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Cato Weekly Podcast: Is American Election Fraud a Real Threat?

Host: Stephen Rowe Guest: Walter Olson, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies

Stephen Rowe (narration): 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.

Archival clip — Donald Trump: 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.

Archival clip — Sen. Jon Ossoff: Who won the 2020 election?

Archival clip — Jay Clayton: I’m not going to do this with you.

Archival clip — Hillary Clinton: I believe he knows he’s an illegitimate president.

Stephen Rowe (narration): Some common narratives include voter registration fraud or purposefully miscounting votes, while others blame the system itself.

Archival clip — Hillary Clinton: You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you.

Archival clip — unidentified speaker: 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.

Stephen Rowe (narration): But how hard is it really to rig an American election? Are any of these claims funded by evidence? Find out with us today.

Stephen Rowe: I’m Stephen Rowe, and this is the Cato Weekly Podcast. 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. Thank you for being here.

Walter Olson: Glad to join you. Yes.

Stephen Rowe: 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?

Walter Olson: A couple of reasons. First is that we have a president, Donald Trump, who has never given up trying to re-litigate 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. In the US, 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 can tell by my describing it that way that these are not the most reliable single stories. When 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 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 are in the state, versus one taken at a different time. 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 so. For example, the voting rules in some states are clean and up to date. The voting rules in other states are not clean and not up to date, so that — as happened to a friend of mine — you can examine the voter rolls for your apartment building, which has a lot of people in it, and realize they haven’t canceled the registrations of a bunch of people who have died. That saps 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 biased about that practice, not so much because it’s going to cause elections to be stolen, but because it shakes public confidence when you get a couple of ballots for people who moved out of state and the state hasn’t caught up with that. There’s always one of those situations — 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 versus its other thing. So that’s where I say we are far from perfect in how we administer elections, and I like — we have this 50-state system — I like the states that aren’t doing it as well to learn from the best practices of the states that are doing 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 learn from their example.

Stephen Rowe: 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.

Walter Olson: There are states that are absolutely nailing this. Florida is kind of a moral lesson, because of course, in the year 2000, Florida was the laughing stock — it had the very close Bush-Gore election and the hanging chads, and a bunch of things were exposed as being very poorly thought out, the ballot design and a bunch of other things. And so I guess sometimes if everyone is laughing at you, you clean up your act. The Floridians — Republicans and Democrats got together, governors and legislators got together, checked around the rest of the country for what was working best, and Florida turned itself from a somewhat dysfunctional voting system into one of the best. And I think it continues to have some of the best results.

Stephen Rowe: Okay, well, if other states are listening to this podcast, they have to see what Florida’s doing, ’cause it seems that that’s happening properly. And so — I know you also said that no elections are perfect, but irregularities and questioning the legitimacy of our electoral system altogether are not the same thing. Why do you think these “rigged elections,” quote unquote, claims seem more pervasive than ever?

Walter Olson: Well, as I say, you’ve got particular political forces — it’s always hard to admit that you lost an election, and that’s true across the board, for everyone. It’s just human character. You have more, because there is this attempt to go on relitigating the 2020 election. But what you don’t have is evidence that there is actually more fraud. Let me talk a little bit about history, because America is no shining example as far as behavior — it has had intimidation and violence at the polls to keep people from voting. It has had grossly unfair rules in many states that barred people from voting. And it has also had fraud and ballot-box stuffing at different times. If you go back to the Gilded Age, so-called, the very corrupt period in the late 19th century — tons of it. In fact, for a long time there wasn’t a secret ballot. You showed up and you had to take the ballot of one or the other party, and the bosses were sitting right there. So you didn’t have the freedom of the private ballot, where it’s just you alone in the voting booth. So lots and lots of problems.

And when you talk about stealing elections by, in some way, switching or manufacturing votes, that continued with big-city political machines down into around the seventies, maybe a bit of it going into the eighties. What is left is what I call low-level fraud, and I’m going to start with the lowest level, because people don’t even think of it as fraud, which is: a lot of people own more than one house — a vacation house. It is very tempting — it even happened to people I know, although I run with a very honest crowd — to check which has the more interesting election, your vacation house or your other house in a different state, and then vote in the one where the election is more interesting. A lot of people aren’t very careful about making sure they’re only registered in one of the two states, which is probably illegal, but people don’t see that household fraud as something you’d want to put someone in jail for — people just don’t take it very seriously. And yet, by number of instances of unauthorized votes being cast, that probably is the single largest category of these crimes we see committed.

