On Thursday night, the final night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention (which was an all-online event that was viewable, in full, from anywhere in the nation), President Donald Trump phoned in to Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. During his chat with the host and longtime ally, Trump claimed that he will be having sheriffs watching the polls during November’s election, and if that scenario were to actually unfold, then it would, of course, result in the intimidation of voters.
Although the specifics of Trump’s threat are unclear — would the poll watchers be stationed outside the polls? Would they watch from a distance? — the apparent threat to at least maybe send sheriffs to polling places shows the ridiculous extremes that Trump seems ready and willing to go to in his efforts to support his ludicrous allegations that there is some kind of widespread fraud in U.S. elections.
Hannity posed the question to Trump:
‘Are you going to have poll watchers? Are you going to have an ability to monitor, to avoid fraud and cross check whether or not these are registered voters? Whether or not there’s been identification to know that it’s a real vote from a real American?’
First of all — could the racist undertones of Hannity’s question been any more clear? How would these sought-after poll watchers determine who doesn’t look like a “real American”? That sort of terminology is, of course, often used to distinguish people on racial grounds — it’s whites and white-leaning people who look like “real Americans,” to far-right folks. It’s folks like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who was born in the United States but Trump said should “go back” to where she came from, who right-wing racists single out as supposedly not “real Americans.”
Meanwhile, Trump replied to Hannity:
‘We’re going to have everything. We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to have hopefully, U.S. attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody, and attorney generals. But it’s very hard.’
Trump has called for the use of poll watchers in the past. In an August 2016 speech in Pennsylvania, he said:
‘We have to call up law enforcement. And we have to have the sheriffs and the police chiefs and everybody watching… the only way they can beat [me] in my opinion — and I mean this 100 percent — is if in certain sections of the state they cheat, okay?’
There was no evidence for Trump’s claims of looming election fraud then, and there’s no evidence now. During his talk with Hannity, the host brought up a database maintained by the conservative group known as the Heritage Foundation that revealed a little more than 1,000 documented instances of voter fraud. Hannity appears to have skipped over a key point — those little more than 1,000 cases of fraud stretch over about four decades. The database starts in 1982. If anything, the data supports the idea that fraud is not the systematic threat to election integrity that Trump claims, because that number is so minuscule. Trump and his allies, like Hannity, just seem to be preparing an excuse to use in the event that Trump loses.
