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Attacking the Vote [1]
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Date: 2022-08-23
Donald Trump
William Cooper is the author of Stress Test: How Donald Trump Threatens American Democracy.
Attacking the Vote
Counting votes in presidential elections will never be precise. Getting millions of people to vote on the same question will always involve some amount of human error and fraudulent misconduct. Election laws will, moreover, always require line-drawing that advantages one side or the other. And courts will always have to resolve post-election disputes.
These are facts. And they're not going to change.
There have, indeed, been fundamental electoral deficiencies throughout American history. Women gained the franchise merely 100 years ago. John F. Kennedy may have won the 1960 presidential election because of shenanigans by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. (No one knows for sure.) And George W. Bush beat Al Gore in 2000 by a few votes in Florida based on a highly controversial opinion from conservative Supreme Court justices.
It has been the good faith and sound judgment of candidates and election officials that has sustained public confidence in the franchise despite elections’ inherent imperfections. State officials have typically counted votes with integrity. And losing candidates have recognized that conceding defeat is necessary to keep American democracy moving forward.
Indeed, Al Gore no doubt genuinely thought he won the 2000 presidential election. The former vice president nonetheless conceded defeat after the Supreme Court spoke. “Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it," Gore said in his concession speech. "I accept the finality of this outcome which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”
That's how it has always worked: Losing candidates have conceded—for the sake of American democracy—even if they strongly believed they actually won.
Until now.
Now, Donald Trump is the loser. And neither good faith nor sound judgment can be found.
Trump is continuing on with the “Big Lie,” the delusion that he (not Joe Biden) was the real winner of the 2020 presidential election. In an October 27, 2021 letter to the editors of the Wall Street Journal, for example, Trump made the following false allegations (among others) about the presidential election in Pennsylvania:
• “305,874 voters were removed from the rolls after the election on Nov. 3rd.”
• there were “57,000 duplicate registrations.”
• there were “39,911 people who were added to voter rolls while under 17 years of age.”
• “17,000 mail-in ballots [were] sent to addresses outside of Pennsylvania.”
The Wall Street Journal’s editors appropriately called Trump's letter “bananas.”
The Republican Party, however, is still embracing Trump. The leading Republican in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, is a Trump ally. In a Politico and Morning Consult poll released in October sixty percent of Republicans said the 2020 presidential election results should definitely or probably be overturned.
And, worst of all, Trump is supporting pro-Trump ideologues' campaigns to be in charge of states’ presidential-election operations in 2024. As Rick Hasen, co-director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center at the University of California, Irvine, told CNN: “It is incredibly dangerous to support people for office who do not accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election. It suggests that they might be willing to bend or break the rules when it comes to running elections and counting votes in the future.”
Trump is targeting the most critical election vulnerability of all: the people who count the votes. It has been the good faith and sound judgment of these people—like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who rejected Trump’s pressure to reverse Georgia's 2020 election results—that has sustained America’s election integrity and, therefore, its democratic legitimacy.
Trump is maneuvering the pieces to checkmate American democracy. In broad daylight. He has captured the hearts and minds of tens of millions of Americans. If he also captures the pens of those who tally the votes, an essential pillar of American democracy—free and fair elections—will be in jeopardy.
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