Stephen Rowe: That’s very interesting.

Walter Olson: So that’s minor. And then it gets a little more major. I think of two or three recent, or semi-recent, crimes that have actually been more or less proved, and they indicate a couple of things I want people to know about the voting fraud that we do have — which is that it’s mostly involving small amounts of votes in local races, most often primaries and nonpartisan races. Now, why is that? Why would people be more likely to cast unlawful ballots in a nonpartisan or primary race? Well, it’s because that’s where, if you can get away with 10 unlawful votes, you might actually change the outcome. In Philadelphia, where there were convictions in one of the last of the great big-city-machine cases, they were generating some unauthorized votes from people they knew were going to show up, and they had someone pose as them — but the numbers were like dozens, because that’s all it took to elect one person to the party central committee rather than another. There’s no way you’re going to swing a Senate or a House race by changing a few dozen votes.

Stephen Rowe: Yeah, that makes sense. I actually want to throw one at you too, because this happens all the time — I’m reading comments on social media, or we’re hearing pundits on the news, and claims have been more focused on foreign people being able to vote in federal elections, which is prohibited by law, of course — US elections are for US citizens only.

Archival clip — unidentified speaker: How many illegal votes are okay? I don’t think a single person in this room, if they’re really being honest with themselves, should agree that non-citizens should vote in American elections, no matter where that election is, up and down the ticket.

Stephen Rowe: Is this an issue that undermines American election integrity?

Walter Olson: You know, if it happened a lot, then the answer would be yes, but this is one of the best-studied issues there is, and it has been studied on all sorts of different levels. What prosecutions have there been? Almost nothing. The federal prosecutors in North Carolina were the one bunch that tried to gear up a bunch of prosecutions, and it was interesting, because they got basically ones and occasionally twos — there was no organized effort, there was no one trying to get these foreign people to vote. When foreign people register, it is typically by mistake, and indeed the sequel is often that they didn’t realize they were registered — they are horrified, because they realize their right to live here might get revoked, and has gotten revoked.

So you’ve had, at this point, something like 15 or 20 states that have also done deliberate audits, based sometimes on the initial seed lists of people who they suspect might have been illegal non-citizen voters. When they go through those lists, most of it evaporates, and the reason most of it evaporates is that the lists are not perfectly up to date — you’ve got a lot of people who were naturalized in the last year who are showing up in the database as not-citizens, and it turns out they were naturalized, they cast a vote, so those melt away. They don’t melt away to zero — in these states, Ohio, Louisiana, many others, that have done that kind of audit, they do discover some. I believe Ohio is the highest number — they found, at least, in the hundreds of votes successfully cast. And of course, because each state is somewhat different in its security measures, some will let more through than others. I think it was Utah that said, “We found two.” Utah likes to be proud of these things, because it’s got this very advanced, high-tech system — they’re weighing things on scale so seriously.

Stephen Rowe: Yeah, I mean, you’re not even supposed to joke about them, but anyway.

Walter Olson: So a couple of things we conclude from that: yes, where it is happening, it’s worth paying attention to see if we can further reduce it, and I’ve even got ideas about that. But secondly, it’s not changing outcomes for the races people care about, it’s not changing seats from one party to another. I see no evidence in the last 30 years that any federal seat in the House of Representatives or elsewhere has been changed from one party to another — even during periods where states didn’t have as good methods for cracking down on this, because there probably was more of this going on 30 years ago than now, just because all the techniques were less good for catching it.

Stephen Rowe: Yeah, that makes sense. We’ve gotten a lot better at it. And I want to hit another topic, because some blame the risk of fraud on mail-in ballots.

Archival clip — unidentified speaker: I’m very skeptical about everybody getting mail-in ballots. I think anytime that you’re not showing up to the poll and showing your ID, there is a higher risk — in the instance of places that don’t require ID when you cast your vote, verifying who you are and that you’re currently on the voter roll. And in the case of mail-in ballots, it’s even worse. Those should be used rarely, and with additional layers of documentation. While others also add that implementing voter ID laws will prevent fraud from happening at all.

Stephen Rowe: I always say to people: okay, do you think that the amount of election fraud is zero? No one thinks that.

Walter Olson: Yeah. No one thinks it’s zero.

Archival clip — unidentified speaker: If Democrats really don’t think that there’s any cheating, give us voter ID.

