Remember that game where a message is passed from person to person (usually they’re girls, as I’ve observed), and the amusement is to see how garbled it has become by the time the last girl receives it? After I blogged last week about a wrong-headed Michigan bill that would cripple voter registration drives by community organizations, among other things, an op-ed in the Detroit News on October 20 reminded me of a game of telephone. This is how dangerous rumors get started–and foisted upon the public by the chief of elections, no less.
Ruth Johnson, Michigan’s secretary of state, has been moved to comment on the state’s inaccurate voter roll (though what she’s really doing is a little grassroots lobbying for her “Secure and Fair Elections Initiative,” a collection of 11 election-related bills). Now, we have to admit that every state has some people on its voter list who don’t belong there. After all, people move and people die, and the list isn’t updated every day. But, making up a statistic that “thousands of noncitizens” are on the list–and purposely (and cynically) undermining confidence in our system of elections–ill befits the secretary of state.
Moreover, she asserts that federal law requires that noncitizens be offered voter registration at the department of motor vehicles. In fact, federal law does require that voter registration be offered at the department of motor vehicles, but the question of citizenship is literally at the top of the voter registration form. “Are you a citizen of the United States of America?” If not, end of story.
That’s where the game of telephone comes in. On the subject of elections, some politicians think that all you have to do is to repeat a fallacy over and over again, and everyone will believe it’s true. Unfortunately, at times they seem to be right.
But let’s call out the Secretary of State on this one. If there are thousands of noncitizens on the Michigan voter roll, let’s see some proof–and let’s demand an explanation for how it happened, if it did. Because federal law is certainly not the explanation–no matter how many times Ruth Johnson wants to repeat her claim–on the telephone or otherwise. (Colorado’s Secretary of State Scott Gessler spouted a similar statistic earlier this year, but it turned out to be an incredible shrinking number; each time it was probed more deeply, it got smaller.)