially colorful detail: “In some Providence voting districts,” Richard said, “McGovern received more votes than the number of registered voters. But, hey, McGovern lost Rhode Island and he lost the election. So, what’re you gonna do?”

Cox sat back in astonishment. “I certainly hope you know what you’re going to do,” he replied. I realized suddenly that I was late for an appointment, and left Richard to try to mollify the unbendingly principled Archibald Cox (never an easy task).

That 1972 voting fraud didn’t take place at the hands of individual voters. Total registration creates an absolute limit on votes cast at any polling place (think about it). The fraud took place where officials tallied and published totals from the voting machines. And that type of voting fraud is among those that all 50 states have since made impossible with elaborate controls, including against Russians and other would-be hackers online (Nevada’s precautions and controls are particularly impressive).

Conversely, however, many eligible US citizens who try to vote find themselves frustrated in their attempts. And this occurs even without any deliberate voter suppression.

Depending on the state, for example, registration may end by mid-October, before interest in the election has peaked; a citizen showing up for day-of-voting registration will be disappointed. Or if a name is spelled wrong on the registration rolls, in Nevada and most states the error can’t be corrected at the polls. (Even unintentionally, minority names may be misspelled disproportionately.) Mail-in ballots may not count unless received – not just postmarked – by Election Day (e.g., in Nevada). And “provisional ballots” seem designed primarily just to calm citizens who find themselves barred at the polls for one reason or another; only a tiny fraction of provisional ballots ever count (Nevada again).

The list goes on. (Hanging chads, anyone?) But it’s a list of inadvertent obstacles to voting, rules that each state adopts to make the jobs of overworked and hassled election officials manageable. After all, states care about their workers, and no state wants to spend more taxpayer money than necessary on semi-annual spikes in autumnal public employment.

Where we’re headed now is someplace different altogether. In the guise of preventing individual voter fraud – as noted, a type of fraud that basically doesn’t exist, primarily because it wouldn’t make sense as an individual activity – we are about to see massive new efforts to make voting more difficult for large swaths of American citizens. And you can guess which swaths.

Trump’s Election Integrity Commission will kick things off – probably with excited headlines about all those dead and relocated people still registered (but in whose names no votes are cast). Contrary to what one might suspect from Trump’s tweets, the Commission will not be trying to establish voter fraud in 2016 or the legitimacy of Trump’s election. They will be trying to assure his re-election, and preservation of the GOP Congress and GOP legislatures that, when it comes to voting, still seem determined to fix the game. So far, they’re succeeding. And so far, the Supreme Court is waving them on.

Individual voter fraud is a myth; a serviceable pretext for Trump, his Commission, and the GOP. Voter suppression is real. It tends to corrupt. And when it arrives, as it now will, on an even larger scale, in the voting procedures of every jurisdiction where more votes might conceivably defeat Republicans, it will corrupt absolutely.

Eric Redman, the author of “The Dance of Legislation” and a former contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine, is a one-time Senate aide. He has managed campaigns in Washington state and served as a volunteer in Nevada’s general election in 2016, as well as in Montana’s special Congressional election this year. He now lives in Seattle.

Feature photo: People vote during primary election day at Sahara West Library on Tuesday, April 4, 2017. Photo by Jeff Scheid.