Stephen Rowe: What are some important considerations around those two things — mail-in ballots and voter ID laws?

Walter Olson: I’ll start with mail-in ballots. Mail-in ballots spread, partly, because during the pandemic there was a very real concern about congregating on election day or in early voting, and mail ballots seemed to offer the right solution, preferred by most people. That having been said, I caution people a little about mail ballots. Oregon and other western states started them first, and people recall that they had to go through quite a few election cycles before they ironed all the kinks out of it — so there was more chaos than there should have been, there was less planning. And then it became this ideological thing, where people believed that if you wanted to go slow, you were in favor of voter suppression. Well, no, that’s not a good way to analyze that either — most of these issues are a balance of conveniences. We can allow more mail balloting, but we should plan for a totally different staffing scale to deal with mail ballots that may be coming in two or three weeks earlier.

And just to finish off for the moment on mail ballots: Oregon does something that I really like, which is it says you’ve got to have your mail ballot in by election day, and please, the state wants you to be a good citizen by mailing it a few days early, so that we aren’t dealing with a mountain of ballots on election day. This is public-spirited — it’s one of the reasons Oregon gets good results out of mail, is it wants it to be a shared responsibility, where the voter feels that they are helping the system work well, rather than — in certain other states, people have concluded, “Oh great, they sent me a ballot, I’ll drop it off at 7:30 in the evening on election day,” and they may not realize that the voting machines in the booth can’t just run the ballot through — that’s not how most mail-ballot tabulating works. It’s going to take someone, and that’s why they’re there two weeks later. So again, if you are a voter, try to be public-spirited and learn what your administrators are hoping you will do as far as method.

Now, you asked about a second thing — the second one was on voter ID laws. On the mail-in-ballot one, it really is, as a courtesy to others — you know, leave it better than you found it — which is just giving people advance notice, and then we could count this faster. With voter ID, I like to let people down easy, because it’s not the huge issue as far as results either way, and I’ll cut to the chase on the studies that economists have done, which is to look at states that have strong voter ID and states that don’t — and they found the states that have strong voter ID don’t seem to have reduced fraud particularly. You have this rather loud argument between the conservatives saying you’re soft on fraud, and the liberals saying you’re soft on voter suppression and don’t care whether people are discouraged by difficult rules. Well, please, everyone calm down and lower your voices, because there isn’t a lot of evidence that’s making that case.

Now, I myself have come to be a little pro-picture-ID-on-the-spot, for a couple of reasons. First, I talked to election administrators, and a lot of them look — even if it doesn’t make a difference on fraud — the line moves faster if people are showing picture ID; it’s easier than the other things, like “please sign this and we’ll compare your signature.” Comparing signatures is so unscientific — you know, the person’s just had a hand injury, they’re not signing the same way, or the original signature was 10 years ago, and let’s face it, we get old, so my signature has changed over time. So a lot of the alternatives in ID verification are imperfect. Some people act nervous no matter what they’re doing. If the picture ID helps the line move faster, then it takes us to a couple of other policy issues, which is: how can we guarantee everyone a picture ID, so that just the fact that they’re not a driver won’t hassle them too much when they’re voting? There are ways you can make an ID system that’s customer-friendly, which will also be administrator-friendly, and I like that idea — but it’s partly because I don’t invest emotionally in the screaming match between “you’re soft on fraud” and “you’re soft on voter suppression.”

Stephen Rowe: Yeah, that’s very, very fascinating, and people just need to look at the data — it’s very interesting that you’re citing that, and I think in common discourse, you’re not seeing that as part of any side’s argument. I do want to get to one other thing, though: are there any other claims that you think are worth addressing, because in the era of social media and 24/7 news in the palm of our hands — what about media bias, or foreign interference? Are there any credible new evidence that could emerge that the 2020 election was stolen?

Archival clip — unidentified speaker: No, this is pure fantasy. Of course, he lost the election by more than 7 million votes to Joe Biden. There was an effort in 2016 of foreign forces, specifically Vladimir Putin, to interfere in our election, and there was overwhelming evidence brought forward by our intelligence agencies, and Donald Trump rejected that overwhelming evidence.

Archival clip — Donald Trump: If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late, we’re looking at them very strongly, but a lot of votes came in late. I’ve already decisively won many critical states, including massive victories in Florida.

