Michigan voter Roberto Garcia got the unpleasant shock of his life at the close of the presidential election in November 2020. He found out that he was one of 10,000 or so “deceased” Michigan voters who voted.
He was called out by name by the local Michigan GOP. Fox News shill Tucker Carlson quickly latched onto the claim and cited it as fact. The inference was that a “dead” Roberto Garcia and thousands more of the dearly departed in Michigan were dumped on the voting rolls by cheating Democrats to vote for Biden.
The claim, even by the GOP’s abominably low standards, was so incredible that investigators easily and quickly debunked it. A beaming and very much alive Garcia fittingly had the final word. He posed in his yard holding a gigantic Biden-Harris sign. He couldn’t resist adding: “I’m definitely alive and I definitely voted for Biden!”
As for Carlson, he offered yet another shame-faced apology, saying that he was “duped” by the Trump camp into also reporting the lie that a “dead” Georgian also voted. That voter also turned out to be very much alive. Like Garcia, he voted for Biden.
The GOP’s dead person vote myth, though laughable, has been often trotted out as one of its vote fraud canons. Every claim has been painstakingly investigated to determine if there is anything to the charge.
NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice has taken the lead in debunking the GOP’s vote fraud lies. The Center, in countless reports, found that that deliberate, designed vote fraud is virtually non-existent in state and federal elections, with the rate of actual larcenous vote fraud at between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. This is not to say that voting mistakes and errors don’t occur. They do. However, they can be attributed in almost all instances to human error, clerical errors, and sloppy or erroneous data matching.
One study found a total of 30 impersonation vote fraud cases in 14 years from 2000 to 2014, out of more than 1 billion ballots cast.
GOP officials dismiss these studies as simply more partisan propaganda by liberals, Democratic-leaning think tank researchers and the press.
The other big and favored GOP lie is that Democrats herd packs of illegal, ineligible workers in the U.S. to the polls to vote Democrat. The Government Accounting Office, Columbia University, the Washington Post and even the Republican National Lawyers Association found little to support this allegation.
Several federal district courts have ruled that the strict photo ID laws in Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Indiana, were racially discriminatory. There have been all of two convictions under the law out of tens of millions of votes in these states’ elections.
The Department of Justice fared even worse when it scoured for cases of federal election fraud, presumably to prosecute. During the 2002 and 2004 federal elections it found 0.00000013 percent of ballots cast were fraudulent. The SCOTUS is packed with Trump-friendly justices, but Trump got nowhere with them when he demanded the high court toss the results of the 2020 election based on fraud. This was even too much for the court. In a terse December 2020 ruling, the court tossed out his lawsuit that, not surprisingly, was backed by 18 GOP states’ attorneys general.
Trump was aware of the GOP vote suppression blitz . He and GOP shills in the conservative media have badgered many into buying the myth of massive fraud and Democrat-stolen elections. Yet, there is not a word from these supposed protectors of voting integrity and honesty about the very real history of vote suppression, let alone the near century-long racial disenfranchisement of Blacks in the South — history that is very much still alive and well in more than a few places in America.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political commentator.
