"The Myth of Voter Suppression" by Fred Lucas

Like everything else in contemporary America, the subject of elections has divided along red and blue lines. By significantly changing rules on ballots, how they’re collected, how they’re secured, how voting does or doesn’t require a photo ID, and similar areas, the divide opens between conservatives concerned about election fraud and progressives cry “voter suppression.”  

Fred Lucas, manager of the Investigative Reporting Project at The Daily Signal (a conservative news outlet), took a close look at what evidence there is for both voter fraud and voter suppression. In The Myth of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault on Clean Elections, he makes a convincing case that voter suppression is indeed a myth, while election fraud has a long and dishonorable history in American elections.

 

The two sides of election concern have a long and interwoven history, Lucas says. Voter suppression, in fact, was almost standard operating procedure in Southern states during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods – and it was a procedure perfected by state Democratic parties to keep as few Black Americans from voting as possible. And it played a significant role in how the Democratic Party kept a hammerlock on cities like New York and the Southern states in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. (I can personally testify to that control; I grew up in Louisiana, where for decades your only political choices were Democrats.)

 

Fred Lucas

Lucas looks at electoral reforms, undertaken by almost half of the states, to see if any of them have discouraged voting. They haven’t. The reforms include cleaning the voting rolls of dead people and people who’ve left the state (something the Michigan secretary of state recently fought to keep from happening, for some unknown reason). He discusses the business of vote trafficking (in a capitalist society, everything gets capitalized). And he also considers how race is used in the arguments over election reform.

 

He examines the various bills introduced and occasionally passed by one house of the current Congress that would essentially federalize control of elections (Lucas sees that as a dangerous mistake). And he presents an in-depth study of all of the various groups behind the claims of “voter suppression” and who’s funding them – including some of the biggest charitable foundations in America.

 

Lucas is also the author of Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Elections, The Right Frequency: The Story of the Talk Radio Giants Who Shook Up the Political and Media Establishment, Abuse of Power: Inside the Three-Year Campaign to Impeach Donald Trump, and other works. An award-winning journalist and veteran White House correspondent, he’s written and reported for Fox News, Newsweek, National Review, History Magazine Quarterly, The Washington Examiner, Newsmax, The Blaze, Townhall, The Federalist, The National Interest, The American Spectator, The American Conservative, and other news outlets. He received a B.A. degree from Western Kentucky University and an M.S. degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. He lives in Virginia. 

 

The Myth of Voter Suppression is both a timely and vital book. Well-research and well-documented, it tells a story of great concern and great peril for the future of American elections. 

 

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Tainted by Suspicion by Fred Lucas.

“Tainted by Suspicion” by Fred Lucas

Reading history is a good thing. History may not repeat itself, but reading it does provide perspective on major events happening now. As in, the state of American politics may not be the worst it’s ever been.

In Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections, Fred Lucas reviews five presidential elections in depth – those of 1800, 1824, 1876, 1960, and 2000 – and two more briefly – 1888 and 2016. He provides the context for each, how the candidates were nominated, what happened during the elections, and the controversies that dominated the electoral college meetings and (occasionally) Congress itself.

Lucas writes in a highly readable style, and includes several pertinent anecdotes about each election. This isn’t a dry reading of history but an engaging, often funny (in hindsight only; it wasn’t funny when the elections happened), and informative review of some of the most controversial elections in American history.

In 1800, Federalist John Adams was seeking a second term while Thomas Jefferson was seeking a first. The mud was liberally flung by all sides. But because of how the electoral college counted votes at the time, Jefferson and his vice-presidential running mate Aaron Burr ended up with exactly the same number of votes. Intrigue followed, as the Federalists attempted to support Burr and so deny that radical Jefferson the presidency.

In 1824, it was Adams’s son, John Quincey Adams, battling Andrew Jackson. Henry Clay, who wanted the presidency himself, would end up denying it to Jackson. It was an ugly, mudslinging campaign (and would be repeated with different results in 1828).

The 1876 election, between Republican Rutherford Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden, was another electoral cliffhanger. Passions rose so high that newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer editorialized for the arming of 100,000 men to take Washington by force and put Tilden in the White House (yes, one might call that news media bias). A special commission of senators, congressmen, and Supreme Court justices was formed to make a decision – and a deal was cut between the Republicans and southern Democrats to give the White House to Hayes in return for the end of military occupation of four southern states in Reconstruction.

In 1960, the controversy wasn’t so much electoral college in nature as it was the deep suspicions that the vote in Illinois, and especially Chicago, was fraudulent. An investigative series started by the New York Herald Tribune found that several Chicago cemeteries had voted and one abandoned, ruined house was the address for 56 different voters. It appeared that the Daley machine had been up to no good, but Richard Nixon, interestingly enough, intervened with the Herald Tribune and asked that the series be stopped. He was afraid that the world would believe that American elections could be bought and sold. And so John F. Kennedy became President.

