Debating Voting Rights and Voter Fraud

An exchange between Clifton Roscoe and Mark Sussman

My last conversation with John McWhorter got a big response in the comments section, particularly around the issue of state-level election security legislation, where John and I have substantial disagreements. I also received an emailed response from a TGS fan favorite, Clifton Roscoe. Clifton shares my concerns about election security. And he happens to live in Georgia, so these issues are very much on his mind.

As happens occasionally, my editor, Mark Sussman, chimed in on the email thread, and he and Clifton engaged in an exchange that highlights some important aspects of the debate over voting rights and voter fraud currently playing out. As you’ll see, they have very different ways of thinking and writing about these questions. It’s a substantial exchange, so I present it here without further ado.

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Dear Glenn and Mark,

John McWhorter is wrong when it comes to Georgia's voting law. Moreover, talk about voter suppression in Georgia isn't supported by the facts.

Let's start with the new Georgia voting law. Independent analysis shows that it's no more restrictive than those in most states. Here's a summary graphic from the Center for Election Innovation & Research:

Claims of 2018 voter suppression in Georgia aren't supported by data from the US Census Bureau. Table 4b shows that black Georgians were registered at roughly comparable rates to their white peers in 2018 and that a higher percentage of them voted than any other racial group. Use this link and access Table 4b if you want to see 2020 results. And here are the 2018 results.

Georgia's black voting registration rates and voting rates rose slightly between 2018 and 2020. Turnout for whites and other racial groups rose more sharply. The net result was that 60.9% of Georgians voted in 2020 vs. 52.0% in 2018. I could send you a detailed analysis, but the bottom line is that concerns about voter suppression in Georgia are driven by false narratives. 

One last point, black folks have turned policing and the criminal justice system upside down in response to false narratives about hordes of rogue, racist cops killing hundreds or thousands of innocent, unarmed black folks and hundreds of thousands of black men sent to prison for smoking a joint. Republicans have false conceptions too. Many of them don't believe that our election systems are kosher. Lots of polls show this. Here's an example from the Center for Election Innovation & Research. Here's an excerpt:

• GOP voters lack trust and confidence in elections at much higher rates than others—a finding that is consistent with the results of other recent national polls.[1]

• GOP and Trump voters have more confidence in their own local and state elections than those at the national level.

• Messaging that creates an expectation of so-called “forensic audits” may have negative impacts for the GOP: four times as many GOP and Trump voters say they are less likely to vote in 2022 if no forensic audits are conducted than if audits are conducted in their state or in all states.

Here's another excerpt:

Many GOP and Trump voters believe that voter and election fraud were widespread in 2020 and will be widespread in 2022. Even a year out, after audits in nearly every battleground state and after over 80 judges heard challenges, there remains zero evidence of any widespread fraud in the 2020 election. 

• Nearly half (48%) of GOP and Trump voters believe there were widespread occurrences of election officials deliberately miscounting votes in the United States in the 2020 election, compared to just 10% of Democrats and 25% of independents.

• Forty-six percent of GOP and Trump voters said that election officials intentionally miscounting votes will be a problem in 2022. This is even higher than the proportion (36%) who think officials accidentally miscounting votes will be a problem.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether these concerns are legitimate, just like folks can argue about whether black concerns about police misconduct and the criminal justice system are overblown. The bottom line, however, is that we shouldn't expect society to indulge black concerns about policing and the criminal justice system while ignoring the voter integrity concerns of right of center whites. 

John McWhorter's arguments might hold sway in NYC, where elections are determined by ranked choice voting and non-citizens are allowed to cast ballots, but they don't resonate in places like Georgia. The AJC poll I sent you earlier today shows that a lot of Georgians have voting integrity concerns. Here are a few examples:

• Question 11 shows that 24.8% of respondents think absentee ballot drop boxes should be eliminated entirely.  That includes 36.8% of whites and 51.3% of Republicans

• Question 14 shows that 37.8% of respondents think there was "widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election."  That includes 54.6% of whites and 73.6% of Republicans

• Question 15 shows that 41.8% of respondents are not so confident or are not confident at all that the 2022 November election will be "conducted fairly and accurately."  That includes 48.6% of whites.and 55.8% of Republicans

