Trump allies can’t stop defending themselves by citing the bigness of the ‘big lie’
“It is true that there isn’t widespread voter fraud,” said State Representative Ken Rizer, who steered a bill requiring voters to display IDs through the Iowa House of Representatives this month. “But there is a perception that the system can be cheated. That’s one of the reasons for doing this.”
In Arkansas, State Representative Mark Lowery said his voter ID bill aimed to prevent fraud. But even more important, he added, is that “a large percentage of Americans do not trust the integrity of the electoral system, and that in and of itself is a problem that needs to be solved, because that undermines the basic tenet of democracy.”
There is history to this, said Allegra Chapman, the director of voting and elections at the advocacy group Common Cause. The first Supreme Court ruling to support voter ID laws, in an Indiana case called Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, acknowledged in 2008 that there was zero evidence of voter fraud in the state. But as long as the law inconvenienced everyone equally, it could be legal — even if it deterred “significant numbers” of voters from voting — if it had a “sufficiently weighty” justification. Trust in elections met that standard, the court added, because confidence could be low “if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud.”
