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Let’s just toss out a couple of suppositions, to see what seems politically plausible as we start our year-long countdown to the elections.
Suppose some bad guys wanted to steal an election, so they round up a bunch of imposters and sneak them into your town — whole busloads of them — and then find out which local residents don’t plan on voting. So they pretend to be those people, cast illegal ballots and drift out of town totally unnoticed.
Of course, it takes thousands of them to swing the election, but somehow word of the conspiracy never leaks. You and your neighbors simply don’t notice all these strangers suddenly showing up to vote – some of them 10 or 15 times — and nobody gets suspicious when a few longshot unknown candidates mysteriously pull off shocking upsets.
Yeah, that could happen. Sure.
For our second scenario, let’s imagine that one political party sees itself losing black, Hispanic and poor voters – so it either has to change policies, to win them back, or figure out how to stop as many of them as possible from voting. It opts for door No. 2.
The activists hire some lawyers and consultants to draw political districts favoring one party. They raise the specter of massive voter fraud — that first supposition mentioned above — and pass a passel of laws designed by make it harder to cast a ballot, if you’re statistically more likely to support the other party.
Yeah, sure, that could happen. In fact, it has happened and will continue happening, in new ways, as long as the courts strike down each new means of suppressing the vote of those not in power.
Methods and results of targeted disenfranchisement are aired in a hard-hitting documentary, “RIGGED: The Voter Suppression Handbook,” being exhibited at the FSU College of Law on Tuesday evening. The 75-minute film will be followed by a panel discussion featuring executive producer Tim Smith, former Leon County Commissioner Bob Rackleff and Tallahassee Pastor Willis Whiting, who fell victim to Florida’s notorious vote purge of the 2000 presidential election.
The film outlines 10 ways to limit voting. There’s “packing and cracking” in reapportionment, concentrating minority voters into as few districts as possible or splintering them among multiple electoral tracts. There’s plain old intimidation, with sheriffs demanding that vulnerable voters prove to the cops’ satisfaction that they belong at the polls. There is shortening of early voting periods, always hitting the times most convenient for certain voting blocs.



The documentary emphasizes that, despite claims of massive vote fraud by leaders ranging from President Trump to Gov. (now Sen.) Rick Scott of Florida, actual in-person cheating is virtually non-existent. Trump is shown claiming he would have won the popular vote, not only the Electoral College, if millions of people hadn’t voted illegally for Hillary Clinton. We also see his blue ribbon Commission on Election Integrity convening and dissolving without accomplishing anything.
The polemic elides a couple points. In deploring voter ID laws, it fails to point out that people can cast “provisional” ballots that are counted, if their registration is later verified. It also skips over the fact that, in purging voter rolls of people who’ve died or moved away (or just don’t care), county supervisors commonly send one or two letters to each registrant – who are then moved to an inactive list, where they can reactivate if they wish.
But the prevailing message of “RIGGED” — that powerful, well-financed forces have made laws with the clear result (and inescapable intention) of making it hard for minority and poor people to vote – is convincingly documented.
Toward the end of the film, Trump is seen telling supporters at a campaign rally, “You see what’s happening. The process is rigged. This whole election is being rigged.”
The president was right. But he probably didn’t mean “rigged” the way the filmmakers demonstrate.
You can see a preview of the documentary at https://vimeo.com/296045604
Bill Cotterell is a retired Tallahassee Democrat capitol reporter who writes a twice-weekly column. He can be reached at bcotterell@tallahassee.com.