The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
If you tell some people there’s a huge problem with something often enough, they might believe you, despite the fact that you’re not an expert in the thing where you say the problem exists and you have little or no evidence to back it up.
That seems to be the impetus for a Senate bill claiming to be about increasing voter confidence in elections, which when it came up for a recent committee hearing was short on the evidence to back up one of its main reasons for being.
“Misinformation and disinformation, as well as incomplete information about the level of voter fraud committed in Washington state, contributes to an ongoing lack of trust in election integrity,” according to a key paragraph in the statement of intent for the bill.
Or as Sen. Keith Wagoner, R-Sedro-Woolley, the bill’s sponsor put it in a hearing last week: “You can’t force confidence, it has to be earned.” When people lack confidence in the system, they don’t vote, he added, describing that as voter “self-suppression.”
To restore confidence or ameliorate this lack of trust, Wagoner and the bill’s cosponsors suggest several remedies, including a check by the Washington State Patrol crime lab of between 5,000 and 10,000 randomly selected ballot envelopes in this November’s election to see if the signature on each ballot matches the one on that voter’s registration form.
Some other changes the bill would make cost about $5 million a year. That amount might be a pittance if there was irrefutable evidence of widespread voter fraud. It would even be reasonable if there was significant evidence that the results of a single election in Washington was changed by election fraud.
But Sen. Patty Kuderer, D-Bellevue, vice chairwoman of the Senate State Government and Elections Committee, noted during the bill’s hearing that former Secretary of State Kim Wyman, a Republican, called the accusation of widespread fraud “ludicrous on its face.” She also quoted a Washington Post article that looked at possible fraud in Washington and two other states for the 2016 and 2018 elections and concluded one is more likely to be struck by lightning than experience voter fraud.
“I’m certainly not alleging widespread voter fraud,” Wagoner said. But it’s not more rare than being struck by lightning, he said, citing a memo that the King County elections supervisor referred 20 cases of possible voter fraud to the county prosecutor.
Twenty cases out of how many votes, Kuderer asked. Not sure, replied Wagoner, adding it was a large number. At that point, Sen. Sam Hunt, D-Olympia, broke in to say there were about 1.2 million cast in that county.
For the record, 20 out of 1.2 million would be one in 60,000. The odds of being struck by lightning are one in 500,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So there’s that.
Hunt noted that a better number to consider is how many of those referrals are actually prosecuted.
In the past, such investigations have revealed that cases of dead people voting — which is what the King County cases appear to be — are often resolved by the fact that the person died between mailing their marked ballot and Election Day, which is legal. Others are resolved with little more than a warning and fine after revealing they involve a person who votes a dead spouse’s ballot.
Unproven allegations of voter fraud have become a circular, self-sustaining argument.
People tell me they know — and I as well as everyone else know — the 2020 election was rigged and that Joe Biden didn’t get 7 million more votes for president than Donald Trump or that Jay Inslee didn’t get 740,000 more votes than Republican challenger Loren Culp for governor. Because everyone knows this, they don’t feel the need to produce any proof because they are stating the obvious.
Unfortunately for the state’s elections system, nothing in Wagoner’s bill would satisfy those skeptics. Nothing any other lawmaker could propose would suffice, either, short of declaring Trump the president and Culp the governor.
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