Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption

Posted on November 13, 2020 by Luke Ford

Ben Mezrich wrote in this 2019 book:

* D’Angelo later asked Zuckerberg what path he was going to pursue in terms of dealing with the twins. Zuckerberg responded:

Yeah, I’m going to fuck them Probably in the year—*ear

In legal terms, the IMs may have been in a gray area—they were not a smoking gun—but they were still dangerous. With respect to Zuckerberg’s moral character at that point in his life, they were less gray than black-and-white. When in another IM he told his friend “You can be unethical and still be legal—that’s the way I live my life,” he was voicing a philosophy that would make future Facebook stockholders rightly nervous.

* After being left in the lurch by Zuckerberg and surprised by the launch of Facebook on February 4, 2004, the twins and their friend Divya scrambled to find programmers to finish ConnectU, which finally went live on May 21, 2004. Not content with merely sandbagging his classmates and the enormous first-mover advantage it afforded him, Zuckerberg appeared to be determined to add insult to injury. As reported in the Business Insider, Zuckerberg recounted to D’Angelo via IM:

We’ve exploited a flaw in their [the ConnectU] system and created another Cameron Winklevoss account. We copied his account like his profile and everything except I made his answers all like white supremacist.

The fake account Zuckerberg created to impersonate Cameron was not just an assault on Cameron’s character. It is also a revealing insight into how Zuckerberg had seen—and judged—the pair from the moment he’d met them in the Kirkland dining hall.

CAMERON WINKLEVOSS

Hometown: “I’m fucking privileged. where do you think I’m from?”

High School: You’re not even allowed to speak its name.

Ethnicity: Better than you.

Height: 7’4”

Body type: Athletic.

Hair Color: Aryan Blond

Eye Color: Sky Blue

Favorite Quote: “Homeless people are worth their weight in paper clips—I hate black people.”

Languages: WASP-y

Clubs: My dad got me into the Porcelain

Interests: Squandering my father’s money …

If he had indeed hacked into the website he was supposed to have helped build, in the twins’ opinion, Zuckerberg had potentially violated federal law. And the fake profile was just the start. In later IMs, Zuckerberg bragged about further hacking ConnectU’s code and deactivating user accounts, just for fun.

And there was more. In the spring of 2004, Cameron sent an email to the “tips” email inbox of the Harvard Crimson to notify them about Zuckerberg’s duplicitous behavior. A reporter named Tim McGinn was assigned to the story and began to investigate. Tim met with Cameron, Tyler, and Divya to hear their story and to review emails sent between Cameron and Mark. He then reached out to Zuckerberg for his side of the story. As Cameron was later informed, Zuckerberg went into the Harvard Crimson offices and tried to convince McGinn and his editor, Elisabeth Theodore, not to run with the story. When McGinn and Theodore decided to continue the investigation, Zuckerberg apparently hacked into McGinn’s Harvard email account to try and keep track of the investigation and whether or not a story would be written.

As Cameron learned, Zuckerberg was able to hack into McGinn’s email by exploiting the data in the Facebook database and violating the trust and privacy of his own users. More specifically, apparently he looked in the Facebook database for McGinn’s Facebook account password, in hopes that McGinn used the same password for his Facebook account as he did for his Harvard email account. He also reviewed Facebook logs for all of McGinn’s failed login attempts, thinking that McGinn had at some point mistakenly entered his Harvard email account password into Facebook when trying to log in. Armed with McGinn’s private information dug out of the bowels of Facebook, Zuckerberg was able to break into McGinn’s email and read all of his emails, including the ones he’d had with Cameron, Tyler, and Divya. Mark also saw email communication between McGinn and Theodore, in which Theodore recounted their meeting with Zuckerberg at the Harvard Crimson offices: “[Zuckerberg] did seem very sleazy. And I thought that some of his answers to the questions were not very direct or open. I also thought that his reaction to the website was very very weird.”

While Zuckerberg’s hack of ConnectU was arguably outside the university’s jurisdiction, Zuckerberg’s hacking of another student’s Harvard email account was not. In fact, it breached the Harvard computer network security and violated an individual student’s privacy (not to mention Facebook’s own privacy policy today) and Zuckerberg was already in trouble for similar violations as a result of the facemash.com debacle earlier that school year.

