US Republicans suspect fraud: Are the voter registers dirty?

Gulf War veteran James McWhorter received an unexpected letter from his district office in Atlanta last year. This letter, addressed to the address of the hair salon, led to this. And that was exactly the problem. His entry in the voter registration had been challenged by a woman named Gail Lee because he had registered under a business address, the letter said.

“I had no idea who Gail Lee was,” McWhorter told CBS. And the complainant clearly had no idea why McWhorter registered at the salon's address in 2008. The African-American was homeless at the time and slept in the shop after work and washed his clothes at a laundromat. To avoid being struck off the voter register last November, McWhorter defended his situation at a hearing and then entered his usual home address.

Former Trump lawyer is driving force

McWhorter is not an isolated case. In the swing state of Georgia, a small number of conservative activists have filed over 80,000 complaints of this kind in recent years. They do not reveal any gross fraud, but merely technical errors, such as addresses with spelling errors or people whose street names have been renamed.

But even though there is no evidence of possible manipulation so far, Republicans have made the integrity of the election a major issue. Complainant Gail Lee became an activist after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. She is still convinced that Trump's victory was stolen through fraud. In 2022, Lee attended a conference in Atlanta on “election integrity.” The conference also included the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI). The organization's leading staff includes Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows and his legal advisor Cleta Mitchell.

Mitchell was on the line on January 2, 2021, when Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump had narrowly lost the presidential election in the state to Joe Biden, but refused to accept that. He asked Raffensperger to find the 11,780 votes he was missing and threatened him with legal consequences. Today, Mitchell heads the Election Integrity Network – a project of the CPI. The network has already recruited an “army of citizens” for the 2022 midterm elections with seminars across the country to track down possible fraud. “The Democrats could only win if they cheated,” Mitchell explained in an interview.

Unreliable software looks for “suspicious” voters

Last year, Mitchell's organization launched the data software “EagleAI.” They search through a wealth of publicly available data for suspicious entries in the voter registers. The program compares the entries with address change data from the American postal service, for example. If the software finds an inconsistency, it immediately formulates a standardized letter of complaint. This allows conservative activists to flood the election authorities with thousands of complaints.

Apparently, however, the application does not work reliably. “EagleAI draws incorrect conclusions and then presents them as evidence of wrongdoing,” Blake Evans, director of the Georgia Elections Authority, told NBC last year.

“EagleAI” is not the only application on the market for searching voter registers. The conservative organization True the Vote has also developed software. It is called “IV3”. But it also has major flaws, writes the computer magazine “Wired”. It cites the 69-year-old veteran Gamaliel Warren Turner as an example. He always lived in Georgia, owned a house there and quickly took part in every election. But in 2019 he temporarily moved to California for professional reasons and had his mail redirected there. As a result, his entry in the voter register was also challenged.

Democratic constituencies in sight

Activist Gail Lee sees her work as an important contribution to ensuring the integrity of the election. But Michael Waldmann, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, takes a completely different view. His think tank describes itself as non-partisan and specializes in questions of American democracy. Waldmann wrote in March about the resistance of conservative leaders: “They seem to be focusing on Democratic districts or regions with a dark-skinned population.” It seems to be about politics and not about the hygiene of the voter registry.”

The Republicans are not only afraid that many Democratic voters will register twice in different districts in order to vote multiple times, or that they will cast additional ballots for citizens who have already died. The conservatives also have the as yet unfounded suspicion that the Democrats are encouraging large numbers of immigrants without citizenship to register. In Congress and in several states, the Republicans are therefore pushing forward laws that require proof of citizenship – such as a birth certificate – in order to be included in the voter register.

According to current federal law, it is sufficient for a person to provide written confirmation that they are an American citizen when applying. If they make a false statement, they face a conviction for perjury with a possible prison sentence of several years and, in the case of foreigners, deportation. Immigrants will therefore be wary of registering to vote. A study in Georgia found only 1,634 cases of potential non-citizens who tried to register unsuccessfully between 1997 and 2022.

The legitimate question of identification

The Democrats, however, see stricter voter registration regulations as primarily a disadvantage for American citizens. According to a survey by the University of Maryland and the Brennan Center, almost 10 percent of Americans do not have documents readily available to prove their citizenship. This proportion is higher among black people than among whites. Traditionally, this is a group of voters who vote for the Democrats in a larger majority.

The Republicans' demand does not seem entirely unreasonable. It makes sense that one must prove one's citizenship with a document in order to register to vote. However, since there is no evidence of widespread fraud so far, the Republicans' fear of manipulation seems to be exaggerated.

The Democrats, for their part, suspect that the conservatives' apparent fear is based on a simple political calculation. The mass complaints are part of the script of the election deniers encouraged by Trump, Lizzie Ulmer of the States United Democracy Center told CNN: “It's about creating an atmosphere of mistrust in which an election result can be questioned or overturned after the fact.”