All of that was apart from what the Russians may also have been doing in North Carolina by targeting its voting systems. As of late spring 2017, there were questions if hacking could have scrambled voter registration data and e-poll books in Durham County, which may have led to computer breakdowns, delays for voters, and the necessity for poll workers to turn to paper ballots.194 When asked what caused that those snafus, Durham County BOE staff quickly rejected hacking and blamed “user error.”195 That’s voters and poll workers—anyone but those actually responsible for managing the voting systems.
13
THE PLAYBOOK: DO EVERYTHING
AS THE ELECTION CAME TO A close, other factors outside of the fine print of voting undoubtedly helped Trump and the GOP. These included former FBI Director James Comey announcing in late October that the bureau was reopening its investigation into Clinton’s handling of her classified email as US secretary of state, her campaign’s decision not to step up Clinton’s visits in Michigan and Wisconsin, the still-simmering rifts between her supporters and the Sanders camp, and the continuing leaks of Clinton campaign emails by Wikileaks—which federal intelligence agencies blamed on Russian hacking. Meanwhile, beyond Trump’s taunts to “Lock her up” and rants that Democrats always steal millions of votes,196 the GOP in a handful of states kept returning to the voter fraud meme to tilt the results their way.
States we haven’t discussed much, like Arizona, enacted new barriers to complicate the process. In mid-2016, Arizona made it a felony to collect and turn in another person’s absentee ballot. That targeted seniors, especially in Latino communities. Indiana deputized party officials to patrol polling places and demand voters to show their IDs, another intimidation tactic. In Marion County, where Indianapolis is its largest city and many blacks live, GOP election officials only opened one early voting site, compared to more than twenty in adjacent white suburban counties.197 In all, fourteen states had new restrictions on the process as Election Day approached.198 In North Carolina, where a federal court in July 2016 threw out anti-voter laws passed after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, the state’s GOP drew on its playbook and showed no tactic was too shameless when power was at stake.
As the November vote approached, North Carolina’s Republican-dominated government and election bureaucracy were already ignoring the federal court ruling that its post-VRA laws were illegally racist. It revived Jim Crow era tactics simply making it harder to vote. Black turnout was down 16 percent during the first week of early voting because “in heavily black counties, there were 158 fewer early polling places,” The Nation’s Joan Walsh reported.199 On Monday before Election Day, the state party issued a release bragging about this result. “African-American early voting is down 8.5 percent from this time in 2012. Caucasian voters early voting is up 22.5 percent from this time in 2012.” The GOP spun this as a sign that Obama’s coalition was “crumbing.”200
It’s worth revisiting fine print in that July 2016 court ruling because it is microcosm of the motives and strategies embodied in the GOP’s war on voters during this decade. Despite its extreme redistricting in 2011, US Court of Appeals Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote that North Carolina was trending purple until the Supreme Court gutted the VRA in 2013. “African American registration and turnout rates had finally reached near-parity with white registration and turnout rates. African Americans were poised to act as a major electoral force,” she wrote for the three-judge appeals panel.201
Nonetheless, the state’s Legislature and governor moved “within days” to pass laws that “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision … and, in fact, impose cures for [alleged voter fraud] problems that did not exist,” the ruling said, recounting the history. It then cited another federal ruling about similar illegal tactics in Texas—that state’s post-VRA voter ID law—where “the state took away [minority voters’] opportunity because [they] were about to exercise it.”202 That’s as clear an affirmation of institutional racism in elections as any federal court is apt to make.
Judge Motz didn’t stop there. She named the Republicans’ motives: To roll back the clock to segregationist days. North Carolina’s GOP had been waiting years to do this. Between 1980 and 2013, the DOJ had rejected “Fifty proposed election law changes,” the ruling noted, while voting rights groups had won fifty-five cases under the Voting Rights Act. “The legislation came into being within days of North Carolina’s release from the pre-clearance requirements of the Voting Rights Act. That long-ago history bears more heavily here than it might otherwise,” she wrote for the majority.203
Motz’s opinion would not call the GOP outright racists: “Our conclusion does not mean, and we do not suggest, that any member of the General Assembly harbored racial hatred or animosity toward any minority group.” But it did say that the GOP laws targeted “voters who, based on race, were unlikely to vote for the majority party.” That contradiction is imbued in southern politics—taking a genteel stance that a person is not racist even if their actions have racist consequences. But the ruling’s footnotes were not blind to that reality and showed some Republicans were unabashedly power hungry, racist, or both.
Judge Motz’s appeals court ruling came in response to a lower federal district court ruling that upheld the anti-voter laws passed immediately after the Supreme Court gutted the VRA. The appellate court chastised the district court for acting as if it was still 1955 and segregation reigned.
