Opinion | The deep ironies in the GOP’s war on ‘voter fraud’

Another person has been sentenced for committing voter fraud during the 2020 election — and once again it was on behalf of a Republican candidate. An Iowa woman named Kim Taylor was sentenced to four months in prison Monday after a federal jury convicted her last year on more than 50 counts of voter fraud as part of a scheme to help her husband in a congressional primary and a county supervisor race.

No matter what former President Donald Trump claims, actual incidents of voter fraud are extremely rare. Those instances that have come to light in the aftermath of the 2020 election are nowhere near widespread enough to swing a presidential election, let alone most down-ballot races. Taylor’s case, one of those rare instances, highlights one supreme irony of the GOP’s obsession with voter fraud: many of the cases of knowing fraud that have been prosecuted since then have had Republicans as the perpetrators.

According to prosecutors, Taylor helped fill out voter registrations and absentee ballots for members of the Vietnamese American community and their families in Woodbury County, Iowa. Taylor, who is of Vietnamese descent, took advantage of the state’s absurd law that all election material can only be printed in English to pretend that she was simply assisting voters with their forms. In fact, she was abusing their trust to increase her husband’s vote totals.

Taylor’s case is a real example of the sort of fraud that right-wing grifters have insisted is rampant among Democrats. In reality, many of those supposed cases are the entirely legitimate use of drop boxes and other approved early voting techniques in areas that lean Democratic. Other Trump supporters have been caught trying to vote more than once, including multiple residents at Florida’s retirement community The Villages. Still others have been caught trying to cast votes in the names of their dead spouses or family members, one of whom was initially a right-wing cause célèbre after claiming someone had stolen his dead wife’s absentee ballot. And just last month, a former election official in Milwaukee was found guilty of voter fraud for using her position to get obtain fraudulent absentee ballots and send them to a Republican state lawmaker who’d boosted Trump’s election lies.

More often though, we’ve seen that votes cast illegally not because of deliberate fraud, but due to constraints on voting rights for the formerly incarcerated. Crystal Mason, a Texas woman whose five-year sentence for voter fraud was recently overturned by an appeals court, testified that when she cast a ballot in 2018 that she was unaware that she was ineligible to vote. And since Florida formed its Office of Election Crimes and Security in 2022, most of its targets have likewise been people who’d voted after being told that they were allowed to do so only to learn otherwise when arrested.

Even on that front, Republicans have found themselves on the wrong side of these restrictions. Most recently, a judge ruled that Brian Pritchard, the first vice chairman of Georgia’s Republican Party, had violated state election law. Between 2008 and 2010, Pritchard voted nine times while on probation for a felony sentence, which is not allowed in Georgia. You’d think this might provoke sympathy or some kind of reconsideration of those restrictions from other Republicans, but his fellow election deniers have instead chosen to throw him under the bus.

The second deep irony of the GOP’s hunt for mass voter fraud is how much it’s detracting from the party’s efforts to win legitimately. The recent Trumpian shakeup at the Republican National Committee put former Trump lawyer Christina Bobb in charge of the group’s Committee of Election Integrity. That committee was set up in response to Trump’s claims, even as RNC lawyers have warned against the kind of voter suppression activity that got Republicans barred from running “ballot security” in polling places from 1982 until just six years ago. It’s also undercut the real work of verifying election security, as multiple GOP-led states have withdrawn from the Electronic Registration Information Center, which helped prevent actual voting fraud as people move between states.

Those efforts at fearmongering about voter fraud are unlikely to bring in more Republican votes. That’s in contrast to the efforts to encourage mail-in voting — efforts that the RNC has recently shuttered. Officials who understand that getting people to lock in their votes early ahead of Election Day can make or break a campaign are facing enormous pushback, thanks to Trump’s lies. “I think Trump can win Erie County, but I have to get Republicans to accept the mail-in ballot,” Tom Eddy, head of the Pennsylvania county’s Republican Party, recently told NBC News.

That brings me though to a most disturbing conclusion: The insistence that mass voter fraud exists can be used by individual Republicans to justify committing voter fraud. After all, if the assumption is that Democrats are busy stuffing ballot boxes, why shouldn’t conservatives follow suit to supposedly even the score? And any GOP losses thanks to a lack of trust in early voting are more than likely to be chalked up to fictional voter fraud. It’s a self-sustaining cycle that would require real leadership from the top to counter. Unfortunately, there’s not much chance that Republicans stop projecting their claims onto Democrats, no matter how many of them get caught red-handed committing fraud themselves.