With election season underway, you’re bound to hear from former President Donald Trump that an army of undocumented immigrants is trying to vote in the presidential election. You may hear from Democrats that GOP efforts to pass new voting laws is a form of voter suppression.
Despite that rhetoric, you might be surprised to hear the argument that voting in the US — the act of casting a ballot and the guarantee it will be counted — is better now than at any time in the country’s history.
That’s what you’ll get from David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan and nonprofit group that gets most of its funding from charitable foundations and aims to improve and build confidence in US elections.
I had a long phone conversation with Becker, a former senior attorney in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division who has been working for decades to improve US elections. Our conversation, edited for length, is below:
Actually, voting in the US is better than ever
WOLF: Your first point in talking about US elections is that the system we have is really good and has never been better. Explain that.
BECKER: The fact is, our elections right now — as voters are thinking about whether it’s worthwhile to cast a ballot in this election — our elections right now are as secure, transparent and verifiable as they’ve ever been.
From the security perspective, we have more paper ballots than ever before. Paper ballots are a best practice. They’re auditable, they’re recountable, they’re verifiable by voters, and well over 95% of all voters will be voting on paper in 2024.
We have more audits of those ballots, which confirm the machines work. Those audits are hand counts of ballots to make sure that those counts match what the machine said.
We have more preelection litigation that confirms the rules of the election than ever before. We have better voter lists than ever before, thanks to states having better technology and better data and sharing that data with each other. And then finally, we have more post-election litigation that confirms the results.
We saw that in 2020 where, despite dozens of cases and with additional cases that have been brought in the years afterwards regarding defamation and otherwise, there’s still not been a shred of evidence brought to any court in the country that would indicate that there was a problem with the 2020 election.
So we know the results are accurate.
The other half of that is from the voters’ perspective, it’s easier to participate than ever before. More voters have access to early voting than ever before: 97% of all voters will have the ability to cast an early ballot — everyone except those living in the states of Alabama, Mississippi and New Hampshire.
Voters in 36 states plus DC will have the ability to vote by mail without any excuse if they want to.
Voters will find, if they want to participate, regardless of who they’re voting for, that it’s going to be an easy process, that they’re going to find it rewarding, that the results will be verifiable. In fact, despite some rhetoric about long lines, evidence suggests almost every voter waits less than 30 minutes in line.
If voters out there are wondering whether to participate, what I’d say is try it, and you’ll see it’s a very easy, convenient, rewarding process.
So why is faith in US elections down?
WOLF: At the same time, polling has shown — and not just in the Trump era, but going back to 2000 — that confidence has fallen, accelerated by Trump, but people have less confidence. If the system is getting better, but people have less faith in it, how can that dynamic be changed?
BECKER: First of all, the data I’ve seen — and I’ve been looking at this since at least 1998 — suggests that there actually has been a radical transformation in voter confidence during the Trump era; that if you looked prior to Trump, what we often saw was that overall voter confidence would remain fairly high, but oftentimes the losing sides’ voters would have less confidence than the winning side.
So in 2004, Republicans were more confident than Democrats. In 2008, it was reversed, but overall it was about the same.
What we’ve seen in the intervening years since Trump has come on the scene is that the constant lies about our election system have had an effect, but only with his hardcore supporters. So a significant percentage of the Republican Party, likely a majority of the Republican Party currently, has serious doubts about the outcomes of elections.
The problem with addressing that, and it’s important to try to address that, is you can’t address it by succumbing to the lies. You have to address the reality of election security and work from there, rather than the fantasy that has been created by losing candidates.
And so we’ve seen places, states actually harm their election integrity by succumbing to lies, doing things like leaving the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which helps them keep their voter lists up to date.
Several states led by Republicans left that consortium in the last couple of years, and their voter lists are going to be less accurate, which means they’re going to have more problems at the polling place during election season.
Are voters needlessly being culled from voter rolls?
WOLF: We have reported at CNN on efforts to purge or clean voter rolls. There’s been a fair amount of concern raised that people who are legitimately registered will be purged. Are you worried about that?
Most of the states are required to conduct regular list maintenance under federal law. All states do list maintenance in some ways, and that’s because we as a society are highly mobile. About a third of all American voters will move in a given four-year period of time.
