Election Fraud Arrest--of a Trump fan

The U.S. Justice Department announced an election-related arrest and prosecution.

It was a Trump operative.

Democrats need to acknowledge election misbehavior can and does happen. 

Republicans need to realize the fraud might be theirs.

The fraudulent activity was not one of forged ballots or votes cast by people who had died, moved away, or any of the allegations posited by Trump and his supporters. This fraud arrest was for a "wholesale" scheme, intended to affect thousands of votes, accomplished by tricking members of a voting group presumed likely to vote for the opposing candidate into "voting" by a mechanism that caused their vote not to count. The Justice Department investigation started two years ago but was slowed and complicated by the accused man's use of aliases and the low priority the Trump Justice Department put on election fraud investigations of the 2016 campaign. This week, though, the Justice Department announced the arrest of Douglass Mackey, who used the alias 'Rickey Vaughn' in a scheme to trick voters planning to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Douglass Mackey, a Trump supporter, is active in White supremacy groups. He says he is a Proud Boy, the rough people who Trump called to come to his aid on January 6, the day to "be wild."  Mackey's plan was clever and effective. Using one of his many Twitter accounts--@Ricky_Vaughn99--which had 58,000 followers, he used graphics of Afro-American supporters of Hillary and tweeted the message that her supporters had an easy and convenient method of voting. "Avoid the line. Vote from home," he tweeted. It then directed people to cast their votes by texting a number.

An analysis of Twitter accounts in October 2016 showed the Ricky Vaughn99 account to be the 107th most influential Twitter account in its effect on the election, ahead of Newt Gingrich and Steven Colbert. Some 4,900 unique phone numbers texted that number. Presumably many or all of them thought they had voted.

Twitter suspended this account in October 2016 for suspicious and activity like this. Currently, Twitter is under attack for suspending accounts, with critics calling it an abridgment of free speech and a form of censorship.

This case is unlike those this blog reported from a close look at election prosecutions in Oregon and Wisconsin coming out of the 2016 election. The Heritage Foundation publishes a list of election law prosecutions, but it is incomplete. However, prosecutions get news coverage in the states where they take place, with a description of the crime. I chose to look at Oregon because it has universal mail-in voting and Wisconsin because it is a battleground state.  

A clear pattern emerges. The prosecutions were essentially random one-off errors. The frauds were either solo acts of partisanship, neglect, or legally ambiguous. The cases where a motivated partisan individual cast votes in other people's names were few. I wrote about it in December: Click: What election fraud prosecutions look like  

More typical was prosecution of a case of a woman who moved from Washington to Oregon. Washington's primary election is two months earlier than Oregon's. She voted in Washington then voted again in Oregon when she moved there. She claimed she forgot she voted in Washington.  Another was a student who voted both at home in Oregon and at school in Colorado. She claimed forgetting. A Trump supporter in Wisconsin intentionally voted for himself, his son, and his son's girlfriend using absentee balloting. Wisconsin voters who turned 18 by the time of the general election are not allowed to vote in the primary election if they were still 17. Some County Clerks improperly allowed the youth to vote, thinking the Wisconsin rule was the same as the Illinois rule where they could vote. 

These are examples of essentially petty theft: Wrong and illegal but unlikely to change an election result. They do not fit the paradigm of "massive voter fraud' as alleged by Trump. 

The Mackey "Ricky Vaughn99" case is different. It was broad in scale, and intended to affect a large number of votes in a single partisan direction; therefore a matter of special concern. It is a form of election crime better described as partisan voter suppression rather than ballot fraud, but it is criminality that both Democrats and Republicans should consider in any new legislation. 

Prior to the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s, Democrats in the South were the primary party of voter suppression. After the 1960s, Republicans attempted to make voting more secure, i.e. more difficult. Democrats in recent years worked to ease voting access, with polls open longer, early voting, more polling stations with shorter lines, and mail-in voting. Republicans have cited these as vectors for election fraud. 

Both sides might be arguing against partisan interest. Democrats may be the primary beneficiary of squelching election fraud and using a wider definition of election crime. Mackey's crime must be prosecuted as a civil rights violation, not election fraud.

Trump's behavior leading up to and after the 2020 election are a warning signal. Trump and the Republican Party generally have normalized and legitimized discarding elections for the purpose of getting a favored result. This is a profound change in morality and expectation. It is a version of the "Broken Window" theory of social norms. If election fraud is extravagantly alleged and perceived by Republican voters, and elections can be discarded, then the social norm is changed; why bother respecting election laws if elections are so corrupt and disrespected?

Democrats would be well advised to be on the side of election law-and-order, with severe penalties for cheating, for election audits, for paper ballot back-ups, for close observers. The conscientious Republican officeholders who held the line on election integrity are facing recalls, censure, calls to resign, death threats, and primary challenges. This is a bad sign for future elections.

Democrats have more to gain than to lose from enhanced election security.

Click: Justice Department release