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I want to talk about how we talk about elections and what’s acceptable for whom to say. Over the weekend, when I was discussing Trump and the reaction to him from the broadly construed left, I told someone that I just genuinely don’t understand the perspective that he’s a “threat to democracy”. Since my interlocutor is on the same page as me with regard to January 6, they didn’t go down that easy and well-trod road, but instead brought up something from before the 2016 election that really rubbed them the wrong way, that they thought from an otherwise neutral perspective was unacceptable behavior, and that’s the way Trump speaks about his acceptance of electoral results. We have a shared recollection of him saying that he would only accept the results if they were fair, but now that I’m sitting down, I want to make sure I know exactly he said:
I don’t think this is a cherrypicked example either, instead being a clear articulation of a position that I think Trump has consistently espoused with regard to both the 2016 and 2020 elections, that he will only accept the results of the election if he thinks they were legitimately free and fair (which may well require his victory for him to agree things were on the up and up). The person I was discussing this with thinks this is a terrible way to speak about elections because of the damage caused to trust in institutions by having your highest political officers saying that they really don’t know whether it’s a fair election or not.
I have previously articulated at some length why I think the 2020 election was an absolute mess and why I think the de facto elimination of secret ballots calls all American elections into question. Nonetheless, I have to admit that having a Presidential candidate express the same sentiment is destabilizing. The question I bump into is whether it’s incumbent on the speaker to be the one trying to stabilize things if they truly believe that the election is going to have highly questionable results. As a general matter, I think it would be best for candidates to not deliberately increase the level of uncertainty about a result; if you basically agreed to the rules and security procedures and thought they were fine, you should assure the public that their votes will determine who wins and you’ll win or lose on the merits. But what if you don’t think the election is even close to fair? What should you say? Let’s try a few examples to think about:
As I describe in the link above, the 2020 election was a mess, with large numbers of ballots cast illegally and laws changed at the last minute. If I were running and believed that, what should I say about it? I don't actually know if it materially impacted the results, but I would be pretty pissed off if my opponents pulled these kinds of stunts in my election.
If I were running in an Illinois state-wide election in 1982 and there turned out to be over 100,000 fraudulent votes just in Chicago, do I still have to just play along with the crooked machine?
Should all Russians agree that Putin was fairly elected this Spring? While his margin might be implausible, he probably is popular, so why stir up pointless turbulence?
Paul Kagame is making Rwanda great again and won 99% of the vote in 2017. His opponent offered him the high praise of saying, “but so far in this election no one in our party has been killed or imprisoned or harassed and that means at least some progress” which was presumably both stabilizing and good for his personal health. Can’t beat that!
Aside from the specific considerations, where at some point an election moves from sincere disagreement about the quality to obviously crooked, there seems to me to be a game theoretical problem with unqualified agreement that there are no concerns about the election. If I repeatedly state that the election is free and fair, am I not limiting my ability to challenge the results if it turns out I was wrong and it’s crooked? Is the game theoretically optimal choice not saying that you’ll see how it goes and assess accordingly? Setting aside problems with Trump’s honesty and bombast, I have trouble with the idea that one should offer such a concession to an opponent that they don’t think is actually a good-faith actor.
But really, I do get the point. Most American politicians don’t talk about issues with the electoral process, favoring stability over personal gain, with the added element of it being likely that they’ll be punished electorally if they attempt to defect from that equilibrium. How should politicians talk about their confidence in elections that haven’t happened yet?
It is fascinating that not more is done to fix an issue that undermines the confidence in the system.
Republicans should push hard for making IDs a free government service. Giving ID cards to people wouldn't be that expensive, and it would be hard for democrats to oppose a program that would help homeless people get a bank account and integrate into society. Not requiring voter ID is rather unique to the US and a hard position to defend when IDs are required for almost everything else in society.
As for stability having a more unified voting system that makes it harder to cheat would increase stability. Having a percentage of the population believe Bush/Trump/Biden stole the election is a destabalizing force.
Yeah, voter ID is a ridiculously low bar that the GOP should be able to hammer home, but the fact that they cant speaks volumes to their weakness/idiocy.
I'm in the UK at the moment, and there are posters everywhere reminding people to bring their photo ID to vote. India manages to give free, mandatory voter IDs to its population. For literally the rest of the planet, voter ID is a uncontroversial requirement. The fact that Democrats push against it so heavily when there are many more apparently lucrative applications to spend political capital on has turned me into a bit of a conspiracy nut about voting integrity.
The electoral reality in the US is that many states have a history of very overtly disenfranchising certain kinds of voter. This colors basically everything about electoral reform in the US.
Anyone who deeply cares about mandatory voter ID and is really worried about vote fraud is already a die-hard conservative.
Other nations have far more recent and far worse histories of this sorts of behavior, and yet manage to pass reform just fine.
The blunt truth is voter ID laws in this day and age are going to disenfranchise almost exclusively elderly rural people who managed to get along without an ID their entire life. The hypothetical poor urban dweller that blue tribers wave around is virtually guaranteed to be on some sort of public assistance which requires ID to collect. Or is not actually eligible to vote, possibly to their surprise but not to the ballot harvesters who knock on their doors.
I live in a very blue city, and my very blue friends are expressing increasing frustration and skepticism with our local elections, because there are absolutely shennanigans going on, to the point that one went on an hour long rant about ballot harvesting the homeless community she works with, because many of the homeless are being paid for their ballots and its causing overdoses. No, i have no personal evidence for this claim, and yes its illegal as fuck, but i have no reason to doubt my friend and it jives with the genral politics of the city. Voter ID truly has become a universal issue, which is why i have nothing but contempt for GOP failures to do something about it.
This is mind-boggling to me. How do those people live? They live in a rural area but don't have a driver's license- do they ride horses to get around? Or just live with a family member who drives them everywhere? Or is it such a closed community that they know everyone so they're able to buy a car and drive it without ever getting a license?
I think this is a small number of mostly very old- like makes congress look young- people who don’t maintain picture ID because they lost their driver’s license from age related legal blindness or something and didn’t bother to keep track of it. I suspect they’re all living in nursing homes or with family.
Most people who can’t come up with a picture ID on reasonable notice are dysfunctional underclass types who just drive illegally and do everything in cash.
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