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Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses? Trump himself has a big personal incentive to say the election is "rigged" if he loses no matter what. It redirects the conversation from analyzing the defeat ("how could we do better"), which will inevitably shine a light on Trump's shortfalls, to one where the basic facts of reality are debated instead. The obvious example is the 2020 election. Lesser known was that Trump did the same thing in 2016 when he lost the Iowa primary to Ted Cruz. Now it seems he's preparing to do the same in 2024.
Many Republicans are more than willing to go along with this, mostly due to either negative partisanship or living in a bubble ("everyone I knew was voting for Trump, then the other guy won? Something doesn't smell right!"). If the pain of defeat stings, why not just be a sore loser instead? I've debated many people who thought the 2020 election was rigged, and inevitably it goes down one of three rabbitholes:
Vibes-based arguments that are short on substance, but long on vague nihilism that "something was off". Nearly 70% of Republicans think 2020 was stolen in some way, yet most are normies who don't spend a lot of time trying to form a set of coherent opinions, so the fallback of "something was off" serves as a way to affirm their tribal loyalty without expending much effort.
Motte-and-bailey to Trump's claims by ignoring everything Trump himself says, and instead going after some vague institutional flaw without providing any evidence to how it actually impacted 2020. For instance, while mail-in ballots are a nice convenience for many, there are valid concerns to a lack of oversight in how people fill out their ballots. People can be subjected to peer pressure, either from their family or even from their landlord or another authority figure to fill out their ballot a certain way. However, no election is going to 100% perfect, and just because someone can point out a flaw doesn't mean the entire thing should be thrown out. In a similar vein, Democrats have (rightly) pointed out that gerrymandering can cause skewed results in House elections, yet I doubt many Republicans would say that means results would need to be nullified especially if Democrats had just lost. These things are something to discuss and reform for future elections.
People who do buy at least some of the object-level claims that Trump or Giuliani has advanced about 2020 being stolen. There's certainly a gish-gallop to choose from. The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into. For most political issues, parties tend to organically rally around a few specific examples that have the best evidence or emotional valence. The fact that this hasn't happened for Trump's claims is indicative that none of them are really that good, and they rely more on the reader being unfamiliar with them to try to spin a biased story. One example occurred a few weeks ago on this site, one user claimed the clearest examples were Forex markets (which were subsequently ignored), Ruby Freeman, and the Cyber Ninja's Audit. I was only vaguely aware of these, so I did a quick Google search and found a barrage of stories eviscerating the Ruby Freeman and Cyber Ninja narratives. I then asked for the response, preferably with whatever relatively neutral sources he could find, since I was sure he'd claim the sources I had Googled were all hopelessly biased. But this proved too high a bar to clear for him, and so the conversation went nowhere. Maybe there's a chance that some really compelling evidence exists out there that would easily prove at least some of the major allegations correct, but at this point I doubt it.
At this point it seems like the idea that elections are rigged is functionally unfalsifiable. The big question on the Republican side now would be whether to claim the elections were rigged even if Trump DOES win. The stock explanation would be that the Dems are rigging it so they have +20% more votes than they normally would, so a relatively close election means Trump actually won by a huge margin. On the other hand, saying the election was rigged at all could diminish Trump's win no matter what, and it's not hard to imagine Trump claiming "this was the most legitimate election in the history of our country" if he manages to come out on top.
You guys need to organize your elections better. The reason people will believe Trump when he yells 'fraud', is because election fraud looks to be plausible.
There's usually no voter ID. The electoral rolls can easily be screwed around with (by both parties in different ways, even). Voting machines seem opaque even when they're not, and break down during voting, necessitating workarounds that don't inspire confidence. Mail-in votes are common and there's barely even a pretense of a chain of custody. And then there are outright shenanigans, such as kicking out the poll watchers.
I've said it before, you need to be able to convince the loser that he lost a fair game.
Consider how it works in the Netherlands:
Media outlets will download the reports and make fancy visualisations such as this one from the last election. I encourage you to click that link, you can see every single vote that was cast. Each dot on the map is a polling station, and if you click them you can see how many votes were cast for each party.
We do sometimes still have sore losers who yell fraud, but we don't have anyone taking them seriously, not even their own supporters.
At least part of this is that American ballots are fiendishly complicated: how many issues are you voting on? My American ballot is a complex superposition of half a dozen different geographic boundaries in terms of which races I vote in: US representatives, state legislature (two different boundaries), municipal city races, county races, school district races, state court boundaries. By the time I'm done with it, my sheet of candidates to vote for probably has 30 or more names on it most years. In comparison I often see other countries with just "which party are you voting for?" and wonder if that's a better system. Hand-counting all the different races couldn't be done night-of easily. Also, the complexity of the ballot means that my specific combination of races I vote in plausibly identifies a pretty small set of street addresses, so anonymity is a real concern.
On the other hand, my county (counties run elections, here -- and yes, I get to vote for elections commissioner) does a pretty good job: it's a computer-printed-and-counted, but human readable paper ballot, and I can vote at any of the dozens of sites in the county. And there are plenty of options for early voting.
Looking at your itemized list sounds pretty reasonable to me, but I can't help but think of which constituencies, and how, each would be challenged. You can't assume everyone has an address! Nor that they check their mail.
We've had multiple simultaneous elections. E.g. municipal elections, provincial elections, water board elections, district committee elections, the EU parliament elections, and referendums back when we still had them. They try to avoid it, scheduling them apart from each other, but when they are combined you just get e.g. three separate voter cards, three separate ballots, etc. This is a bitch to count which is why they rather not do it.
Eligibility may vary: someone from another EU country can vote in the EU parliament elections, can vote in a municipal or district committee election if they have lived there for at least 5 years, and can't vote in any other elections. There may be multiple elections going on at once, and you can only vote in one of them, so you just get only the one voting card and your neighbour may get all of them.
We don't get to vote for judges or school boards, sadly, so maybe it does not scale to the level of democracy in the US. On the other hand you could of course just spread them out and just have a couple of elections every year. We run our elections mostly using volunteers already, so it doesn't need to be that expensive (and democracy is worth something, right?).
The municipalities run the elections here, but there are set standards for doing so. They have to print the voter cards and the ballots and set up the polling booths (the picture of the voter card I linked has the coat of arms of the municipality of Sliedrecht on it, for example), but they have to follow the same process everywhere.
Ah, but you can. If you really are homeless, you are supposed to register at a shelter in the municipality where you last lived before you became homeless. Then you'll get your mail there. I guess if you're truly vagrant you'll have trouble, but that surely can't be too different anywhere else.
(Edit: though this actually can be a bit of a problem. People may live in (ahem) informally rented housing, so they can't register. Especially students and other young people. This is technically illegal, but tolerated. They leave their registration at their parents' house. They can vote, but would have to travel back "home" to do so (or ask one of their parents to be their proxy). They also can't vote for local elections in the place where they actually live, since on paper they don't live there.)
That's on them.
If only it were that simple
(pdf warning) https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wakegov.com.if-us-west-1/s3fs-public/documents/2024-09/November%205th%20General_SampleBallots_Guide_0.pdf
See the 181(!) ballot styles for Wake County NC (home of the state capital, Raleigh, and one of the state's 100 counties) starting on page 11. Your ballot depends on exactly which districts you live in for various things, which usually don't line up. These ballots this year are actually on the small side IME; it's usually 3-4 pages rather than 2.
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