How Hard Is It to Rig an American Election?

The Cato Weekly Podcast

The episode explores the distinction between widespread election fraud claims and actual administrative irregularities within the American e

Key takeaways

• Thousands of court challenges regarding the 2020 election were uniformly found to have no evidence of widespread fraud.
• Outdated voter rolls can undermine public confidence even when they do not result in actual fraudulent votes being cast.

Main topics

• Election Fraud Claims
• Mail-in Balloting

Notable quotes

The more you know about the system, the less likely you are to think that it was actually crooked.

Conclusion

Maintaining high levels of public trust in electoral institutions is e

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) you Speaker 3 (0:04) While 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. Speaker 5 (0:14) The only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged. Remember that. It's the only way we're going to lose this election. Speaker 1 (0:23) Who won the 2020 election? You know, I'm not going to do this with you. Speaker 8 (0:28) I believe he knows he's an illegitimate president. Speaker 3 (0:31) Some common narratives include... voter registration fraud or purposefully miscounting votes, while others blame the system itself. Speaker 8 (0:40) You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you. Speaker 1 (0:50) 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 shenanigans happening. 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. Speaker 3 (1:13) 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. Speaker 3 (1:31) 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? Speaker 6 (2:03) A couple of reasons. First is that we have a president, Donald Trump, who has never given up trying to relitigate the 2020 election and who spreads every theory he 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 into 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 U.S., 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 crooked. It's very far from optimal, because I think we should be like those other countries and change our rules a little bit so that we get certainty on election night. But that's different from being dishonest. You know, the examples you will often hear the most are the ones that have bounced around the internet the most. You know, you can tell by my describing that Speaker 1 (3:18) way. The Speaker 6 (3:18) crazy internet. You know, these are not the most reliable single stories. 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, you know, they blow the whistle on the night of. And 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. Speaker 6 (3:50) 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 to 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 rolls in some states are clean and up-to-date. The voting rolls in other states are not clean and not up-to-date. as happened to a friend of mine, you can examine the voter rolls for your apartment building, which has a lot of old people in it, and realize they haven't canceled the registrations 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 rolls. And then it gets one degree worse, or maybe three or four degrees worse, if you're in a state that mails ballots to everyone. I'm kind of dubious about that practice. Not so much because it's going to cause elections to 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 Speaker 3 (5:26) of those Speaker 6 (5:26) 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 states that aren't doing it as well to learn from the best practices of the states that are doing it 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, you know, learn from their example. Speaker 3 (6:01) 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. Speaker 6 (6:13) Florida is kind of a moral lesson because, of course, in the year 2000, Florida was the laughingstock because it had the very close Bush-Gore election. The hanging chads. The hanging chads. A bunch of things were exposed as being very poorly thought out. 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 legislators got together. checked around the rest of the country for what was working best as different things. Florida