On the use of federal power in pursuit of a phantom

I am told by the report in Reason that the Justice Department has undertaken what it calls an election integrity initiative — a tour of jurisdictions, Rhode Island among them — and that this tour has produced no meaningful evidence of the fraud it was sent to find. I did not live through the events described, but the shape of the civic question is one I know well.

The franchise is the foundation of republican government. Nothing I believed more firmly. Every citizen's lawful vote must be protected — from suppression, from manipulation, from the corruption of those who count the ballots. If genuine fraud exists, pursue it without quarter. The law is the law, and its enforcement is not optional.

But here is the discipline a free government owes its citizens: the power of prosecution must follow evidence, not the other way around. When the apparatus of the executive is dispatched to find a crime that the evidence does not support, it ceases to be an instrument of justice and becomes an instrument of something else — intimidation, perhaps, or the manufacture of a narrative useful to a faction. Neither serves the Republic.

Reason notes, and I mark this as the report's claim rather than my own recollection, that the actual threats to electoral integrity — the ones voters themselves identify and fear — are not what this initiative addresses. If that is accurate, then the government has confused the performance of vigilance with the practice of it. A general who marches his army to where the enemy is not has not secured the territory; he has only exhausted his troops.

I think also of the effect such campaigns produce on the citizenry's confidence. The constant cry of fraud, unaccompanied by proof, does not protect the ballot — it poisons faith in the ballot itself. A population that doubts the legitimacy of its own elections is a population made ready for something far worse than fraud. Faction has always known how to exploit that doubt.

The office of the Attorney General, like every office of the Republic, is held in trust. Its prestige depends upon its restraint as much as its resolve. Spend that prestige on prosecutions that confirm no crime, and you diminish the office for the cases where the crime is real and the pursuit is just.

My counsel is this: let the government publish its findings fully, however sparse. Let independent observers — from every part of the political spectrum — examine what was sought and what was found. Accountability is not the enemy of law enforcement; it is its guardian. And let the officials responsible ask themselves, honestly, whether the resources of justice were aimed where the Republic's genuine need lay.