The Illegitimate Harris Presidency
A skirmish on Twitter/X between Elon Musk and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson revealed a leading misinformation tactic election deniers will use paint Kamala Harris as an illegitimate President if she wins the election. Here are the Tweets:
The line election deniers have been pushing goes like this: “Voter registration rolls are a mess. There are more registered voters than people who live in the state, there are possible noncitizens on the rolls, and officials refuse to clean up the rolls. We’ve even gone to court to force officials to remove ineligible names, but courts won’t hear our cases. Democrats are using these fake, dead, and ineligible voters to vote for Harris in a massive voter fraud.”
None of this is true.
Here’s what you need to know:
Every state has procedures to remove voters who have died, moved, or are otherwise ineligible. Federal law requires it, and state laws have similar rules.
There’s a waiting period before states can “purge” voters. When Benson says “inactive” voters will eventually be removed in accordance with law, she’s describing a safeguard to sure we don’t punish people too early for not voting. Here’s the process:
If Benson receives information that I moved, she’ll send a notice to my old address asking me to confirm I still live there. If I don’t respond, she’ll make my registration “inactive,” but federal law says she can’t remove me until I fail to vote from that address in two federal elections.
Benson is simply following the law: she’s identified 1.2m people to remove once they don’t vote in two elections. If they do show up to vote, they can prove they still live in Michigan and cast a ballot (rather than having been prematurely disenfranchised).
Musk is wrong and misleading when he says Benson will “only” remove ineligible voters “AFTER” the election.
Federal law says Benson can’t remove the 1.2 million inactive voters until after the election because she has to see if they vote.
Benson actually does remove voters before every election, because federal law requires it.
That said, federal law prohibits officials from removing voters within 90 days of any election to prevent error-prone, eleventh hour purge efforts that often disenfranchise qualified voters.
But what about all those inactive and extra voters, you ask? Doesn’t this mean they’re on the rolls and can lodge fake votes for Harris?
No. Votes don’t magically cast themselves. “Stealing an election” requires finding a huge number of people willing to illegally vote twice through either (1) a massive vote-by-mail scheme (which we’ve seen is impossible to do without getting caught); or (2) wide scale in-person double-voting, which would likewise be caught by Trump’s 100,000 lawyers and volunteers monitoring voting.
Trump and Musk are misinformation masterminds: they know it’s easier to make voters suspicious of a false claim than to totally satisfy them that the claim isn’t true. Once Trump and Musk do that with a dozen different false claims in half a dozen battleground states, we’ll be fighting an uphill battle to make a Harris victory seem legitimate.
But a little truth and common sense can go a long way. Stay tuned over the next 15 days (and 15 weeks until the Inauguration) for basic facts and straightforward analysis to cut through the misinformation.