At the time, Harvard was unaware of Zuckerberg’s additional violations. A few years later, however, Zuckerberg’s second offense became public. Despite the fact that Zuckerberg was, and still is, a Harvard student to this day—he left indefinitely on a voluntary leave of absence to run Facebook after his sophomore year—Harvard has never taken any public action related to this hacking.

In total, the existence of that hard drive from Zuckerberg’s college computer must have meant he’d never risk a trial, and not just because his IMs regarding the twins would blemish his sterling reputation as a boy wonder CEO, but more importantly, because they would call into question the very basis of the revolution he was creating:

If you ever need info about anyone at Harvard just ask.

I have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS.

People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They “trust me.” Dumb fucks.

Private IMs between any other college kids could perhaps be explained away as the digital equivalent of “locker room” talk. But in the context of a college dropout whose mission was to “connect the world” and by doing so would hold the privacy of millions of people in the palm of his hand, they had the potential to permanently derail him. And certainly, to the twins, the IMs proved what they had been saying all along: Zuckerberg had knowingly wronged them. The image of a likable nerd who wore a hoodie and talked about building things that are “cool” was not the Mark Zuckerberg they knew.

* As Zuckerberg had so delicately pointed out in the fake profile he’d made of Cameron, Tyler and Cameron had been born into money. But what Zuckerberg didn’t know was that their father had built that privileged childhood for them through sweat, brains, and character. He’d propelled himself upward from a heritage of hardworking German immigrants, a family of coal miners, and he’d made it his mission to instill in the brothers a sense of right and wrong so strict that it could often be blinding. Winning didn’t matter if it didn’t happen the right way, for the right reasons.

Tyler simply couldn’t just walk away, not even for $65 million in cash.

* Shortly after they’d settled, the twins learned that Facebook had received a valuation that had been conducted by an independent, third-party valuation firm. This valuation, which Facebook used to comply with IRS rules and the US tax code, valued the twins’ Facebook shares at a quarter of the price they had used in reaching the settlement—was it another ear fucking?

It certainly sounded like securities fraud to the twins, the withholding a material, independent valuation during a settlement agreement that involved a securities transaction, but Facebook maintained that they had not withheld anything, or deceived anyone.

* Even Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard, took a shot at them, publicly calling them “assholes” while onstage at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech Conference, hosted at the Aspen Institute. The twins’ offense? Wearing jackets and ties when they’d attended President Summers’s office hours in April of 2004 to discuss Zuckerberg’s duplicitous behavior—behavior they believed was a direct violation of the Harvard Student Handbook, specifically the part of the Handbook that stated: All students will be honest and forthcoming in their dealings with members of the Harvard community. In addition, there was an expectation of “intellectual honesty” and “respect for the dignity of others.”

Summers’s public attack seemed so unfair, so disgraceful for an educator, let alone a current Harvard professor, that the twins wrote an open letter to then Harvard president, Drew Faust, expressing their concerns regarding Summer’s conduct:

“… At [March] office hours, we [Cameron, Tyler, and Divya] waited in his [President Summers’s] reception area but were told that we would have to return next month because there were more students in the queue than time allowed. In April of 2004, we returned to office hours and were successful in meeting with President Summers. His manner was not inconsistent with his reputation and present-day admissions of being tactfully challenged. It was not his failure to shake hands with the three of us upon entering his office (doing so would have required him to take his feet off his desk and stand up from his chair), nor his tenor that was most alarming, but rather his scorn for a genuine discourse on deeper ethical questions, Harvard’s Honor Code, and its applicability or lack thereof.

We now further understand why our meeting was less than productive; someone who does not value ethics with respect to his own conduct, would likely have little interest in this subject as it related to the conduct of others. Perhaps there is a “variability of aptitude” for decency and professionalism among university faculty.

Regardless, it is deeply disturbing that a professor of this university openly admits to making character judgments of students based on their appearance. It goes without saying that every student should feel free to bring issues forward, dress how they see fit, or express themselves without fear of prejudice or public disparagement from a fellow member of the community, much less so from a faculty member.

Ironically, our choice of attire that day was made out of respect and deference to the office of the President. As the current President, we respectfully ask for you to address this unprecedented betrayal of the unique relationship between teacher and student. We look forward to your response.”

