AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File New Jersey Gov, Mikie Sherrill When it comes to allegations of voter fraud, there are no goalposts — there are only moving targets.
Just look at CNN, where allegations of large-scale voter fraud are dismissed routinely as baseless conspiracy theories. Yet when confronted with legitimate examples of voter fraud — and the inherent implication that similar cases are out there yet to be discovered — the tone changes slightly. Oh, sure, they say — the fraud is real. But it’s negligible and has no effect on elections.
Well, except for the times when it does.
It appears we are quickly entering the second stage of political denialism. We have gone from “this isn’t happening” to “okay, this is happening, but it’s not really that bad.”
Following reports last week that New Jersey had incorrectly added nearly 7,000 non-citizens to the state’s voter rolls, and that some 400 of them had illegally cast ballots in elections within the last three years, CNN host Abby Phillip reliably stuck to the position that this doesn’t prove anything regarding the larger concerns over voter fraud.
“This is obviously not a great situation,” said Phillip, “but it also doesn’t demonstrate that there’s widespread voter fraud in New Jersey or anywhere.”
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) blamed the fraudulent enrollments on a “software glitch.” Many journalists have accepted this explanation on its face, and it may be true, but the software vendor in question vigorously denies it.
The Manhattan Institute’s Jesse Arm responded to Phillip: “In New Jersey? 6,600 non-citizens made it onto the voter rolls. That, to me, is pretty widespread voter fraud.”
“That’s widespread?” Phillip asked. “Do you know what’s the percentage?”
“What’s your definition of widespread, by the way?” Phillip pressed. “Is it 1 percent? Is it 2 percent?”
CNN contributor Scott Jennings jumped in: “What’s your tolerance for this?” It’s a fair question. After all, valid votes are diluted or canceled out by each fraudulent vote. Some real number of voters is being disenfranchised.
“Hold on,” responded Phillip. “This is not about tolerance; this is about whether it is widespread or something that is relatively rare.”
“You’re pounding him over the word ‘widespread,'” Jennings noted. “I just would ask you, what is your tolerance for any fraud at all?”
Phillip declined to answer the question and returned instead to focusing on the word “widespread.” You may have heard this style of argumentation before.
As the Manhattan Institute’s Rob Henderson put it memorably in 2021, this form of defending indefensible behaviors and situations goes in four stages. Step one: “It’s not really happening.” Step two: “Yeah, it’s happening, but it’s not a big deal.” Step three: “It’s a good thing, actually.” He later added step four: “People freaking out about it are the real problem.”
We are squarely on step two when it comes to voter fraud, quickly approaching step three.
During a similar debate in January, Phillip had stuck to the talking point that maybe there is voter fraud, but not enough to matter. “You guys are in search of something that there has been no evidence exists in the — to the degree that you think that it exists,” she said.
Earlier, when President Trump claimed in 2020 that voter fraud was costing him the election, Phillip took a harder line, saying, “He’s trying to take the voting system down with him … This is a complete farce and a travesty, and it’s incredible that he’s doing it from the White House.”
Added CNN’s Jake Tapper, “[There’s] no evidence for what he’s saying, just smears about the integrity of vote counting in state after state. It’s not true, it’s ugly, it’s frankly pathetic.”
For good measure, longtime CNN correspondent Dana Bash added, “I mean, I’m not an emotional person, and I’m having trouble kind of keeping it together after listening to the President of the United States saying what he just said.”
Later, in 2022, then-CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza authored an article titled, “Election fraud isn’t really a thing, part infinity.”
“There is simply no evidence of any widespread election fraud in American elections,” he wrote. “It just isn’t a thing. … [T]here is ZERO evidence that these rule-breakers are doing so in any sort of coordinated way. And, the sheer paucity of people who even attempt voter fraud is so small … as to make the Trumpian obsession with it laughable,” Cillizza added.
Elsewhere, former CNN host John Avalon, who specialized in “reality checks,” claimed it is an insult to “our democracy” to suggest such a thing as widespread voter fraud or any fraud that might affect an election’s outcome.
Relatedly, in 2018, when there was a question of election integrity involving Republican Mark Harris’s 905-vote win over Democrat Dan McCready for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, CNN published an article titled, “Why the case for election fraud in North Carolina is strong.” So as it turns out, there was fraud, and it did affect the outcome of an election. Hey, it happens after all!
Anyway, back at CNN last week, Jennings and Phillip continued to spar over the issue, with the former saying, “I have zero tolerance for this. By the way, this isn’t the only place this is happening.”
Phillip simply pivoted away from the issue, turning her focus to a questionable White House initiative aimed at cleaning up voter rolls.
“Why are you okay, then, with the administration using a system that a federal judge recently found was actively removing U.S. citizens from the voter rolls based on inaccurate information?” Phillip asked, moving on completely from the question of voter fraud in New Jersey and elsewhere. “Why are you comfortable with that system being used to check the voter rolls?”
Following the conclusion of that Phillip panel last week, one is reminded of another popular tweet: “It’s amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.”
Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington.
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