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This American MomentFaculty and alumni scholars offer perspectives on the state of American democracy, its challenges, and its possibilities.Interviews by Sandra Knispel and Karen McCally ’02 (PhD) | Illustrations by John Tomac

The Votes of Others

Why are so many Americans doubting the integrity of the ballot?

Mayya Komisarchik

Assistant professor of political science at Rochester

Specialist on race and ethnic politics in the US, representation, and voting rights. Courses include Race and Ethnicity in American Politics.

There have been previous periods in American history of wavering confidence in the integrity of elections. Although we did not have public opinion polls at the time, during the late 19th-century era of Democratic machine politics, for example, the popular press regularly reported on voting fraud.

But what’s different now is that there is an extreme lack of confidence in electoral institutions that’s been instilled on the Republican side. There’s a lot of partisan asymmetry, as demonstrated in polls showing that Democratic voters largely think that democratic institutions that ensure free and fair elections work, while Republican voters, particularly Trump supporters, do not think that that’s true. And that’s fairly novel.

This asymmetry is a function of messaging in which Republican elites, wholly without evidence, are asserting that there was widespread fraud. What has surprised me is the persistence of Republican elites who, to this day, nearly six months after the election, carry forward the lie about fraud. As of the beginning of April, 33 states, the vast majority under Republican legislative control, had proposed significant restrictions to mail and/or early in-person voting based on the pretext of fraud.

Race plays a huge role in these developments. In 2020, there were efforts to throw out votes in close states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, but those efforts were focused on Detroit, Philadelphia, and Fulton County and other areas with heavy concentrations of Black voters.

It’s part of a history in the United States of claiming fraud as a pretext to challenge minority votes. In 2013, Kansas started requiring voters prove their citizenship, a measure premised on the claim that large numbers of Mexican noncitizens were showing up to vote illegally. When the law was challenged in court, expert witnesses for the state testified that one of the approaches they use to try to identify alleged noncitizens is to look for Hispanic names on the voter rolls.

Rhetoric about fraud also surfaced during the debate over the National Voter Registration Act in 1993. We heard rhetoric warning that making it easier for people to register and to vote would open the gateway for widespread fraud, and we saw a slew of voter ID measures introduced in the early 2000s based on that false assumption.

There’s also a long history of outright attempts to suppress Black votes, apart from any charges of fraud. Until the mid 1960s, for example, voters were charged poll taxes in the South, which disproportionately affected Black voters. It really wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act in 1965 that we saw blanket protection against a lot of explicit forms of vote suppression.

Since the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby v. Holder decision, one of the things I’ve been watching is how widely we have opened the door to explicit attempts at voter suppression.

The Biden administration’s For the People Act, known as H. R. 1, is a good start, but preventing state-level vote suppression requires even more sweeping reforms that cover things like uniform election dates and the distribution of resources to precincts, for example. For Congress to respond to the Shelby decision by renewing the coverage formula put in place by the Voting Rights Act in Congress—would put jurisdictions with long histories of vote suppression back under federal supervision. That, too, would help discourage vote suppression.