Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM MAY 12-18, 2021 UCW 5 OPINION For weeks after the ballots were counted, supporters of the defeated presidential candi- date insisted the election had been stolen. Some alleged a shadowy conspiracy to rig vote-counting machines, throwing out just enough legal votes and manufacturing just enough illegal ones to decide the outcome. I heard these conspiracy theories many times, and not just from folks on the political fringe. I heard them from prominent North Carolinians who supported the defeated candidate. ey were Democrats. It was 2004. No, voting machines from the company then known as Diebold were not rigged to deny John Kerry his rightful victory. If you are one of those Democrats who repeatedly flogged that story to me back then, or who still believe it to be true today, then you should know I'm just going to tune out your outrage at Donald Trump supporters for espousing a similar conspiracy theory. e public discourse about elections and election laws has become thoroughly suffused with hyperbole, paranoia and misleading claims. Republicans discount Democratic al- legations as fanciful and then make their own fanciful allegations. Democrats act similarly. In reality, our election system, while exhibit- ing some correctable flaws, works fairly well. Generally speaking, it has never been easier to vote than it is right now. And, generally speak- ing, vote counts have never been harder to fake or manipulate than they are now. e rampant voter suppression about which some Democrats complain so vociferously is simply not evident in election statistics. Nei- ther is the rampant voter fraud about which some Republicans complain so vociferously. Indeed, the same studies that disprove one tend to disprove the other at the same time. Consider the example of voter-ID require- ments. Most scholarly research has found that requiring identification to vote has either a tiny effect or no discernible effect on the number of ballots cast. e vast majority of citizens, in other words, either possess an ID already, make easy use of state programs to get one, or have no interest in voting, anyway. Keep in mind, though, that a lack of a significant relationship between ID laws and vote totals also suggests imper- sonation fraud is very rare. Otherwise we'd see vote totals dip after enactment. at's not an argument against voter ID, by the way. It strengthens public confi- dence at a low cost. Nudged by the requirement, some folks without photo IDs ob- tain them to vote and then enjoy the ancillary benefits of having ID cards. More- over, in North Carolina, a photo-ID requirement is constitutionally mandated. My point is simply that at least the kind of voter fraud an ID requirement might deter does not occur at a scale large enough to tip the vast majority of elections. Nor do most other election irregularities or mistakes. It is, however, prudent to take reasonable, low-cost precautions against the rare excep- tion. at means requiring identification to cast in-person or absentee ballots. It means forbidding third parties from harvesting and turning in ballots — a potentially abusive practice that Democrats properly criticized in North Carolina's 9th District race in 2018 but that would be expanded, not curtailed, by the "For the People" bill Democrats are advancing in Congress. Plenty of Republican activists, and even a few Republican officials, indulge in conspira- torial thinking about elections, too. When I answer their calls or emails, I remind them that extraordinary claims require extraordi- nary evidence. Do left-of-center columnists and politi- cal analysts do the same? I don't see it. I see them lionizing Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic lawmaker who lost Georgia's 2018 gubernatorial contest by a much larger margin than Trump lost the state two years later. Yet she insisted that she was cheated out of her rightful victory by a GOP-led conspiracy. As far as I know, Abrams refuses even today to concede the 2018 race. Over-the-top claims about voter suppression and electoral conspiracies are mostly political theater, not serious analysis about the (usu- ally modest) effects of actual policy changes on actual voting behavior. I know that. I don't have to like it. JOHN HOOD, Chairman of the John Locke Foundation. Contributing Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@upand- comingweekly.com. 910-484-6200 Conspiracy theories damage democracy by JOHN HOOD