by Francis Wilkinson
A federal jury’s $148 million judgment in a Georgia defamation case was only nominally about a hapless has-been named Rudolph Giuliani.
The former New York mayor, whose descent into pathos and corruption needs no retelling here, flagrantly lied about two Georgia election workers, baselessly claiming they had committed fraud while they administered the 2020 election. The lies inspired racist threats against the women — a wholly predictable result given the racial aggression that animates the MAGA base. A jury in Washington, D.C., found that Giuliani, who declined to testify and essentially offered no defense, owes massive damages for his calumny.
Giuliani, however, is just a bit player in a larger, longer story. The lies were first planted in the political ground before Giuliani was even mayor of New York. Now, they’re blooming everywhere.
After all, what’s the basis of the criminal case against Donald Trump in Georgia — and of the related plea agreements of MAGA attorneys Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell?
Lies about voter fraud.
What fueled the violent attempted coup of Jan. 6?
Lies about voter fraud.
Giuliani showed a zest for mendacity throughout his service to Trump, but he was decades late to the game.
“The false claims of widespread voter fraud were long used to gin up the Republican base and undermine victories by Democrats as the product of phantom cheating,” UCLA law professor and election law expert Richard Hasen said in an email. “Since 2020, however, claims of fraud have been central to attempts to subvert election outcomes — an even more pernicious use of the lie.”
The descent of the Republican Party into MAGA degeneracy is complex. But it tracks the party’s embrace, first tentative and tactical, later authoritarian and pathological, of lies about voter fraud.
In advance of the 2004 election, during which Republicans pressured US Attorneys appointed by President George W. Bush to generate voter fraud cases, a lawyer for the New Mexico GOP encouraged a steady focus on the issue: “You are not going to find a better wedge issue.”
Eight years later, in June of 2012, Republican Pennsylvania House Leader Mike Turzai rattled off a list of partisan accomplishments, culminating in the state’s new voter ID law. “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done,” Turzai said in private remarks caught on tape.
Few did more to pave the fraudulent way than Hans Von Spakovsky, who has used a sinecure at the right-wing Heritage Foundation to make a long career of fomenting voter-fraud hysteria. The perfect sample of Von Spakovsky’s work was his 2011 essay in the accommodating pages of the Wall Street Journal, in which he claimed that 50 votes in a Kansas election had been “cast illegally by citizens of Somalia.” Worse, the election had been decided by just one vote.
Hasen quickly pointed out on his widely read Election Law Blog that the 2010 election in question had not even taken place in Kansas, but in Missouri. Moreover, by the time Von Spakovsky published his essay, a Missouri court had already rejected the claim that illegal votes had been cast by Somali citizens.
When Von Spakovsky appeared as a witness in a Kansas case in 2018, he acknowledged under oath that the Missouri court had found no fraud. Yet Von Spakovsky never corrected his false claim, which spread to other news outlets. You can still read the falsehood about Somali voters on the website of the Heritage Foundation today.
Giuliani, like Trump, was simply following the partisan course set by Von Spakovsky, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and others. Kobach served on Trump’s comical voter fraud commission, which sought to bolster the former president’s lies about his loss of the 2016 popular vote. For years Kobach trafficked in stories of immigrants and dead people voting illegally. Yet when he was empowered to hunt down illegal votes in Kansas as secretary of state, the phantoms proved hilariously elusive. (One purportedly dead voter identified by Kobach was interviewed by a local reporter as the surprisingly vigorous corpse worked in his yard.)
From the start, claims of widespread voter fraud were a crooked crutch for a party struggling to adapt to a new era and new voters. Trump, who loves lies as passionately as some red cappers love Trump, repurposed the lies from an attempt to gain tactical advantage, through repressive voting laws, to a weapon for overthrowing the republic. He may yet face accountability for his actions. Giuliani already has.