* Although Tyler and his brother had been raised in a family that now had money, their parents never let them lose touch with their family history, and not just their father’s coal mining ancestry. Carol’s forebearers were also German immigrants who came to the United States in the nineteenth century with nothing but their dreams. Carol’s grandfather was a fireman and hotelier in Rockaway Beach, her uncle served in the U.S. Army during World War II and fought in the Pacific Ocean theater, and her father was a homicide detective. Like Howard’s family, Carol’s family embodied good Christian morals and believed that a person’s word meant something. Howard and Carol had grown up believing that the world was a place where honesty and the ability to work hard were respected above all else. Winning was not what mattered: what mattered was that you gave your best effort and conducted yourself with the highest integrity and character.

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The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature 1850 – 2000

Posted on November 13, 2020 by Luke Ford

Richard Griffiths writes in this 2010 book:

* The concerns of English Catholic literature on the whole failed to mirror those of its French equivalent. The reason for this lies mainly in the position, and history, of the Catholic Church within the two countries and the very different opponents it had to face in each. In France the last three decades of the nineteenth century saw a strong revival in religious values, with many Catholic conversions among the intelligentsia and a flowering of literary and artistic output of a Catholic nature. To a large extent, this was a reaction against the tyranny of institutionalized atheism and anticlericalism, in the urban society of the nascent Third Republic. The vast claims of nineteenth- century positivism dominated this society, which had become imbued with the belief that Catholicism was purely for the uncultivated and ignorant and that it was impossible to be both intelligent and Christian. At the same time, politically, anticlerical laws had become the hallmark of the Third Republic. However, in the space of a few years a new Catholic intelligentsia, made up mainly of recent converts, had made religion once more respectable.

* The British converts’ situation was very different. They were mostly converts not from atheism or agnosticism, but from another form of Christianity, Anglicanism. And where in France, despite all historical vicissitudes,
Catholicism had remained the religion of the vast majority of Christians, in Britain Catholicism was very much a minority religion, which had been kept by force of law in an inferior position for centuries until the early nineteenth. The major concern therefore, for British Catholic writers, was not with what differentiated Christianity from the secular society of the time, but with what differentiated Catholicism from other forms of the Christian religion. The miraculous and the mystical had a lesser part to play. In their place came a concentration on specifically Catholic views of the sacraments and of the priestly role. The authority of the Church, also, was continually contrasted with what appeared the ‘free- for- all’ of the Anglican position.
Secular politics played a lesser role for most of these writers (with certain conspicuous exceptions), than for their French equivalents, until the interwar period. At the same time there was a concern with class and social position that would seem strange to French eyes.

* Nowadays, most people are aware of the grievous persecution that was suffered by British Catholics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – the tortures and executions of priests for celebrating the Mass, and of those who harboured them, and the very large fines and punishments enacted on those (the ‘recusants’) who refused to attend the compulsory Anglican services. It is perhaps less well known that after the times of physical persecution, the Catholic population continued to suffer under a series of laws, known collectively as the ‘penal laws’, which inflicted various civil disabilities upon them… These laws, which effectively removed Catholics from public life and severely restricted their religious life, received some palliation in the late eighteenth century… It was only after some years of campaigning for Catholic emancipation that the 1829 Catholic Relief Act removed most disabilities.

* The Oxford Movement was a group of Anglicans, based mainly in Oxford, which set out to restore the Church of England to what they saw as its mainline position in the universal Church. They reacted against the extreme
Protestantism, and the latitudinarianism, of much nineteenth- century Anglicanism and aimed to restore the High Church character of the seventeenthcentury Church. In the process, they stressed those characteristics that the
Church of England and Catholicism had in common. They believed ‘that the Church of England held an intermediate position, represented by the patristic tradition, as against modern Romanism on the one hand and modern Protestantism on the other’.6 Leading lights in the movement included John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, John Keble and Hurrell Froude.

