There are some very good reasons why Americans don’t trust elections anymore
The big reveal from the carefully orchestrated congressional hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol is this: There’s still no credible evidence of enough fraud to make a difference in the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
The big surprise derived from the hearings is that it took some members of Donald Trump’s inner circle four years to realize that he’d become — in the words of former Attorney General Bill Barr — “detached from reality.”
Beyond the hearings’ big reveal and big surprise looms a big question of more-lasting importance: Why do so many people still believe Trump’s lies about the election being stolen?
There are arguably two sub-groups who believe that the 2020 election was marred by widespread fraud. First, there are those in the MAGA cult who’d believe anything Trump tells them, so they’re mostly beyond dissuading. The unusual steps taken to conduct an election during a pandemic added to their suspicions and made them more susceptible to Trump’s lies.
Meanwhile, there’s another group of mostly rational folks who have legitimate concerns about safeguarding the integrity of our elections. This group’s concerns about the issue arise out of our nation’s well documented history of election fraud.
THERE’S SOME HISTORY
Indeed, tales of voter fraud are even embedded in our folklore, as in the anecdote about the “little old lady” in Indiana whose dying wish was to be buried back in her native Chicago “so she could continue voting.”
In fact, in our nation’s early history, voters had no privacy and were often subjected to intimidation. Not until the 1880s did the secret ballot become the norm. Even after that reform, suspicions of rigged elections persisted.
The problems were especially evident in the big cities where political machines were dominant. From Boss Tweed in New York to Boss Crump in Memphis, election winners often were predetermined. In recent years, suspicious outcomes in cities such as Philadelphia have contributed to cynicism about the legitimacy of the results.
Just last week, former Philadelphia Congressman Michael J. Myers pleaded guilty in federal court to charges of fraudulently stuffing ballot boxes on behalf of Democrats in elections from 2014 through 2018.
Adding to the cynicism is a flurry of books that either touch on the topic or focus on it. One of the best is Robert A. Caro’s much lauded 1990 book “Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson.”
Caro carefully documents how blatant election fraud in Texas’s 1948 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate marked a crucial step in LBJ’s political career, producing an 87-vote victory that earned him the sarcastic nickname “Landslide Lyndon.”
In 2000, it was Democrats’ turn to cry foul as the presidential election’s outcome, as noted in NBC’s Tim Russert’s famous quip, “all came down to Florida.” Noticing that George W. Bush’s brother Jeb was Florida’s governor, outraged Democrats put two and two together and came up with a groundless theory that Florida’s results were rigged.
This was debunked by a Miami Herald investigative team led by veteran reporter Martin Merzer. Its book, “Democracy Held Hostage,” citing an independent audit, concluded that Bush was indeed the winner, albeit by a narrow margin in an election fraught with court challenges, hanging chads and voters’ confusion about a Palm Beach County ballot designed by a Democratic supervisor of elections.
GORE-BUSH STILL STINGS
Nonetheless, long after 2000, some Democrats continued to sulk, even though Al Gore, unlike Trump, commendably conceded defeat — and even though Florida enacted a series of reforms designed to avoid a repeat of such a national embarrassment.
A post mortem on Florida’s
2000 election was one of many elements in Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund’s 2004 book, “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy.” Several of the abuses that Fund cited — ballot-box stuffing, ballot harvesting, etc. — were echoed in Eric Eggers’ 2018 book,
“Fraud: How the Left
Plans to Steal the Next Election.”
Given the amount of suspicion being raised, it’s no wonder that voters left and right have a level of distrust — a distrust exploited by several of the polarizing personalities on cable news channels such as Fox and MSNBC.
Unfortunately, such distrust in the protocols of democracy can lead extremists on both ends of the political spectrum to seek out alternatives — sometimes up to, and including, resorting to bullets instead of ballots. A recent upsurge in abortion-related political violence, from both the left and the right, may be traceable, at least in part, to an endemic distrust of elections.
That said, it might help allay some of the cynicism if the left didn’t portray photo ID requirements and every other effort to safeguard election integrity as “voter suppression.” While voter suppression has occurred and must be vigorously fought wherever it occurs, the tendency to portray every reasonable reform as voter suppression is a reminder that Donald J. Trump isn’t the only one sowing distrust in a process that’s vital to our nation’s survival as a democratic republic.