Donald Trump isn’t the only right-wing fabulist who has learned that when you enter a courtroom, rules matter. True the Vote, a national group devoted to spreading conspiracies about voter fraud, just suffered a humiliation in a Georgia courtroom, thanks to a judge’s simple request that they — get this — provide evidence for their claims of fraud during the 2020 election and the subsequent Senate runoff.
While it’s understandable to despair at the ease with which the liars and con artists of the right’s “election integrity” movement pump fabrications into the national bloodstream, their virtually unbroken string of failures in the courts may offer some solace. At least there, the system seems to work.
That’s because courts have rules far more strict than Rudy Giuliani’s podcast or — as Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News showed — an evening of right-wing television. To make a charge stand up legally, these voter fraud fabulists have to back it up with evidence. Again and again, they have failed to do so.
The cycle, by now, is depressingly familiar. First, groups like True the Vote spout claims of widespread fraud based on innuendo, ignorance of the law and the occasional I-know-a-guy-whose-girlfriend’s-cousin-heard-from-another-guy hearsay. Then those claims are amplified by conservative media — in this case, True the Vote’s conspiracy theories were heavily featured in the film “2000 Mules” from Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative pundit and convicted felon who was pardoned by Trump.
But though the claims may be widely believed by the devoted and the deluded, when it comes time to actually challenge the outcome of an election, they fail. In the Georgia case, True the Vote had filed a claim with the state in late 2021 alleging that the organization “spoke with several individuals regarding personal knowledge, methods, and organizations involved in ballot trafficking in Georgia.” They even said they had one anonymous individual who “admitted to personally participating and provided specific information about the ballot trafficking process.”
Those are some blockbuster allegations. So the state of Georgia opened an investigation, and asked True the Vote for evidence, including the name of this ballot trafficker so they could interview the person. Last summer, fed up with waiting for True the Vote to turn over corroboration, the Georgia attorney general asked a judge to compel the group to share its proof. Finally, in a court filing — more than two years after its initial complaint — True the Vote admitted it is unable to supply evidence for its charges.
We saw a similar series of events in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election: All over the country, Trump’s representatives and advocates tried to get the results of the election overturned. Every time they got into court, they were unable to provide any proof of their claims. They lost over 50 such suits; in some cases, judges that Trump himself had appointed tossed them out of court.
Add that to the success the targets of voter fraud defamation have had holding Trump allies accountable for the damage they did. Dominion settled its lawsuit against Fox News for $787.5 million, and a similar $2.7 billion lawsuit from Smartmatic is ongoing. A jury ordered Giuliani to pay $148 million to two Atlanta poll workers he targeted with vicious lies about them being part of a nonexistent voter fraud scheme. And one man who alleges he was slandered by True the Vote and “2000 Mules” has a lawsuit that is still pending. They claimed that video shows him stuffing a ballot drop box with fraudulent votes when he was actually dropping off ballots for himself and members of his family.
Unfortunately, the fact that the right’s voter fraud fraudsters lose just about every time they have to supply proof of their claims in a courtroom doesn’t mean this mania has been defeated. The bogus idea that voter fraud is rampant in American elections has become a core tenet of Republican ideology, almost as important as a belief that taxes are too high, immigrants are violent and abortion must be prohibited.
Polls consistently show that about two-thirds of Republican voters say Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president. No one repeats that lie more loudly and often than Trump himself, and fealty to that deranged fantasy may be the most important thing he looks for in anyone who wants to work for him. Trump’s pick to be the next co-chair of the Republican National Committee, North Carolina GOP Chair Michael Whatley, has worked with election denier groups; he was also involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Trump reportedly chose Whatley because, as one of the former president’s associates put it, he is “a stop the steal guy.”
Republicans’ continued belief in those lies produces a panoply of ugly consequences. Election workers around the country who want nothing more than to serve their communities and the system of democracy face harassment and death threats. Conservatives have redoubled efforts to restrict voting rights under the false banner of fighting fraud. And the very fanning of these conspiratorial flames burns away trust in the democratic system. So far, the purveyors of election fraud stories haven’t succeeded in reversing any legitimate elections. When they get into court, they inevitably fail. But only continued reversals at the ballot box itself may be enough to stop them.