If Frenchmen can do it, Americans can.
If Frenchmen can do it, Americans can.
W e got a one-election reprieve, but the problem remains: We Americans need to fix our voting system now.
Electoral shenanigans, from either political team or both, didn’t end up mattering very much in 2024 — because of a Trump landslide that saw Big Orange take 312 electoral votes to Vice President Harris’s 226 and apparently win the popular vote, while the GOP appears to have swept both the House and the Senate. But it’s worth remembering how many such shenanigans there were — the sheer number of crazy election stories that landed in the inbox of any pundit or consultant during this October and November.
In Iowa, for example, it was revealed that hundreds if not thousands of noncitizens have been voting in recent elections. According to “the state’s top election officials,” at least “87 Iowans without U.S. citizenship” illegally voted during the past few elections. Another 67 persons broke state election law by registering or being registered to vote “despite not being citizens.” These figures seem to represent very extreme undercounts: The citizenship status of at least 2,022 more Iowans known to have registered and in most cases to have voted “remains unclear” — but all individuals in that group “indicated to the state that they are not U.S. citizens” on at least one occasion.
Reading between the lines of some archetypally polite Midwestern newspaper pieces, voting by confirmed or probable noncitizens appears astonishingly prevalent in the Hawkeye State: “Of the state’s 1,700 precincts, the cases appear in roughly 700.” And, while those numbers might stand out, Iowa is hardly alone in this respect. In a bizarre case, Michigan officials just admitted that at least one Chinese exchange student cast a ballot simply by “using his identification from the University of Michigan,” and that there was no way to recover any such already-cast votes.
Even more disturbingly, during the 2024 election cycle, rabid partisans began for the first time to attack the public drop boxes used to collect ballots in many large American cities. The use of such drop boxes is itself almost universally condemned as bizarre by Europeans. Multiple different ballot drops were attacked across both Washington State and Oregon, with each attack visibly destroying hundreds of ballots. While the attackers on these occasions came from the left side of the political spectrum — the incendiaries used in several of the larger fires bore the legend “Free Gaza” — there is no reason that any Boogaloo Boy–style raider from any faction could not replicate these arson strikes at any time. The technique used was simplicity itself: Just toss oil and a bomb or lit match into a hot box full of paper.
Both of these problems exist alongside, and contribute to, a larger challenge. Simply put, there is no way to know the real rate of voter fraud in America, so long as the U.S.A. does not require citizens to vote in person or show an ID when they vote. One of the articles cited above argues that “in the 2016 election, officials only referred 30 suspected cases of non-citizens voting” to legal authorities across 40-plus large regional jurisdictions, and thus that fraudulent votes accounted for a paltry “0.0001% of . . . votes in that election.”
But, at some level, all this means is that very few foreign voters or other fraudsters got caught. Recall that a competently done scan-and-purge of the rolls in Iowa alone turned up almost two orders of magnitude more registered noncitizens than the number that The Experts™ discovered nationwide — fully 0.5 percent–1 percent of the state’s electorate in some off-year races. Saying that these folks do not exist because they have never been jailed is like saying that there cannot really be 1 million-plus daily users of The Pirate Bay and similar sites, because there are so few annual prosecutions for internet crimes.
The actual existence of thousands of hard-to-track, probably illegal voters in one single state brings us to a serious point about how actual, large-scale election fraud would take place. Historically, voter fraud has almost never been primarily a matter of a few drunks wandering into local churches and voting under a cousin’s name for “kicks.” Speaking as a political scientist (who grew up in a union family in Chicago), the most common sort of serious fraud has generally been what we might call “union slate.”
Allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, labor locals in my sainted home city were long known for keeping up-to-date rosters that contained the names of all citizen members and for then sending in proxies on Election Day to vote for those members who were on vacation, unavoidably tied up at job sites, or in some cases dead but not yet off the rolls. Today, a similar technique would involve automatically registering to vote anyone who qualifies for an individual or commercial driver’s license — a practice that exists in multiple states and is colloquially known as “Motor Voter” — and cheerfully encouraging that driver to vote while never running any serious background check for citizenship.
Significantly, this second process is not something that I am wildly hypothesizing. A 2023 editorial from the center-right Washington Examiner, based on Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) data, noted that 394 noncitizens were recently “MV” registered to vote in (again) Chicago . . . despite telling DMV or even “election officials that they were not citizens.” This group cast at least “85 ballots in real elections,” and stayed on the voter rolls for an average time of seven and a half years. Similar searches by PILF in other U.S. regions turned up 222 known foreign/illegal voters on the rolls in Maricopa County (Ariz.), 264 in California’s San Diego County, and 1,334 in Fairfax County (Va.). A remarkable 5,556 foreigners were apparently registered to vote across all of Virginia — most have been removed from the rolls following this study and other good work — “but only after 7,474 votes were cast illegally.”
Logically enough, the Examiner’s editors note that no foreign migrant who wanted to vote would voluntarily point out even his green-card status, while no migrants at all are likely to volunteer that they are illegal aliens, and so it stands to reason that “many multiples” of even these numbers just reported “are on . . . voter rolls.” Notably — as in the case of union-slate voting — illegal votes cast by most people in this category would be essentially impossible to track, absent a requirement to show current ID and preferably also to demonstrate U.S. citizenship. Under the current system in place in most states, a person with a name and address that is on the rolls simply walks into a polling place, provides that basic information, votes, and leaves.
Other new twists on the ancient business of voting, such as shipping ballots and envelopes to most homes in a large area and allowing citizens to send them back by mail, introduce still more unwanted complications to the electoral process.
So what is to be done? “RETVRN,” as the kids say. The obvious solution to most if not all of the issues described above is to do what the large majority of other Western democracies do, which is also what the U.S.A. did until roughly 18 minutes ago. Make citizens show up with current photo IDs (and very preferably with evidence that they are citizens) on the day of the damn election and vote in person. A recent viral tweet described the voting system in place during a major recent French race — in fact, their presidential election — thusly: “[You] take a piece of paper with the candidates’ names on it, place your choice inside an envelope, and then drop into box. Far too complicated for the US to ever embrace!”
If Frenchmen can do it, Americans can. And, all banter aside, we should do it immediately.