If someone moves out of the state, it’s proper that that voter registration be flagged and ultimately removed because they’re no longer an eligible voter in that state. That’s a normal process that happens in every single state, blue and red.
In general, states do their best to get that right.
I think one of the troubling trends I’m seeing is that hyper-partisans in some states are announcing their normal voter list maintenance … very close to an election, as if it’s something unusual, as if it’s some vast anti-fraud effort to try to take credit for that on a partisan basis and perhaps influence the upcoming election.
A good example of this is in Texas recently … they had undergone three years of list maintenance, removed about a million voters. That’s a very normal number for Texas. There are no red flags that I’ve seen, but that took place over a three-year period, and they just recently announced it as if it was a recent development — and it gives voters the false impression that it’s designed to influence the upcoming election, rather than it was just part of their normal activity.
Is an army of poll watchers coming to disrupt voting?
WOLF: Something else we expect is that Republicans, in particular, are organizing poll watchers in a way that we haven’t seen recently. What are poll watchers, and how do we expect them to be deployed differently this year by the parties?
BECKER: First of all, poll watchers are a normal, constructive aspect of our election system. In every jurisdiction, poll watchers from both parties, from the candidates, from the campaigns, are allowed to watch various parts of the process. Could be voting, could be vote-counting, but they also have to adhere to rules so they don’t interfere with that process.
But when poll watchers might, in this divisive environment, think that they have somehow been deputized as vigilantes in polling places or vote-counting centers, we could have problems.
With regard to this upcoming election, I would say it’s actually not a new thing, that we’ve heard the Republican Party say that they’re going to recruit an army of poll watchers. They have literally said this in almost every presidential election since I’ve been doing this work, and it’s never materialized.
It could be that claims of recruiting an army of poll watchers is an attempt to intimidate some voters. And yet it’s hard to organize watchers at the national level and deploy them all over the country.
I’m skeptical that they will actually be successful in doing so, and even if they are, I am confident that election officials and law enforcement will enforce the laws of the state to make sure that they perform their function, which is to be eyes and ears … but definitely not to interfere with voters.
Americans already prove citizenship in order to vote
WOLF: There are efforts in some states and at the national level to change the way in which people would prove their citizenship in order to register to vote. Why not just do that?
BECKER: We have to understand all of the protections in place to make sure that noncitizens don’t vote in this country.
First, it’s against the law. It has been against the law for decades.
Second, and most people aren’t aware of this, under federal law, every single voter who registers to vote has to provide ID when they register … a driver’s license number or a motor vehicles number. Think about what every person has to provide when they go there for the first time. They have to show proof of legal presence and proof of residence. For most people, that is a US birth certificate or US passport. The state has that information.
Lastly, think about the deterrence effect for noncitizens, whether they’re documented or undocumented, against illegal voting. If they’re undocumented, they might have come here under great risk and great stress for whatever reasons they thought were important. … If they registered to vote or cast a ballot, they would be risking deportation for the right to cast one additional ballot in an election in which 160 million ballots are going to be cast. It would be painting a big bull’s-eye on themselves.
We know that this system that we have in place is effective. States have routinely done checks for noncitizens in just the last couple of years. They found literally zero noncitizens to cast a vote. Even Texas had found only 0.03% possible noncitizens. And based on previous activity in the last few years, it’s likely that every single one of those had been recently naturalized.
So why would we enact a law that’s effectively a “show me your papers” act that basically says to every citizen in the United States, we know you’ve already shown your papers to the DMV. We know you’ve already shown your papers to state agencies, but we’re going to require you to go back out and get your papers again, keep showing them to us.
Another question that I think is legitimately raised about some of the recent claims is the timing. The recent bill that was brought in the House was introduced in the summer of this year, just months before a major presidential election, when, even if it was a good idea, would have been impossible to implement in time for the presidential election.
If this was a serious problem for which there was evidence … why didn’t those who claim that noncitizen voting is a problem bring this up in 2020 or 2021, or even better in 2017, when they had a president in power who is apparently very sympathetic to their views? And the reason is because this is about politics, not policy. … It’s an attempt to set the stage for claims after the election that the election was stolen if their preferred candidate loses.