* The situation of the Catholic Church in Britain in the early nineteenth century was later to be graphically described by Cardinal Vaughan:

“Marks of persecution were fresh upon her body, the smell of fire was still upon her clothing. Her organisation was abnormal and missionary, reduced to its lowest form, as though England had been China or Japan. After ten centuries of public praise her voice was low; her divine services cut down to their bare essentials; many of her distinctive devotions and practices were either forgotten or conducted in private, and, as it were, in silence, and with closed doors. No kind of uniform, no outward mark of distinction in her ministers was visible. The English Church was like a ship on an angry sea, close reefed and battened down, exposing as little surface as possible to the stiff gale which was still only lessening.”

* Catholics also took delight in pointing to the aristocratic nature of the Catholic religion, as opposed to ‘middle- class’ Anglicanism.

* The French Catholic novel has been described as having had three major strands. The ‘pious’, or ‘sentimental’ novel, a sub- literature of no great value; the ‘conversion novel’, of which Huysmans’ En route (1895) was the prototype, followed by other works such as Ernest Psichari’s Le Voyage du Centurion (1915); and the most widespread form, the ‘miraculous’, or ‘mystical novel’, in which the framework of the realist novel served as a
backdrop for mystical and often miraculous events. A far less prominent strand was that exemplified by some of the novels of Paul Bourget, in their examination of human dilemmas relating to faith (it was this strand, minor
in France, that was to become the dominant one in Britain).

* Converts from Anglicanism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were above all attracted by the certainty and authority of the Catholic Church’s teachings and its decisions. This seemed a safe anchor amidst all
the uncertainties they had felt until this time. They tended to contrast this with what they regarded as the free- for- all of Anglicanism.

* ‘English Catholics are just Protestants, protesting against Protestantism.’ D. H. Lawrence’s statement has a certain amount of truth in it. It was above all Anglicanism that obsessed the English Catholic writers, however.

* [Hilaire Belloc’s] cynical view was that British imperialism was a crooked scheme directed by Jewish fi nanciers. In his four savage political novels, which were written between 1904 and 1910 starting with Emmanuel Burden, a central figure was the Jewish financier I. Z. Barnett, whose tentacles reached into every area of the national life and who finally ended up as the Duke of Battersea. Robert Speaight rightly compares Belloc’s depiction of him to ‘some savage anti- Semitic caricature of Forain’s illustrating some diatribe of Drumont’s.’17 This fictional character stands for the Oppenheims, the Beits, the Wernhers, those speculators and investors in
the mines of the Transvaal for the preservation of whose commercial interests the South African War, in Belloc’s view, had been fought.

* G. K. Chesterton shared many of Belloc’s attitudes in relation to the Jews. Much of his verse on their subject
contains the same spirit of false jocularity that characterized Belloc’s most vulgar efforts… Chesterton’s hatred of capitalists led him, like Belloc, to a mistrust of Jews whom he felt were at the centre of the system.

* By the late 1920s there had been considerable enthusiasm for Italian Fascism throughout Europe and nowhere more so than in Catholic circles. Ignoring the fact that Fascism on the Italian model had been in its origins a secular movement, hostile to the Church, foreign observers tended to take the Lateran Pacts of 1929 (which had essentially been an attempt at a pragmatic solution to Italian Church- State relations) as a sign that this dictatorship was based on Christian principles.

Fascism appealed particularly to the Right- leaning facet of Catholic political thought that we have been examining. Belloc, in particular, regarded Mussolini from the early 1920s onwards ‘with a besotted admiration which was undiminished until his death’.23 (Chesterton, however, detached as always, viewed Fascism with a much more cautious eye). But there is no denying the attraction felt generally in establishment circles throughout
Britain for the new dictator,24 and Catholics were at this stage merely one group among many.

* Fascism, for him, meant a return to the Catholic Middle Ages and was an attack on ‘the ideas to which the Renaissance gave birth and which have dominated the world for several centuries’.27 It stood for ‘a sense of moral purpose’ rather than any specific political tendency, whether of Left or Right. Italy, said Barnes, had been in a terrible state, but Mussolini’s moral power had filled the Italian people with moral strength. Britain, which was in a similar state, required a similar solution.

By the early 1930s, a number of politically aware Catholic writers and journalists in Britain were similarly writing of the need to imitate this model of government (the economic crisis having led many to believe that democracy was doomed).