• Question 16 shows that 34.3% of respondents somewhat support or strongly support replacing a new touchscreen voting system that was purchased in 2019 with paper ballots that would be filled out by hand.  That includes 38.2% of whites, 25.5% of blacks, and 45.7% of Republicans

Voting integrity issues resonate with a lot of Georgians. It's not surprising that the Republican-controlled state legislature made changes to election laws. Was the suppression of black votes a factor? Maybe, but mostly to the extent that black votes are reliably Democratic votes and black Democrats control the election processes in places like Atlanta. It's not surprising that center-right whites don't trust them to run fair and accurate elections. Truth be told, many Georgians don't trust black Democrats in Metro Atlanta to run a lot of things, including the airport, the local transit system, local school districts, law enforcement, and the criminal justice system. 

There's a lot of history behind these concerns. Atlanta has had a steady stream of black mayors since Maynard Jackson's first term began in 1973. Some of his successors have faced intense legal scrutiny. Bill Campbell (mayor from 1994 to 2002) was convicted of tax evasion and sent to prison. Former Mayor Kasim Reed's administration (in place from 2010 to 2018) has been under federal investigation for many years. Here’s a deep dive. The Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal, which broke in 2013, still resonates today as well. A teacher is headed to prison and more could be as well.

All the above feeds an underlying lack of trust that cuts along racial and ideological lines. It won't go away anytime soon. 

Best regards,

Clifton Roscoe

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Hi Clifton,

Thanks, as always, for this incisive, rigorous email. I can’t disagree with your numbers, but what seems most relevant to me about both the voting rights and voter fraud issues is their parallel positions in the national strategies of both political parties.

One of John's initial points was that voter suppression doesn't work. If that’s true, it’s one of the key facts about the situation. John is saying that these laws are enacted in an attempt to keep black people from voting, but they don't keep black people from voting. That's either because it's actually very hard to suppress motivated voters or because Republicans are very bad at it. 

So if John is right, you wouldn't see voter suppression reflected in the data, because it didn't actually happen. But that’s not necessarily the important thing. Just because it didn't happen doesn't mean no one tried to make it happen. John objects to the willingness of Republicans to be seen to be attempting to suppress the black vote, which is a matter of interpretation. Are Republicans (as they claim) not trying to suppress the vote at all, or are they trying and failing to suppress it? John thinks it's the latter, and there's no data you could summon to definitively prove or disprove that. 

Clifton, say you're right, and Georgia's laws are no more restrictive than those in most states. That doesn't mean they're not more restrictive than they used to be. So both sides can claim to have truth on their side, insofar as Republicans can rightly claim that Georgia's laws aren't unduly restrictive (when compared to other states) and Democrats can rightly claim that they are unduly restrictive (when compared to how they used to be).

This issue is not about what is '“actually happening.” It's ideological conflict, in the sense that two different groups have different pictures of the forces that shape reality. What we're seeing is a misalignment between those two pictures, which is why John literally doesn't understand why Glenn is denying that Republican efforts look kind of racist (even if they aren’t actually racist), and Glenn seems perturbed by John's insistence on Republicans' apparent or possible racism.

The voter fraud issue is just Republicans' version of Democrats’ “Jim Crow 2.0” argument, at least in terms of political strategy. Same basic moves. For Democrats, the suppression of the black vote is a crisis that must be stopped by federal legislative action, despite the sparse evidence that there really is such a crisis. For Republicans, voter fraud is a crisis that must be stopped by state-level legislative action, despite the sparse evidence that there really is such a crisis. 

Of course, the lack of evidence is a feature not a bug. Since you can't ever prove there was no attempt to suppress the black vote, and you can't ever prove there was no attempt to subvert the election, both sides can run on the issue until the end of the time or until the public gets bored, whichever comes first. You could imagine either side using the North Carolina Supreme Court’s recent rejection of Republican gerrymandering as fodder for their preferred position. 

The really insidious thing about all of this is that if either of these two issues was demonstrably real, it would be cause for extreme concern and immediate action. If black people are being systematically prevented from voting because of their race, we should take drastic action at the federal level. Same with the large-scale subversion of democratic elections. But if the studies and reporting are to be believed, that's not what's happening. The risk is that these virtual crises will produce an actual crisis, where the democratic process will collapse because people will be made to believe it already has collapsed. 

