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Many Americans think our elections are rigged.

Liberals perceive massive voter disenfranchisement, with Republicans preventing millions of minorities from voting to assure Republican victories.

Conservatives perceive massive vote fraud, with millions of noncitizens and other ineligibles voting to assure Democratic victories.

While both views could be right, each is mostly wrong. Yet the fear of refuting election paranoia reflects how name-calling has replaced debate. Anyone rebutting the conservatives’ myth will get labeled a liberal lackey. Even worse, question the disenfranchisement myth and you get called Racist.

In part, today’s paranoia reflects past realities. Like most democracies, America has a history of both bigotry and vote fraud.

Liberal fears reflect the historic realities that from the 1890s to the 1960s, mainly in the South, state and local election officials kept African Americans from voting through horrendous means, legal and illegal. As Charles Bullock and R. Keith Gaddie showed in “The Triumph of Voting Rights in the South,” the 1965 Voting Rights Act immediately increased median African American voter registration in the region from 39 percent to 59 percent. In Mississippi, black registration rose from 7 percent to 60 percent. According to the authors, in today’s South, black voter turnout often exceeds white turnout, a civil rights triumph that reporters largely ignore.

Similarly, though vote fraud now seems rare, conservative fears reflect the historical realities that for decades urban Democratic politicians had supporters, including dead people, pets, vote multiple times in the same election.

For both left and right, paranoia also reflects the sheer size of our elections. In November 2016, more than 136 million people voted in general elections run by 50 states and thousands of local officials, directing tens of thousands of (largely elderly) Election Day volunteers. In anything that big, even with the best intentions, mishaps happen.