* Throughout the 1930s there was to be a strong element of support for ‘Mediterranean fascism’ among British Catholics, who indiscriminately placed Mussolini, Salazar and Franco in the same category…Nazism, however, presented a completely different problem for most of these people. Admirers of Mussolini such as Jerrold, Petrie and Belloc recoiled at the ‘barbarism’ of Nazi methods and beliefs.

* George Orwell assessed public opinion in 1944: ‘Outside its own ranks, the Catholic Church is almost universally regarded as pro- Fascist, both objectively and subjectively’.

* The ‘Radical Right’ and its influence on Belloc and Chesterton was the strongest strain in British Catholic political thought in the early twentieth century…

* Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) presents something of a contrast with Graham Greene. Greene stands as a turning- point in twentieth- century Catholic literature, looking back to what had preceded him, but also looking forwards, as
his career progressed, in new directions which, though some have seen them as an abandonment of the Catholic novel, were in fact a restructuring of it in new and vital ways. Waugh, on the other hand, represents the culmination of a tradition, its finest flowering – but his work is essentially a dead-end.

* Brideshead Revisited was first published in 1945. In the preface to the revised edition of 1960, Waugh described its theme as being ‘the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters.’9 Unlike so many other Catholic novels, however, this one does not assail the reader ‘up front’ with an obvious message and the theme only gradually emerges during the course of the novel. Indeed, so subtly is it introduced that many people, enjoying the novel for other reasons, have failed to realize how Christian a work it is. When Waugh went to Hollywood in 1947 to discuss a film version of the novel, he noted that the writer who would be adapting it for the screen ‘[saw] it purely as a love story’ and that none of those involved saw ‘the theological implication’.1

* Sebastian, the drunken wastrel, is tortured not so much by the actions of his mother (which are merely ancillary), as by a sense of loss (expressed through a sense of loss of childhood, but in fact something far deeper) – and by what Cordelia perspicaciously perceives as a vocation that he was resisting.21 After
many vicissitudes, he eventually tries to get taken on as a lay- brother at a monastery in North Africa, but is not accepted because of his alcoholism. Finally (just as Charles de Foucauld had in Jerusalem after his conversion), he ends up as a humble doorkeeper in the house of the Lord, ‘a sort of under- porter’.22 As Cordelia puts it, the Superior ‘was a very holy old man and recognized it in others’. Gently, Cordelia explains to Ryder that what he has to understand about Sebastian is that he is holy and that his suffering has been necessary: ‘One can have no idea what the suffering may be, to be maimed as he is – no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering. It’s taken that form with him . . .’

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Trump’s Party Cannot Survive in a Multiracial Democracy

Posted on November 11, 2020 by Luke Ford

Francis Wilkinson writes July 15, 2020:

As Ronald Brownstein points out in a data-driven essay on Trump’s “neo-Nixonian” 2020 campaign: “Americans today are far more racially diverse, less Christian, better educated, more urbanized, and less likely to be married. In polls, they are more tolerant of interracial and same-sex relationships, more likely to acknowledge the existence of racial discrimination, and less concerned about crime.”

What Brownstein describes is an American enlightenment that viscerally rejects Republican resentment and chauvinism. The GOP embrace of Trump has further narrowed the party’s already restricted access to the growing segments of the American electorate. It is deeply unpopular among voters under 40 who will determine the future of the U.S.

In propping up Trump’s corrupt and derelict administration, the GOP has grown increasingly authoritarian. Having repeatedly failed to take an exit ramp from white nationalism, the party finds an exit from democracy itself beckons as the only sure means to stave off further electoral decline. The next four months may be a very dangerous patch of road.

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What Is Trump Playing At?

Posted on November 11, 2020 by Luke Ford

Thomas B. Edsall writes:

* Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, was outspoken:

It would be not simply a major departure but a deeply dangerous one were Trump to deny the legitimacy of Biden’s election. It would be a brutal renunciation of American democracy. It would create not simply a fissure but a chasm in the nation’s politics and government, telling his tens of millions of supporters as well as his congressional backers to reject Biden’s presidency. It would be an act of disloyalty unsurpassed in American history except by the southern secession in 1860-61, the ultimate example of Americans refusing to respect the outcome of a presidential election.

In fact, Wilentz warned:

Trump would be trying to establish a center of power distinct from and antagonistic to the legitimately elected national government — not formally a separate government like the Confederacy but a virtual one, operating not just out in the country but inside the government, above all in Congress.