“The district court took no issue with one of the Legislature’s stated purposes … to ‘move the law back to the way it was,’” Motz wrote. The accompanying footnote was stunning.204 It quoted a “Republican precinct chairman who testified before the House Rules Committee that the photo ID requirement would ‘disenfranchise some special voting blocks [sic]’ and that ‘that in itself is the reason to vote for the photo ID, period, end of discussion.’” That GOP precinct chairman was Don Yelton, an AM talk radio host who called himself the Rush Limbaugh of western North Carolina. He told Comedy Central’s The Daily Show in late 2013, “If [the law] hurts the whites so be it. If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want government to give them everything, so be it.”205
“The sheer outrageousness of these public statements by a party leader does provide some evidence of the racial and partisan political environment in which the General Assembly enacted the law,” that footnote ended, returning to the cautious wording of federal court decisions.206 As expected, North Carolina’s GOP vehemently denounced the court and ruling, saying Democrats had appointed Motz and her colleagues.
But they were not the only red state getting slapped for anti-voter actions in 2016. The same day of the North Carolina ruling, federal District Court Judge James Peterson struck down some Wisconsin laws, writing “a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement.”207 A week earlier, Texas reached a settlement with the DOJ and civil rights groups to loosen its new voter ID rules after being sued for racial discrimination.208 For a moment, it seemed like the pendulum in this decade’s voting rights war was swinging back in the direction of civil rights.
These rulings should have been the end of the story, but they were not. As Election Day neared, North Carolina was like many states. Despite a close governor’s race, Clinton and its Democratic US Senate candidate, Deborah Ross, a former state ACLU director and state representative, were ahead in polls. Reporters like The Nation’s Walsh were upbeat about “a new South led by North Carolina.” She mentioned repeated visits by President Obama and the First Lady, by Vice President Joe Biden, and by Bill Clinton to fight “powerful headwinds, given the state’s herculean efforts at voter suppression.”209
We know what happened. On November 8, Clinton lost the state by nearly 4 points. Ross, like the five other Senate candidates who were key to regaining a majority in that body, also lost. In the governor’s race, the incumbent Republican, Pat McCrory, was trailing the Democratic state Attorney General Roy Cooper. As results trickled
in—each county had to count its regular ballots, provisional ballots, absentee, and overseas votes—McCrory’s campaign consultants began accusing Democrats of voter fraud. Hundreds were named as illegal voters in vote-contesting filings and were smeared in the press. The state party filed an emergency motion with the US Supreme Court, under a complex theory it might get a ruling throwing the selection of the next governor to the GOP-led legislature.210
These moves showed that just when you thought the election might be over, it’s not. The same was also true for Democrats across the nation who did not understand why Clinton lost—especially after polls showed her leading despite Comey’s resurrection of the FBI’s investigation. In Michigan, more than seventy-five thousand ballots were initially reported on the state’s website as missing presidential votes. That state had the nation’s tightest finish, with eleven thousand votes separating Clinton and Trump. In Wisconsin, where a tough voter ID law was in effect for April’s primaries but thrown out by a federal judge in July, Trump won by nearly twenty-three thousand votes. Milwaukee County, with its largest population of blacks and tens of thousands of students, cast sixty thousand fewer votes than in 2012. (Only two years before, another court noted that an estimated three hundred thousand Wisconsin residents, mostly poor and students, lacked required IDs to get a ballot.) And in Pennsylvania, voting machines in dozens of counties that went for Trump were entirely paperless, which meant that there was no way to audit or verify the reported result.211
As the campaign peaked, Clinton was crestfallen by Comey’s investigation, preoccupied with Russian interference, and believed that she was ahead in key Midwestern states—Michigan and Wisconsin. Her campaign sent Clinton and its resources elsewhere. These observations and miscalculations are detailed in the 2017 book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.212
What’s not in that book and most post-2016 accounts is how Democrats, including many Berniecrats, voted for Clinton—even if it was more out of opposition to Trump than affirmation of her. But she was an insider in a season favoring outsiders. The Democratic establishment anointed Clinton expecting she would be facing ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Nonetheless, many coastal Democrats rallied and believed she was more progressive than her husband. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and even northeastern Virginia, where Pentagon contractors and federal employees live, saw her as a technocrat who understood them. But across interior America, Clinton was unconvincing for many reasons. Those ranged from her cautiousness on the stump to decades of being pilloried as an elitist, liberal feminist by right-wing media in those regions. Too many women, let alone men threatened by strong women, rejected her.
All these factors, which politically attentive Americans are aware of, played into Trump’s favor. But what is overlooked in those cultural and political analyses is how the stubborn Republican game plan of doing everything to rig the rules and tilt the field comes into play when contests are tight and the turnout is less than a landslide. The 2016 election didn’t see the turnout waves and popular vote margins of victory that Obama inspired in 2008 (9.5 million votes) and 2012 (5 million votes). While her 2.9 million popular vote victory was bigger numerically and percentage-wise than John Kennedy’s in 1960 and Richard Nixon’s in 1968, it wasn’t sufficient to translate into an Electoral College victory in 2016.
Republicans turn to a do-everything strategy because our elections are so decentralized. There are ten thousand jurisdictions overseeing one hundred thousand Election Day precincts nationwide—to say nothing of states that vote early and vote by mail. It is virtually impossible to predict the final swing precincts, in the swing counties, in the swing states. No pundit, pollster, or data analytic expert accurately foresaw where she would fall short by tens of thousands of votes compared to Obama in 2012.