That's my “objective” analysis. I'm sure other, more knowledgeable people have said this more eloquently than I have. Of course, I have my own political sympathies—I'm no less immune to these sorts of machinations than anybody else. 

Best,

Mark

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Mark,

I'm pleasantly surprised and honored that you want to post an exchange between us about voting rights. 

John McWhorter's argument seemed to have two key threads:

1. Voter suppression, as defined by Democrats, doesn't seem to work

2. Republicans are trying to suppress black votes

I think we can agree on Point 1 above. Census Bureau data shows that black voter registration and voting rates are comparable to the average in places like Georgia.  Point 2 is an uphill slog for progressives. It's hard to call Republicans racists when Georgia's new law is well within the parameters of those in other states. It is more accommodating than those in several “blue” and presumably non-racist states. 

So then the question becomes, “But why did they change it? There wasn't much fraud, so isn't this a sign of racist Republicans trying to suppress black votes?” This too is a difficult argument for progressives. Election procedures were modified during the pandemic. Lots of people weren't happy with some of the changes that were made and lots of people don't think enough safeguards are in place to maintain voting integrity. Politics being what they are, it's not surprising that Republicans in Georgia enacted a new law in response to the concerns of their constituents. Mollie Hemingway's “rigged” election argument (more on that later) isn't relevant to the original conversation between Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, but it's probably a motivating factor behind several of the new laws as well since a lot of center-right people don't trust the election process and the people who run it.

While I agree with you that Democrats and Republicans are playing to their bases with their takes on this issue, I tend to side with Georgia Republicans. To be fair, I don't doubt that some “racist” Republicans were alarmed by the successes of people like Stacey Abrams when it came to voter registration and turnout efforts. To also be fair, it's not clear to me that these groups always played by the rules. There weren't a lot of mechanisms in place to ensure that they did during the pandemic. That helps explain why new restrictions on the ability of partisans to give food and water to those waiting in line to vote became a hot topic in Georgia. 

Here’s another article from The Federalist about this. The short version is that while evidence of voter fraud is not widespread, there seems to be ample evidence of a concerted effort to "rig" the 2020 election in Joe Biden's favor. Mollie Hemingway wrote a book about this that she recently discussed on John Kass's podcast.

My elbows aren't as pointy as Mollie Hemingway's, but I can't dismiss the idea that a concerted and unfair effort was made to help Joe Biden win in 2020. A lot of people feel the same way. Elections/voting is the biggest issue facing Georgia according to a new Atlanta Journal-Constitution/University of Georgia poll. Go to Question 3 for details.

A lot of my center-right friends feel the same way.  My progressive buds, as you might expect, disagree.

This is also relevant. Here’s an excerpt:

The last election for Georgia governor was close. Rapid growth in the electorate since then could make this year’s races even more competitive.

As the 2022 election year ramps up, a recent list of Georgia’s registered voters shows how the state has changed.

The number of registered voters has jumped 11% since four years ago. Most new voters are under 35 and live in metro areas. They’re more racially diverse, with substantial increases of Hispanic and Asian voters.

Both political parties acknowledge these demographic trends generally favor Democrats in a closely divided state, where Democrat Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential race by less than 12,000 votes after Republican Brian Kemp prevailed in the 2018 gubernatorial contest by 55,000 votes.

But Republicans see vast room for gains as Biden’s approval ratings slump, disillusioned conservative voters return to the fold and the GOP tries to appeal to people of color.

A comparison of Georgia’s voter lists by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows how quickly the state has grown from 2018 to 2022, setting up tight elections for governor and the U.S. Senate.

Here’s another excerpt:

New voters are concentrated in metro Atlanta counties that have supported Democratic candidates in recent years. About 12% of the state’s new voters are in Fulton County, followed by Gwinnett, DeKalb and Cobb counties.

Republicans are focusing on both new voters and voters who sat out recent elections. Democrats won both of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats after 752,000 voters who had participated in the 2020 presidential election didn’t cast ballots in the runoffs, according to turnout data.

