Opinion | A guide on how to steal votes

Come along, let’s go steal a vote.

For this How-To explainer on vote stealing, we’re going to make it really, really easy. We’re going back to a time when Alabama didn’t require a photo ID to cast a ballot. Just more than a decade ago, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a major portion of the Voting Rights Act—and proclaimed that discrimination was dead in the South while doing so—Alabama passed its voter ID law that targeted the poor and minority communities.

But before that time—back in the heyday of voter fraud, I suppose—Alabama had a fairly common, very effective ID law. It required that a registered voter present one of several forms of identification, including a driver’s license, utility bill with name and address, student ID, hunting license, fishing license, and several other forms. The forms had to show the voter’s registered name and the registered address.

Let’s go steal that easy-to-steal vote, shall we?

Now, to do so, the voter victim must be registered. That’s easy enough to check, though. We check a name through the voter registration system.

Next step: Get some form of ID.

For this, we’ll have to go to the person’s address and sit outside, waiting for the mail carrier to put the mail in the box. And it will have to be a street mailbox or some other mail drop-off box that doesn’t require a key or a code to open.

We might have to make several trips and go through several batches of mail to find a qualifying bill that we can present to the poll workers to prove who we are. But for the sake of this exercise, let’s say we get lucky on day one and find the power bill of our unwitting victim.

Now, we wait on Election Day.

On that day, we head to the polling location of our victim. We pass ourselves off as the victim. We present the utility bill. And then we pray that one of two things doesn’t occur—that our victim has not either cast a ballot or submitted an absentee ballot, and that no one at the polling location near his or her house recognizes the name. (That also reminds me—you can only steal the vote of a person of your gender. For obvious reasons.)

But, phew, no one at the location is familiar with our victim. We cast the ballot. The vote is stolen. We’ve done it.

We’ve stolen one vote.

One vote.

Do you understand now why it is that people with working brains take a look at the never-ending efforts to add layer upon layer of voting barriers by imposing increasingly more difficult ID requirements, and we say that’s an obvious attempt at voter suppression?

Because no one is going to all of that trouble to steal votes.

If you would like proof of that, I’ll give you this little stat: In the 20 years prior to our new ID law going into effect in 2014, the state had prosecuted just one instance of voter fraud in which someone attempted to steal the identity of a registered voter to cast a ballot. That case involved a woman using her sister’s ID to vote—a case of fraud that would not have been thwarted by our new ID requirements.

In the more than a decade since, the number of people who have been denied the right to vote because they forgot their license, didn’t have a valid license, weren’t aware of the ID requirements, didn’t have the funds to obtain a license, ran out of time before they could get an ID or any of a number of other issues is unknown. But we know it’s a helluva lot more than zero—the number of cases of fraud from in-person vote stealing.

Because that’s the only kind of fraud that voter ID laws prevent. In-person fraud. The fraud that doesn’t exist, except in the minds of easily-fooled conservative voters.

And now, Republicans are trying desperately to add more layers. To add more barriers to voting. To squeeze poor people completely out of the process, using the SAVE Act requires absurdly hard-to-get, expensive-to-get documents in order to register to vote.

That act is facing long odds in the U.S. Senate, but is being pushed by almost every Republican, including the full delegation from Alabama, which is proud to continue our tradition of poll taxing. (Alabama’s voting slogan: Where all are free to vote … so long as you can correctly guess the number of marbles in the Mason jar.) Should it pass, though, it would require registering either a valid passport, a STAR ID driver’s license, a consular report of birth abroad, or a combination of a standard driver’s license and a birth certificate or tribal identification (but only those with expiration dates, which many do not have).

Why are they doing this?

Because obtaining any of those documents is extraordinarily costly and time-consuming. I know this for a fact because my little family just went through obtaining passports and birth certificates a little more than a year ago because we were traveling overseas. It took weeks. And several trips to various government entities. And a few hundred bucks for the three of us.

Now, we could afford it, and we set aside the time to obtain the documents necessary and gave ourselves plenty of time. My wife is extremely well organized, so we were able to gather everything we needed and only make the necessary trips. But we all know what this will do for the poorest among us—those struggling to get by each month and stretched way too thin on both time and money. They’ll give up.

But hey, it’s worth it, right? Because we have a real problem with illegal immigrants voting in this country. Right?

Well, lucky for us, the right-wing think tank, The Heritage Foundation, dug into that fraud—those millions of illegal votes being cast by immigrants who aren’t citizens. And they found …

Just 99 cases of noncitizen voting since 1982.

That’s 2.3 cases per year.

Statistically nothing. Wouldn’t affect a dog catcher race.

But see, stopping fraud has never been the goal. Because there’s actually so very little fraud in our elections. The exhaustive reviews of the 2020 election have proven that without a shadow of a doubt (unless you’re a self-involved manchild who can’t accept defeat).

The true goal of these laws has never been to stop fraud. It has been to stop voting. To discourage certain segments of the population from going to the polls. To suppress the vote. It has been targeted. It has been relentless. It has been successful.

And that, boys and girls, is how you steal votes.

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