Wilentz envisaged

a counter-government, administered by tweets, propped up by Fox News or whatever alternative outlet Trump might construct for himself — a kind of Trumpian government in exile, run from Mar a Lago or maybe from wherever else Trump selects to reside in, in order to avoid prosecution by the State of New York.

Wilentz and others argue that Trump is gearing up to violate a principle of peaceful transition established shortly after the founding of the nation.

* Trump’s refusal to concede, and the support he is getting from his fellow Republicans, is part and parcel of the sustained drive by the right, especially since Barack Obama won a majority in 2008, to constrain and limit political participation by minorities by every available means: gerrymandering, voter suppression, restricting the time and place of balloting, setting new rules for voter identification and so forth.

On this theory, allowing the Nov. 3 vote to stand would, in the face of rising minority participation, endanger the ability of the Republican Party to compete in future national elections.

* Samuel Moyn, a Yale historian, discounted fears of a Trump-led insurgency for a different reason: that Trump is not up to playing the role of strongman.

“I think we will come to understand him as the weakest recent president,” Moyn wrote by email, “and this ‘unprecedented’ situation in which he refuses to acknowledge election results is just more proof.”

Moyn rejected the notion that “we are in a dangerous situation,” because instead of a serious threat, “we have something more like a parody of a coup, one which moreover is something like a conclusive demonstration of the limits of Donald Trump’s power all along.”

* The fact that Trump does not care about the scope of the mayhem he creates — that he revels in anarchic conflagration — creates exceptional danger.

Philip Bobbitt, a professor of law at the University of Texas and at Columbia, is an expert in national security. He raised the question of what is called “continuity of government.”

If Trump succeeds in preventing acceptance of Biden as president all the way to Jan. 20, 2021, Bobbitt notes in an email, what is known as “continuity of government” becomes a problem.

Continuity of Government is an artifact of the nuclear age: what happens to the National Command Authority vested in the president — and to nuclear deterrence — if a surprise attack decapitates the US leadership? The problem resurfaced after 9/11 when it became known that the fourth plane seized by Al Qaeda was headed to the Capitol and would have struck during morning business in the House. The result could have rendered Congress helpless until new elections replaced enough House members to reconstitute a quorum; in the interim martial law would have prevailed.

These problems could be lethal in the chaos Trump is seeding.

A number of scenarios, Bobbitt noted,

by no means fanciful, could result in the constitutional drop-dead date of Jan. 20, leaving the country and many elements of government deeply divided as to who the rightful occupant of the presidency is.

In that event, Bobbitt asked, “What happens to the national command authority vested in the president?”

“There is a second, related problem,” Bobbitt continued:

The continuity of government vulnerability spawned a number of emergency powers granted to the president, some highly classified. We could well face the use of these powers by the president based on his professed belief that the election was irredeemably flawed and that a “coup” against him is underway.

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Voter Fraud: A Red Herring

Posted on November 11, 2020 by Luke Ford

From Harvard’s Kennedy School, released November 6, 2020:

Proponents of stricter voting laws often claim restrictions are necessary to prevent voter fraud, but there is little evidence to support this assertion. President Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that widespread voter fraud was committed by his opponents in the 2016 election, asserting that “there were three to five million illegal votes cast in the 2016 election.”102 On November 27, 2016, the President tweeted: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”103 On January 25, 2017, Trump tweeted: “I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and….even, those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time). Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!”104 The White House produced no evidence to support these claims, which seem to have been intended to encourage regulation to suppress voting, not combat fraud.

Claims of widespread voter fraud have been made without evidence by other Republican officials. Kris Kobach, former Secretary of State of Kansas, has been outspoken campaigner against voter fraud – for example, claiming without evidence that “fraudulent votes tipped the election in Minnesota for (former Senator Al) Franken.”105 In 2005, the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee stated in a report that “voter fraud continues to plague our nation’s federal elections, diluting and canceling out the lawful votes of the vast majority of Americans.”106 The report contained no credible evidence to back up the claim.

