A Free and Fair Election

Months ago, some friends raised the question of whether we would actually have elections this November.  At the time, I dismissed their concerns as alarmist.  I simply couldn’t imagine a scenario in which the administration would interfere with or cancel the election.

I no longer dismiss this suggestion, because this past Thursday Trump made the case in his nationally televised address that would create the pretext he needs to do precisely that.

Trump’s obsession with the 2020 election, his attacks on mail-in ballots, his call for congressional gerrymandering, and the endless and baseless conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud, especially by undocumented immigrants, his appointment of election deniers to key positions overseeing election security within his administration—all this is old news.

What’s new is that he has now put us all on notice that he is prepared to recycle those old long-disproven conspiracy theories about our elections being “rigged” so that he can claim to be protecting them exactly as he uses the vast powers of his office to undermine them.

We can’t know just how far he will pursue this, but he has already threatened to withhold federal anti-terrorism funds from states that don’t comply with his demands to turn over election data.  Using the claims he made on national television about non-citizens voting, he could order ICE and potentially the National Guard to intimidate voters at polling places.  If the results go against the president’s party, he can now claim the authority to declare them invalid.

It is by no means certain that the government would attempt anything so radical, of course. But the clear purpose of the president’s speech was to lay the groundwork for that option.

It is certainly good news that in the days since the president’s address many Republicans have been distanced themselves from the president’s speech and/or maintained silence.  They have apparently recognized that relitigating the 2020 election and giving their base a reason to believe that their votes won’t be counted accurately isn’t politically wise, especially in a year when they already face re-election challenges.  Perhaps that silence, together with the recognition that passing the SAVE Act remains impossible, suggest that even spineless Republicans might draw the line at openly subverting an election.  We can certainly hope so.   

But the president’s sinking approval ratings, the fact that the Iran war is quickly turning into just the sort of quagmire he promised to keep us out of, that inflation remains high, and that he has angered key members of his own party by undermining their re-election bids—all this makes Trump and his party even more vulnerable as November approaches.  And the more vulnerable he feels, the more desperate he is likely to become. 

Which is why it is at least possible that Trump will attempt to use the government to sway the election, in the tradition of the authoritarian strongmen that he has openly admired. 

We can’t know what form this might take—intimidating voters, seizing voting machines they claim have been compromised, or launching baseless criminal investigations of Democratic candidates in the weeks leading up to the election.  All are within the realm of possibility for a president who has already publicly expressed his concern that if Democrats win the House he will be impeached for a third time, and who has already used the Justice Department to target his political foes. 

It goes without saying that free and fair elections are the bedrock of our democracy, as is the time-honored tradition of gracefully accepting the results of those elections when your preferred candidate loses.

And it also goes without saying that this president has demonstrated time and again that he has no respect for democratic norms or the rule of law.  It is one thing—though hardly trivial--to casually amplify baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud.  It is another entirely to elevate those claims to a prime time address and to signal that he is prepared to use all the resources at his disposal to interfere with our elections on the basis of those lies.

This is the time to use all the resources at our disposal to ensure that the government does not interfere with this election.  We can do this by

·      serving as poll observers, to ensure that people are not intimidated and dissuaded from voting,

·      supporting the organizations that work to ensure the accuracy and security of our elections, like Verified Voting,Democracy Works, and the Brennan Center for Justice,

·     supporting organizations that are organizing volunteers to protect our elections, like the “Hands Off Our Vote” project of Indivisible

• supporting voter education through the League of Women Voters, and

·      supporting Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts by organizations like the Movement Voter Project.

It is a sign of these trying times that as we mark the 250th anniversary of our country we face explicit threats to our most basic right—the right to vote—and that they come from our president. So far, most of the other assaults on our democratic institutions have been blocked by the courts and I want to believe that this one will, as well. But I no longer take that for granted.

Our democracy depends on elections, and those elections now depend on us.  “We the people” choose our elected representatives and we must now work to ensure that we can do so again in November, as we have throughout our history, in a free and fair manner.

In words attributed to Benjamin Franklin at the inception of this experiment in democracy 250 years ago, “we have a republic, if we can keep it.”