Trump’s rising star should force voting reform for GOP’s sake as well as Dems

Trump’s growing political power has given a shot in the arm to his claim Democrats stole the 2020 election. Without reforms to the system, the issue won’t fade.

Former US president Donald Trump attends the Kentucky Derby last week. Picture: Getty Images

Donald Trump’s stubborn claim that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats, which overwhelmingly has been rejected by elite opinion and repeatedly by US courts, has had a shot in the arm as the former president’s political power is growing. On current trends the issue won’t be fading away.

Trump’s picks for Republican primaries in the lead-up to critical midterm elections in November have won easily in Ohio and West Virginia. Even Senator Mitt Romney, who fell out spectacularly with Trump, said last week if he wanted the Republican nomination in 2024 the 75-year-old would get it.

A Harvard University poll in late March found 47 per cent of Americans would vote for the former real estate tycoon and television star, compared with 41 per cent for Joe Biden and 38 per cent for Kamala Harris. Biden’s standing is unlikely to have improved.

Trump screened and lauded a new documentary, 2000 Mules, at his Florida mansion for prominent friends and fans last Friday night. It was produced by conservative provocateur and author Dinesh D’Souza and a Texas not-for-profit, True the Vote.

Using vast troves of anonymised mobile phone location data – the kind that helped police arrest rioters on Capitol Hill on January 6 – the documentary suggests at least 2000 individuals in five key swing states visited at least 10 voter drop boxes and five left-wing activist organisations during the voting period. Some “mules” – those dropping off multiple ballots – visited drop boxes more than 50 times, it claims.

The show also presented CCTV footage of people dropping multiple ballots off at strange hours, some wearing gloves (and a T-shirt; it clearly wasn’t to keep warm) at all hours of the night.

All up, the supposed mules could have made the difference in critical states such as Pennsylvania and Arizona, which Biden won by only thousands of votes, D’Souza argues. The film is fascinating and methodologically novel, though the producers fail to prove anything and it has been ignored by the major US networks, even Fox and Newsmax. With four million minutes of video of voting booths, as the producers claim to have, why not show footage of the same individuals dropping votes off more than once? Something doesn’t add up.

But that’s not the point. Without reforms to improve the perception and reality of integrity in elections in the world’s most important democracy, films such as 2000 Mules will keep chipping away at Americans’ confidence in them. The share of Americans who believe the 2020 US election was illegitimate is incredible.

A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll in December last year – more than a year after the election – found 71 per of Republican voters believed Biden’s election as president was “probably or definitely not” legitimate. Almost a third of independent voters agreed. Obviously, this is a very large group of people, many educated and informed, and whatever the evidence they have grounds to be suspicious.

Because of Covid-19 the November 2020 election in the US led to a huge expansion of absentee voting and the vast proliferation of unattended drop boxes. The incentives to commit electoral fraud are always powerful given the stakes, so lowering hurdles to commit this will inevitably lead to more of it: it’s basic economics.

At the same time, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated more than $US400m to charities set up to help with voting during a pandemic. The bulk of the money, overseen typically by Democrat activists, went on salaries for “voter outreach” in swing states and counties that Biden ended up winning, according to Capital Research Centre, a think tank in Washington.

If 2020 was the safest and most secure election in US history, a claim repeated constantly in the media, it certainly wasn’t the most independently administered. If Republicans win congress late this year, expect a few questions about “Zuck Bucks”.

The integrity of US elections is a longstanding problem and shouldn’t be a priority only for Republicans.

Historians still debate whether Illinois and Texas Democrats nefariously won John F. Kennedy the 1960 presidential election. Some Democrats claim the 2000 presidential election was stolen by George W. Bush. And new White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has claimed Repub­lican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp stole the 2018 state election.

A commission led by former Democrat president Jimmy Carter and former Republican secretary of state James Baker in 2005 recommended states introduce voter ID, limit mail-in voting and tidy up electoral rolls which, by 2012, were a dog’s breakfast, with one in eight voter registrations not even valid according to the independent Pew Research Centre.

Yet in 2022 it’s no exaggeration to say the Democratic Party has become obsessed with maintaining pandemic voting rules beyond the pandemic, casting anyone who wants to return to pre-2020 voting rules as a racist who is intent on “suppressing the vote”. It’s reasonable to ask why the party has become so insistent on keeping rules that it barely advocated for before 2020.

The party has slammed Georgia’s modest attempt to improve the integrity of elections, including introducing voter IDs, as “a return to Jim Crow” – a ludicrous claim no fair-minded person could entertain. They would be shocked by rules in Australia, where voters need a good reason to vote via mail, and drop boxes are not allowed.

If the cost of ensuring faith in the outcome of elections means a handful of people couldn’t be bothered to vote, so be it. There’s plenty enough to argue about on the policy front without painfully debating the outcome of every election, which only polarises an already highly political society even further.

Joseph Stalin once quipped it’s not who votes but who counts the votes that matters. These days, the how and who of getting votes to the counters is at least as important. Whatever the merits of D’Souza’s provocative film, there should be no scope for mules in the future.