The vote-fraud libel: old news is older news

Cynthia Tucker writes: "Among true believers on the right, there is no sturdier fiction -- no fairy tale more popular -- than the one that insists American elections are plagued by voter fraud." So far, so true, as far as the belief is concerned, but Tucker doesn't realize just how sturdy the supposed fiction has been. A few sentences later, she writes: "the myth has been circulating for decades now." Decades? Try generations, if not centuries. Tucker apparently suffers from tunnel vision that limits her historical perspective. She wants to trace the vote-fraud libel back to "the same time that the Voting Rights Act guaranteed black citizens access to the ballot," or fifty years ago. But it was old news a century before that. She may miss that in her belief that the libel is an idea of "the right," but the truth is that the Republican party has been accusing the Democratic party of voter fraud from the time the GOP was born. That's because the Democrats, howevermuch their overall attitude towards blacks has shifted over time, have always been dedicated to integrating newcomers or marginalized people into the electoral process as quickly as possible. From their beginnings, Republicans have accused Democrats of cutting corners on that integration process in order to win elections. Then as now, Republicans accused Democrats of bringing unnaturalized aliens to the polls to vote. Republicans have always accused Democrats of cynical if not treacherous inclusiveness, giving voice to an irrepressible nativism despite Lincoln's contempt for Know-Nothingism. Republicans in turn might be accused of practicing a cynical nativism that was never much more than a sour grapes argument. If Democrats had the immigrant vote locked up, then immigrants were going to ruin the country. In the 19th century the Irish were going to turn the country Catholic. A few generations later Italians and Slavs were going to drive down the national I.Q. while spreading dangerous political ideas like the plague. And so it goes. To imply that the voter-fraud libel had been invented only recently to spite black people specifically is historically blind and additionally handicapping when the real facts might earn the present targets of voter-fraud conspiracy-mongering some empathy from the descendants of people targeted the same way generations ago.