That’s why Republicans deploy such a vast playbook of starting line advantages, such as extreme redistricting giving them upwards of a 6–8 point lead, and other barriers such as strict voter ID laws that also shave another 2–3 percent off of Democratic voting blocs in November (and even more in the primaries). Nobody precisely knows where the fault lines will appear in a country with 137 million presidential voters, especially in a year like 2016 with no final battleground state—unlike Ohio in 2004 and Florida in 2000.
While Democrats were mortified with the outcome—Trump’s victory and the Democrats’ loss of the Senate—the travesties didn’t end on Election Night. They continued when Americans wanted to know what happened, including who voted for Trump and why. They found elections are filled with additional opacities, namely, a non-transparent vote verification process, and partisan and institutional reluctance to recount close elections.
That absence, after a race that never seemed to end, was another antidemocratic feature of our system of voting. When citizens are left grasping for facts and officials don’t or won’t provide them, then the most cynical, biased, and conspiratorial forces win. Voters deserved to know who voted for Trump and trust that counts were accurate—or realize why voting machinery is unreliable. The Green Party’s recounts sought those answers, and they were blocked on almost every front.
SECTION III
THE RECOUNTS
14
WHAT HAPPENED?
NO DEMOCRAT OR PROGRESSIVE NEEDS TO be reminded how they felt on 2016’s Election Night. During the day, precinct exit polls by a national media consortium of the print and broadcast outlets reported a tight race but likely a Clinton victory. But as results trickled in and states assumed to be reliably blue lined up behind Trump, and the GOP took control of Congress, disbelief and shock set in. At about 11:15 PM Eastern, the AP called North Carolina for Trump. A half hour later Fox News called Wisconsin for Trump. Clinton was ahead in Pennsylvania, but her strongholds had all reported and Trump was gaining. At midnight, David Simas, Obama’s White House political director, called Clinton Campaign Manager Robby Mook and urged them to not “drag this out.”213
Clinton wouldn’t concede until the next morning. Immediately across America, voters, campaign volunteers, and others who did not imagine a Trump victory and GOP sweep, did not accept this result. The public, especially Democrats, wanted to know what happened, what went wrong and hoped there might be some way to prevent Trump and GOP from taking power in January 2017. An angst-filled campaign ended with even more angst.
Just when explanations and understanding were needed, mainstream media failed to deliver. The biggest outlets, which for months hawked their latest polls as gospel, did not discuss what they had missed or misreported. Nor did they consider pausing to verify the results in swing states, where, only days before, polls had projected Clinton as winning. Instead, the outlets did what they always do in the aftermath of close and controversial elections. They seized upon an easy narrative to explain away the results, while ignoring a genuine desire for actual proof. The most seized-upon narrative was low-income, working-class whites came out for Trump in a spasm to preserve their place in an increasingly diverse nation. (By mid-2017, academics found Trump’s base was white but was not low-income; most lacked college degrees but two-thirds made more than $50,000 (just below America’s median household income), with a third making more than $100,000.)214
What ensued after November 8 was schizophrenic. Beyond the GOP hyping Trump’s win as a mandate and Trump blaring he would have won the popular vote if millions of immigrants had not voted illegally—a lie—state election directors saw November 8 as a wide success. Compared to 2012, the top officials said there were fewer delays and polling place problems. Across the country, voting in communities of color and white areas was more similar than not, they added, applauding themselves.215 These same officials spent the fall downplaying reports that Russians had breached their computerized voting systems. By spring 2017, it emerged that thirty-nine states were targeted and one had been penetrated—more than anyone reported during the election. But Election Day did not produce obvious telltale signs of interference, such
as outsized requests for provisional ballots by voters not on precinct lists.216 The officials overseeing elections wanted to slam the door on 2016, sweeping under the rug the less visible, antidemocratic, poorly performing, or possibly malicious features of the election. They turned to certifying the results and taking vacations.
That landscape left a handful of voting rights activists, constitutional lawyers, computer science experts, and journalists looking for answers and explanations—or offering their own. Chris Thomas, who retired in early 2017 after thirty-six years as Michigan’s election director, called these people “wonks,” “crusaders,” and “professional irritants” in an exit interview with a trade publication, reflecting how many in his profession see these advocates.217
Nonetheless, one of the first analyses to emerge came from a cadre of election integrity activists who, since 2004’s presidential election, have been tracking discrepancies between media exit polls and the Election Night results. (These counts are not the official totals that come days or weeks later, but unofficial ones used by the media to project winners and by the candidates to declare victory or concede.) These activists emphasized that international election observers use exit polls as a big clue for detecting fraudulent results. They were astonished. As Election Defense Alliance cofounder Jonathan Simon wrote, “By early morning [November 9] I had begun circulating tables documenting the most egregious ‘red shift’ exit poll to vote count disparities ever recorded in the computerized voting era. Even for those accustomed to the mysterious and pervasive rightward shifts between exit poll and vote count results, the results were eye-popping.”218
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