Among Democrats, it remains in doubt whether the changes in Georgia’s electorate will result in victories at the polls during a lower-turnout, off-year election such as 2022.

A recent AJC poll of registered voters showed Kemp ahead of Abrams, 48% to 41% in an early, hypothetical matchup. On a similar question pitting Republican David Perdue against Abrams, they finished in a statistical tie.

In this year’s Senate race, the poll showed Republican Herschel Walker favored at 47% to Warnock at 44%, within the margin of error. Warnock was leading other Republicans running for the U.S. Senate.

I didn't see any mention of the new Georgia voting law or voter suppression in this long piece.  I'm sure those things will be brought up when the campaigns start in earnest. Politicians and the media will play the race card as long as they can. 

Let me know how far into the weeds you want to go with this. There may not be a clear winner, but folks might find our cordial exchange helpful and illuminating.

Clifton

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Hi Clifton,

I think a place where a lot of cross-talk about election issues happens comes around the numbers. To take a step back, if the question is, “Were there shenanigans in the 2020 election that allowed Biden to squeak out wins in key districts where he otherwise would have lost?,” then people who dig deep into the numbers, funding, changes to local election procedure, etc. are going to go back and forth with each other forever. These people (and maybe you?) are going to scream when they see what I’m about to say.

I have to confess, I don’t find analyses of the sort The Federalist cites all that compelling. Not because they aren’t revealing and not because they aren’t valuable and not because they aren’t really intelligent, but simply because I’m too ignorant about our democratic processes to really be able to make heads or tails of it myself. It’s incredibly complicated and I have a lot to do and I just don’t have the time or, frankly, the kind of brain that is good for this sort of thing. 

People like you are valuable because you have a political perspective informed by data, and you speak in good faith. I may disagree with you, but I know you’re not trying to snow me. Sadly, there are not enough Clifton Roscoes in this world, and as a consequence, people like me get our data packaged in a tidy, often partisan political framing, and we always wonder, “Yeah, but is this just bullshit?” I realize this isn’t a great look for me, but it’s true, and it’s true for I’d guess 95% of the people in the country. 

So when that Federalist piece says the alleged subversion efforts in Wisconsin are dangerous because they pose “an acute threat to the perceived legitimacy of elections,” it feels like a revealing bit of misdirection. Whether or not there were bad actors in Wisconsin or anywhere else, they don’t affect the “perceived legitimacy of elections” in any discernible way. Perceptions of that kind are generated, cultivated, stoked, and shaped by media outlets, political interest groups, think tanks, academics (even serious ones), and any number of other arms of the political interpretation complex, of which The Federalist is one. These perceptions are reinforced in individuals by the company we keep (IRL and online) and probably some deep-seated temperamental dispositions. There’s no getting outside of it to some underlying political reality where the facts themselves determine our perceptions, at least not for most people. The very purpose of the Federalist piece is to shape perceptions.

Perhaps what I’m saying is that I am extremely cynical, that I find it impossible to disaggregate sincere, reasonable concerns about important democratic processes from the production and instrumentalization of those concerns by self-interested parties. To get back to something John said, why all of a sudden has election fraud become an a major issue? One answer is that Trump has made it into an article of faith among his followers. But that’s too simplistic. A more compelling answer is that Republicans have to figure out how to win more elections in places where they’re in the minority, and Trump’s fixation on election fraud provided a platform on which to build a national political strategy. That doesn’t necessarily mean that people worried about election fraud are as cynical as the political interests that made it an issue, nor does it mean they’re dupes or suckers. They’re sincerely worried, just as most people concerned about the suppression of black voters are sincerely worried.

I’m less concerned about the specific issues we raise here than I am by the tendency of people to identify with complexes of political interests that truly do not give a fuck about them. It’s extremely difficult to resist or interrogate that kind of identification when it’s the atmosphere we live in and when so many of us define ourselves by our politics. I’m as guilty of this as anyone (well, maybe not anyone), but I’m trying to become more aware of it when it happens.

Thanks for this exchange, Clifton. I so value your contributions to the newsletter, and I know Glenn does, too. Looking forward to what comes next.

Best,

Mark