Stephen Rowe: I’d love for you to comment on those two things — media bias and foreign interference.

Walter Olson: Media bias, I’m going to say, is present — it has been present throughout American history, there’s nothing new under the sun as far as that goes. And in some ways, of course, our First Amendment means we get the upside of this, which is that we can see a range of different, unfair, partisan views, and somewhere in the middle we might be able to detect something that they agree is true. But it is frustrating. Foreign interference is also interesting, and it also dates back to the founding period — if you look at the Federalist Papers, they were super worried about foreign powers exercising various types of influence over the president or Congress. So that’s been tried for a long time. I will say, as a general rule, don’t worry about the voting machines — the idea that someone is beaming, off a satellite… and honestly, the things that I hear, I have to follow this 24 hours a day, but you know, they really believe that psychic beams are being sent and bounced off Elon Musk’s satellites, and you’d have to believe in something higher than God to believe all of these things — that it’s all being done by some combination of the former Venezuelan dictators and the Chinese. That’s not the part of foreign interference that I do think we should always be keeping half an eye on. It is softer influence, in which — and we saw it certainly in the 2016 election — the Russian intelligence agencies had gotten their hands on a bunch of sensitive material and released it in certain ways. We’ve seen it from other powers at other times in other elections, and it’s worth knowing about — we don’t want that kind of manipulation to be going on in the United States.

I don’t always have that many occasions to agree with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, but he had the single best answer, because someone came out with a report that a foreign power was influencing some American election — I think, in the direction that he would have wanted, as far as wanted in the sense of the candidate that he liked — and he just gave a very flat statement, saying this is a threat to America, that this happened; we should all be against it just as equally, whether we like or dislike the candidate, because we must not stand for it — we’re Americans.

Stephen Rowe: I like that quote, and I’m imagining Bernie Sanders right now: “This must not happen.”

Walter Olson: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Stephen Rowe: Well, he’s got that manner too.

Walter Olson: Yes. Oh, he’s great. So, Walter, I’ve got one final question for you: why is it important to have a certain degree of faith in our electoral institutions?

Editor’s note: the line above appears to be crossed lines in the source audio — Stephen Rowe asks the closing question, and Walter Olson answers below.

Walter Olson: If faith is undermined without good reason — that is, if the institutions are working properly and yet people are convinced they’re not — a whole bunch of bad things happen. People do not trust the legitimacy of the next government that gets elected, and from that flow a lot of bad things, as far as believing perhaps that laws they’ve enacted may not be binding, that we can defy or ignore laws because it wasn’t a real Congress, or the president who signed it wasn’t a real president. And you can quickly get to — not the kind of anarchy that you see in utopias where everyone minds their own business, but anarchy in the sense that things break down, the rule of law breaks down if people don’t believe the laws have been properly enacted. And beyond that, you get distrust within communities. This is all, of course, done legally, done locally — and because it is done locally, to bring into question the conduct of elections means painting some of your neighbors — and often the ones that have been involved in community activities for a long time, ’cause that’s who tends to be the volunteers, the election judges and so forth — painting them as being part of some big conspiracy against you. And that undermines the trust — you know, economists, political scientists and others talk about high-trust versus low-trust societies. Believe me, you want to live in a high-trust society, because everything from how stores treat you and you treat stores, to how your neighbors treat you and you treat neighbors — that all works so much better in a high-trust society. And this is so symbolic — I think libertarians in particular have so much at stake with a high-trust society: if they want private ordering, then private ordering is going to work so much better in a high-trust society. Deirdre McCloskey has written about this beautifully.

Stephen Rowe: Oh, incredible. Well, at the end of the day, even though no election process is flawless, identifying and addressing real problems versus dismissing the outcome of an election are very different things. Our ability to choose our leaders through free and fair elections is the foundation of any democratic society. Rigging a major American election would require a level of coordination and evidence, as we’ve talked about, that has never been demonstrated. When the evidence shows an election was conducted fairly, protecting that legitimacy is part of protecting the democratic process itself. Walter, thank you so much for joining us today — you are a real treasure.

Walter Olson: Thank you so much for having me on.

Stephen Rowe: Absolutely. And thank you for listening to the Cato Weekly Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s discussion, please subscribe, smash that like button, and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about the ideas and research discussed here, visit cato​.org. The Cato Weekly Podcast is a production of the Cato Institute, dedicated to advancing individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. Join us next time for more insights and conversations on the issues shaping our world.