Must-read from Ned Foley:
This recent tweet from Professor Larry Tribe caught my eye: “Call it what you like, but the # of voters turned away for not having required forms of ID exceeded margin of T’s victory in MI, Pa & Wis”
As soon as I read it, I said to myself, “That can’t be right.”
First of all, no voter ever should be “turned away” for lack of ID. Instead, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) requires that voters lacking required ID receive a provisional ballot. To be sure, some poll workers may fail to enforce the mandates of HAVA, but in volumes exceeding Trump’s margins of victory in Michigan (about 11,000), Wisconsin (about 23,000), and Pennsylvania (about 44,000)??? If there had been a massive failure of election administration on that scale, which could have accounted for the outcome of the presidential election, presumably we would have heard news reports of it by now….
In sum, I think Tribe’s tweet is wildly irresponsible — indeed demonstrably false. The assertion that “the # of voters turned away for not having required forms of ID exceeded margin of T’s victory in MI, Pa & Wis” simply does not square with HAVA, the applicable ID rules governing these three states, or available data.
Ordinarily, I would ignore such misinformation, except that it comes from a “big name” source — a prominent Harvard Law professor, who (among other well-known accomplishments) served as one of Al Gore’s leading lawyers in the 2000 recount litigation.
As celebrated as Tribe may be, he certainly is not as well known as Donald Trump. Nor is Tribe’s tweet as egregiously false as Trump’s claim that he would have won the national popular vote were it not for “the millions of people who voted illegally.” Still, if one is to decry Trump’s blatant falsehoods about the electoral process, one must also call to account leading figures on the other side of the political aisle when they also propagate outright untruths about elections. In this context, as so many others, the Golden Rule fully applies: speak truthfully about voting as you would have others also speak truthfully about voting.
In this regard, I am also deeply disappointed about the League of Women Voters, whose website prominently displays the declaration of the League and its president, Chris Carson, that the “the 2016 presidential election WAS rigged” — a declaration subsequently reported by the Washington Post.
The League of Women Voters should know better. It is supposed to be a responsible organization about the nature of the voting process. It has a venerated history that it should not squander by sullying itself with Trump-like falsehoods about the nation’s voting process.
What is the League’s evidence that this year’s election “WAS rigged”? Among the assertions that the League makes to support its outlandish allegation is the fact that several states, including Ohio and Wisconsin, cut back the amount of early voting that they previously offered — not eliminating early voting completely, but not offering it as generously as they had before. While one certainly can disagree with this rollback of early voting as a matter of policy, it is impossible to say truthfully that this rollback disenfranchised any voter or rigged any election….