Fred Lucas

The 2000 campaign between Al Gore and George W. Bush came down to the controversy in Florida, whether the votes were counted correctly, and all of the legal maneuvering through the courts, with the conclusion of two decisions (7-2 and 5-4) by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lucas concludes with the 2016 election, Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton, and the numerous efforts that were put in motion to deny Trump the White House.

Each of the sections includes a speculative “what if it had gone the other way” discussion.

The author makes or implies a number of summary points:

In general, no election was “stolen.” America survived the controversies, although potential violence was close in both 1800 and 1876 (and remember that 1876 was the nation’s centennial celebration).

It’s awful to go through one of these controversies, but it has happened before. Events can indeed appear to be heading for social and political convulsion. But, so far at least, the United States has gotten through its controversial and disputed elections.

In a few cases, a different outcome would have made a significant difference – for example, Al Gore would likely have nominated more liberal justices for the Supreme Court than George W. Bush did. But in many of these examples cited, the differences might have been surprisingly small.

Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal. He’s covered the White House for other publications for a number of years, and writes regularly on politics for Fox News, The Weekly Standard, and other publications. He received a bachelor’s degree from Western Kentucky University and a master’s degree from Columbia University.

Tainted by Suspicion allows us to look past today’s headlines and breaking news stories on television and keep some perspective. It’s also a fascinating account of many of the presidential election controversies the United States has experienced.

Top photograph by Kevin Morris via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Yuval Levin’s “The Fractured Republic”

Blame it on the politics of nostalgia.

In The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism,

Yuval Levin makes a convincing case why both of America’s major political parties have it wrong. The Democratic Party remains fixated on the good old days of the Great Society – the 1960s – when big government programs run by technocratic experts seemed to be the answer to everything. The Republicans are stuck in the glory days of the Reagan era – the 1980s – with supply-side economics and “it’s morning in America again.”

It doesn’t help clarify or resolve anything that the Democrats see the Reagan era as a betrayal of the Great Society, and the Republicans see the Great Society as the betrayal of the Constitution. Both parties are still stuck in the politics of nostalgia, and it’s a politics that is making America and the world increasingly unsettled and uneasy, if not dangerous.

What the two parties seem not to understand is that America, and Americans, have been changing since the 1960s and the 1980s. And Levin sees three key characteristics of that change: “the weakening of our established institutions, a growing detachment from the traditional sources of order and structure in American life, and an intensifying bifurcation of ways of living.”

Traditional sources of authority – political, cultural, religious, and social – have been diffusing and in some cases atomizing. These changes were not caused by the internet and social media – they were well underway by the time Tim Berners-Lee (not Al Gore) invented the worldwide web in the late 1980s. What the internet did do was to exacerbate and enhance the changes that were underway. The internet “is particularly well suited to our individualist, deconsolidated way of life,” Levin writes. “In some respects, the Internet embodies the kind of society we are in the process of becoming: it is decentralized, personalized, and individualized.”

It may seem paradoxical but it actually makes a strange kind of sense. As we decentralize and continue to “personalize and individualize,” more power flows to the federal government. And the federal government is increasingly ill-suited to deal with the domestic and global problems the country is grappling with, and not only because of the politic standoff in Congress.

Levin writes from a conservative perspective, but that perspective doesn’t blind him to the failures of conservatism and the Republican Party. He offers penetrating insights on all of our major institutions. For my generation, the Baby Boomers, he says the equivalent of this: “There’s no going back to the 1950s. Institutions were still respected and heeded. A belief in the progressive improvement of life was still holding sway. The mainline Protestant denominations were a dominant force in American society.” And none of that is true today. Consider the numerical collapse of the mainline Protestant groups who seemed determined to embrace full extinction.

And to my children, the Millennials, he says the equivalent of this: “Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s bad. Nothing works better for civilization than the family, and to throw out traditional concepts of the family is to seriously risk the eventual collapse of society. You may achieve complete individual freedom at the expense of that freedom.”

Yuval Levin

Levin is the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and editor of National Affairs. He also worked on staff at the White House and Congress and is a contributing editor to National Review and the Weekly Standard. He is also the author of Tyranny of Reason: The Origin and Consequences of the Social Scientific Outlook (2000); Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy (2008); and The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (2013).

The Fractured Republic isn’t only an explanation of what’s wrong; it also offers possible a number of solutions, beginning with building upon those forces that seem to be tearing our society apart. Levin doesn’t see a fundamental problem of inequality in America, but he does see what he calls the fundamental problem of immobility. Levin’s proposed solutions are not prescriptive and one-size-fits-all. Instead, they rely on an individualized and experimental approach.

I don’t think I could find a better guide to the 2016 presidential election than The Fractured Republic. It’s a thoughtful, important, and vital work.

Top photograph by Dawn Hudson via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.