A week before Election Day, the “voter integrity” group True the Vote released a new smart phone app to empower its army of citizen detectives to report suspected incidents of voter fraud and intimidation across the country, in the hopes of creating, as True the Vote’s founder Catherine Engelbrecht put in an interview on Monday, “an archive that will finally pull the curtain back on the myth that there is no voter fraud.”
But it seems that the evidence of massive voter fraud that Engelbrecht hoped to expose failed to materialize. In the week that the app was available, users recorded only 18 incidents of election irregularities, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with True the Vote’s policy priorities.
Eight were incidents of voting machine malfunctions — a serious and persistent problem, but not the product of a voter fraud conspiracy. One was a report of the disorganization that left a number of Hartford, Connecticut, precincts missing their lists of voters.
Three reports were of suspected “voter intimidation” — one, a report of a camera in a polling place, another of an elderly woman who claimed a poll worker snatched her ballot out of her hands when she was done with it, and one from a Houston voter who was very concerned about an “African American woman” standing nearby while she voted:
Only one app user reported a suspected case of voter impersonation — the main bugaboo behind restrictive voter ID laws — an Iowan who reported getting a call about a rejected absentee ballot despite never having submitted one.
Ironically, one report to True the Vote’s app chronicled a voter’s struggle with an overly restrictive voting law that True the Vote supports. An Ohio voter reported casting a provisional ballot because they had moved since last voting. This voter would have been allowed to cast a ballot if Ohio permitted same-day voter registration, a practice that True the Vote opposes. The voter reported that a number of others in their precinct were experiencing the same problem:
It’s this voter’s experience that best represents the problems that thousands of Americans had casting votes that count yesterday. Texans struggled to present photo IDs acceptable under their state’s tough and deliberately discriminatory voting law. In North Carolina, a new restricting the precincts in which voters could cast ballots left people confused and unable to vote. In Georgia, a failure to process new voter registrations meant that many prospective voters were turned away from the polls.
Groups like True the Vote have raised the specter of widespread voter impersonation fraud in order to push for restrictive laws that make it harder for large segments of the population to vote. Their own app shows how wrong-headed they are.
