Claims of 'voter fraud' have a long history in America. And they are false

Texas’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, was supposed to be a whole lot poorer by now.

On 11 November, eight days after the presidential election and four days after the networks called the race for Joe Biden, the conservative talk radio host turned Republican politician launched a bounty hunt. Any tipsters who could provide evidence of voter fraud that led to a criminal conviction would receive at least $25,000, up to a grand total of $1m. The money was set to come from Patrick’s campaign, not his personal account. Still, the point remains: if voter fraud was rampant, as President Trump and leading Republicans have repeatedly claimed, Patrick’s million-dollar fund should have run dry long ago.

Related: Trump team’s discredited fraud witness compared to SNL character

As it stands, Patrick’s campaign finances are in far better shape than his credibility. To date, it appears he has paid out a grand total of zero dollars and zero cents.

Patrick stands out for his willingness to put his donors’ money where his mouth was. But his million-dollar effort was just a small part of the largest voter-fraud hunt in American history. Never in American history have self-proclaimed fraud-fighters been given more attention, resources and time to prove their case – that a major election was stolen through what they’ve dubbed “illegal votes”.

Instead, they’ve done the opposite. The 2020 election, and Trump’s attempt to overturn it, will leave us with plenty of reasons to remain concerned about the health of our democracy. But the idea that our political process has been compromised by widespread fraud isn’t among them. It’s time to retire the voter-fraud myth for good.

Falsely claiming voter fraud is a tradition nearly as old as American democracy itself. Take, for example, early 19th-century New Jersey. Under the state’s original constitution, some women had the right to vote, and some politicians (namely those of the Federalist party) felt they would be more likely to win elections if those rights were taken away. But stripping eligible voters of their rights for purely partisan reasons was unseemly, even by 1800s standards, so ambitious lawmakers came up with an excuse. Men, they charged, were casting their ballots, slipping into petticoats, and then voting a second time. The only way to prevent this gender-bending fraud was to eliminate women’s voting rights entirely.

As a logical argument, the anti-fraud case for disenfranchising women made little sense. But logic was never the point. In 1807, aided by their theoretically principled excuse for their blatantly partisan power grab, the New Jersey legislature ended their state’s experiment in women’s suffrage.

As more Americans won voting rights on paper, and the two-party system became more entrenched in our political process, voter fraud remained a convenient excuse for disenfranchising eligible voters. In the 1830s, on the theory that cities couldn’t be trusted to hold honest elections, Pennsylvania passed a voter registration law that applied to the city of Philadelphia and nowhere else. “Although the proclaimed goal of the law was to reduce fraud,” writes Alexander Keyssar in The Right to Vote, “opponents insisted that its real intent was to reduce the participation of the poor, who were frequently not home when assessors came by.”

Not surprisingly, false claims of fraud also played an important role in propping up segregation. In 1959, Washington parish, Louisiana, “purged” its voter rolls. Local officials claimed they were merely remove illegally registered names from the rolls. In fact, they purged 85% of the parish’s African American voters. This proved too audacious even for the Jim Crow era, and a federal court overturned the parish’s purge. But in most cases, courts have given lawmakers the benefit of the doubt. So long as they can plausibly claim to be fighting fraud – or more accurately, so long as they can’t be proven not to be fighting fraud – legislators can pass bills restricting access to the ballot, even for eligible voters, and even if the voters affected are clearly more likely to belong to one party than the other.

In other words, when conservative pundit Dick Morris claimed that over a million people voted twice in the 2012 elections, when President Trump alleged that millions of undocumented immigrants cast ballots in 2016, or when Rudy Giuliani dropped his sweaty dud of a bombshell at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, they were taking part in a timeless American tradition. From a moral standpoint, falsely claiming fraud is despicable. But from a political standpoint, it’s historically been a win-win: in a best-case scenario you disenfranchise voters in an election that already occurred, and in a worse-case scenario you lay the groundwork for disenfranchising them next time.

Already, Republican politicians are once again using the fear of voter fraud – a fear that exists, to the extent it does, entirely because of baseless claims they generated – as a pretext to attack the voting rights of eligible American citizens. The Texas congressman Dan Crenshaw recently argued that the only way to restore confidence in our elections is to make voter registration far more difficult and outlaw mail-in voting for many if not most Americans. The Florida senator Rick Scott has gone even further. His “fraud-fighting” bill would throw out ballots if a county can’t tally them within 24 hours, even if those ballots are legally cast.

It’s hardly surprising that politicians like Crenshaw and Scott believe they can get away with turning false claims of voter fraud into the very real disenfranchisement of eligible voters. It’s happened many times before. But this time ought to be different. Egged on by the would-be authoritarian in the White House, election results have been challenged in at least six states. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed in an attempt to delay or overturn the certification of the final tallies. Hearings have been held. The attorney general, Bill Barr, in a frightening break with established Department of Justice procedure, authorized federal prosecutors to investigate credible fraud claims even if doing so would appear political.

The results? The Trump administration is now a 39-time loser in court. A parade of frustrated judges, many appointed by Trump himself, have written blistering opinions pointing out that the president and his allies have no basis for their claims. Even Trump’s own lawyers have admitted under questioning that they’re not alleging fraud because they have no evidence with which to do so. Inside the conservative echo chamber, the Republican party’s attacks on the integrity of our elections will sow doubt and distrust in our political process. But in the real world, the idea that marquee elections are being stolen via voter fraud has now been disproven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Which means that, barring real evidence to the contrary, it’s time for our institutions to stop taking partisan claims of voter fraud seriously. Reporters should treat allegations of a fraudulent election the way they treat birtherism or QAnon – as pure conspiracy theory. Courts should stop giving self-proclaimed fraud-fighters the benefit of the doubt, and instead demand that they substantiate their allegations before barring eligible Americans from the ballot box. The handful of Republican politicians who, to their lasting credit, condemned Trump’s attempts to manipulate the most recent election should be equally forceful about attempts to manipulate future ones.

This year, false claims of fraud weren’t enough to overturn an election. But next time we may not be so lucky. Trump is not the first American to embrace the voter-fraud myth for his political advantage, but if American democracy is to survive, he ought to be the last.

• David Litt is a former Obama speechwriter and the author of Thanks, Obama and Democracy in One Book Or Less