Republicans are doing their darnedest to convince Americans of the threat of widespread voter fraud by committing voter fraud. The latest perpetrator looks to be Mark Meadows, the dumbest man in politics. The former Congressman from NC-11 and former Trump Chief of Staff listed his residence as a burned out trailer in western North Carolina where he has never lived and may never have even visited. Instead, he was living in a condo in Northern Virginia. What a fraud.

The real problem, though, is Republicans who insist on pushing a false narrative that threatens to disenfranchise thousands of Americans, most of whom would support Democrats if they could get past onerous barriers to voting. The targets are generally older and browner Americans, but the GOP has also worked to reduce polling places where large numbers of young people live, places like college campuses. In the GOP mindset, if you can afford to own multiple properties, we’ll look the other way. If you live in public housing, you’re clearly suspect. 

Republicans have been pushing the lie of widespread voter fraud ever since Obama won. They’ve undermined faith in our electoral system while lacking any evidence to back up their claims. The voter fraud scheme that rocked North Carolina in 2018 was perpetrated on behalf of Republican candidates and would not have been prevented by any of the measures the GOP was pushing at the time. 

Which gets to another point: the moving goalposts. When Republicans first started screaming voter fraud, it was little more than a dog whistle to White folks who couldn’t believe that a Black man could get elected president. They focused on early voting, a method of voting that the Obama campaign used to drive up their margins, especially in heavily African American areas. The GOP pushed legislation that would reduce the number of early voting days and polling sites. They resisted any attempts to restrict mail-in ballots since voting by mail was used disproportionately by Republican voters at the time. It was also the way the Bladen County folks perpetrated election fraud on behalf of Republicans. 

During COVID, Democrats developed mail-in ballot programs to increase voter turnout. Suddenly, they became the focus of GOP stories of voter fraud. To hear Republicans tell it, 2020 was stolen by widespread vote-by-mail schemes. Their proof lay mainly with the high number of Democratic votes that came through that system. So, today, the GOP wants to limit access to the ballot by sharply restricting mail-in absentee voting. They can’t prove widespread fraud, but they can sow seeds of doubt through their propaganda networks and cast doubt on our democracy. And that’s really the point. 

The real frauds are the Republicans who either perpetrate lies about voter fraud or who sit silently while the disinformation damages our democracy. We won’t hear any Republicans criticize Mark Meadows, despite his hypocrisy and deception. They will stand with a guy who believes the earth is 6,000 years old and who supported the January 6 attack on the Capitol but won’t stand with people who have had to fight for the franchise throughout the history of our country. And then they’ll call themselves patriots. What a bunch of frauds.