Since 2018, there have continued to be multiple accusations of election fraud again presented without evidence. In the 2018 elections, there were allegations of fraud in Florida and Arizona made by Republican politicians. In Florida’s Senate race, Republican Rick Scott filed a lawsuit alleging “rampant fraud” in the counties that heavily favor Democrats because the counties took longer to tally the votes.107 The lawsuit led to a Broward County Circuit judge ordering the Broward County Supervisor of Elections to release records requested by Scott and the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee related to voting tabulations. The records released did not include any evidence to support the accusations of fraud, and the Florida Department of State, which oversees elections, did not receive or observe any credible evidence of fraud or criminal activity.108

In Arizona’s 2018 Senate race, the Arizona Republican Party accused the Maricopa County Recorder of “premeditated destruction of evidence” after “voting irregularities” in the election. However, no evidence of voter fraud was produced and Republican Martha McSally conceded the race to Democrat Krysten Synema. In Kentucky, Governor Matt Bevin claimed that there were a “number of significant irregularities” and “thousands of absentee ballots that were illegally counted” in the November 2019 gubernatorial election.109 No evidence was produced to back up this claim and Bevin eventually conceded the race after losing a recount.110

Bipartisan studies have concluded that there has been little evidence of widespread voter fraud in modern American elections. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has compiled a nationwide database of charges of voter fraud over 37 years (from 1982 to 2019). During this period, 1,085 charges resulted in criminal convictions, an average of just 29 convictions nationally per year.111 A 2017 national voting study by the Brennan Center for Justice, an academic policy center and think tank, concluded very few noncitizens voted in the 2016 election. Across 42 jurisdictions studied, election officials who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. In other words, improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001% of the 2016 votes in those jurisdictions.112 Forty of the jurisdictions — all but two of the 42 studied — reported no known incidents of noncitizen voting in 2016. In the ten counties with the largest populations of noncitizens in 2016, only one reported any instances of noncitizen voting, consisting of fewer than 10 votes.

In California, Virginia and New Hampshire — the states where President Trump claimed the problem of noncitizen voting was especially acute — no official identified an incident of noncitizen voting in 2016.

In 2002, the Justice Department established the Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative to prosecute voter fraud. From 2002 to 2006, just 86 people across the country were convicted of ballot fraud offenses.113 Voter fraud convictions were an infinitesimal part of the overall vote of more than 110 million votes cast nationwide.

In February 2017, President Trump established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to investigate voter fraud in the 2016 election. The Commission found no significant evidence of voter fraud and was disbanded in January 2018 after it became the target of eight lawsuits accusing it of violating federal laws ranging from transparency to discrimination.114 Documents released from the lawsuits, including e-mails and PowerPoint presentations from the two meetings held by the panel, contained no evidence of widespread voter fraud.115, 116 A 2017 study published in the Electoral Studies Journal examined President Trump’s accusations of voter fraud by looking closely at three states where Trump claimed such fraud took place: New Hampshire, Virginia, and California. The study found “little evidence consistent with widespread and systematic fraud, . . . no evidence of problems in the vein raised by Donald Trump, . . . [and] no suspicious patterns in result timing” that would imply a “rigged” election.117 The study’s results were “consistent with various state-level investigations conducted in the initial months of 2017, all of which have failed to find any evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 General Election.”118

In an earlier preliminary study by The New York Times, 26 states and the District of Columbia reported no credible allegations of voter fraud in the 2016 election, and eight states reported only one credible allegation. The highest numbers of credible allegations were very low: Tennessee (40 allegations out of 4.3 million votes cast in the primary and general elections) and Georgia (25 allegations out of 4.1 million votes cast in the primary and general elections). There was no evidence of widespread fraud.119 A 2014 study published in the Electoral Law Journal looked for evidence of voter impersonation, the type of fraud targeted by strict voter ID laws and later cited as a basis for President Trump’s short-lived Advisory Commission. The study found few reports of impersonation and concluded that “the proportion of the population reporting voter impersonation is indistinguishable from that reporting abduction by extraterrestrials.”120 (Nor has there been significant evidence of fraud in voting by mail; see section on “Response to the Novel Coronavirus,” below.) In fact, the only significant case of voter fraud in recent years has been the case of a Republican political operative accused of ballot tampering, perjury, and obstruction of justice in connection with the 2018 congressional race in North Carolina. The case is currently pending in state district court.121

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