Voter Fraud

A year ago I wrote two posts (here and here) about Trump’s unfounded allegations of voter fraud.  Since allegations like this from the president are so dangerous to our democracy, it seems important to emphasize and expand upon it.

After the Mississippi run-off election for Senator this Tuesday, November 27, the closest national elections will have all been resolved.  Governors’ races in Florida and Georgia are no longer in the news.  But for several weeks after the mid-terms, those two gubernatorial and the Florida senatorial race were mired in difficult and complicated recounts. 

Razor-thin margins in important elections have always been challenged, with each side seemingly sure that a recount will be decided in their favor.

But this year the recounts have been accompanied by President Trump’s repeated accusations of electoral fraud … and by the willingness of almost all national politicians in his party to go along. 

A Washington Post editorial reported Trump’s tweet from Monday, November 11:

“Large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged,” Mr. Trump tweeted Monday, as so often with no basis in fact. … “An honest vote count is no longer possible—ballots massively infected.”

In a country with so little trust in government, Trump’s reckless accusations are dangerous. Some of these allegations are so inane that it’s hard to believe that even Trump made them, for instance, when he accused some people who had

absolutely no right to vote … they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.

After Kyrsten Sinema was declared the winner in the race for Arizona Senator (and her opponent, Martha McSally, had graciously conceded), the President nevertheless tweeted

Just out — in Arizona, SIGNATURES DON’T MATCH. Electoral corruption—Call for a new Election? We must protect our Democracy!

Since President Trump’s election, of course, we have become inured to his lies. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker recently reported that since his election the president has made 6,420 false or misleading claims.  (My favorite is the President’s recent ridiculous [even if  innocuous] statement that forest fires in Finland are prevented by frequent “raking” of the 100,000 square miles of Finnish forest.)

Perhaps a bigger issue than Trump’s damaging lies about the electoral process is the unwillingness of national Republican political leaders to challenge him.  Political scientist Erica Frantz writes that

democracies do not fall apart because a single leader destroys them, but rather because the individuals and bodies with the power to check the leadership fail to use that power to preserve the system.

Unfortunately, most of the national Republican Party has refused this responsibility.  In fact, many in the party have taken up Trump’s chants.  For instance, while the recount between Republican Rick Scott and Democrat Bill Nelson in the Florida Senatorial race was still in process, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell had already officially welcomed Scott as the senator from Florida.  And Republican Senator Cory Gardner, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, demanded that the Florida recount be halted while Scott was narrowly leading.

As I explained in my previous posts, there is absolutely no evidence of individual voter fraud in the United States in at least the last century.  The Brennan Center for Justice reported on fifty-four separate studies by different organizations reported that

the rate of illegal voting is extremely rare, and the incidence of certain types of fraud—such as impersonating another voter—is virtually nonexistent.

With much fanfare, President Trump even appointed a committee to research the issue, headed by Kansas Secretary of State Chris Kobach (R)—a leader in the movement to suppress the vote by claiming voter fraud.  Soon, however, the President quietly disbanded the committee after it, too, had found no evidence of voter fraud. 

Most of us don’t think about it, but democracy, even in the United States, is a fragile flower.  As we are seeing in some of the smaller European countries, such as Turkey, Hungary, Poland and others, democracy is being gradually snuffed out.  We have in the past been confident that American democracy was so firmly rooted that it could never be in danger.  So confident was he in the strength of American democracy that American social scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a book, The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that

the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government.

From our perspective in 2018, his naïveté is startling.

Democracy is only as strong as the confidence in which the people hold it.  As I’ve written before, only 30% of young people in the United States feel that living in a democracy is “essential.”  24% think it’s a bad way to run a country!

While many of us don’t take President Trump’s lies seriously, approximately 40% of the country does.  Their President and many in the Republican Party are convincing that 40% of the population that they cannot trust our democracy, and one way they’re doing this is by promoting the voter-fraud fiction.  The ultimate ramifications of such distrust are horrifying to think of.

I realize that many of us are also thinking that “there must be a better way.”  But as long as we can’t propose that better way, we must do everything in our power to maintain what we have.

Our Constitution: Undemocratic Democracy : Part 2

This post is a continuation of the first in a series of historical threats to our democracy.  Here, I will examine the constitutional structure of our government and what we can learn from the Founders about our current dilemma.

Structure of Government

Even with only 6% of the population eligible to vote, the elite class was still worried about losing control. They designed government to keep people like themselves in power and others out. For instance, they divided government into three parts: the executive (the President), the legislative (Congress) the judiciary (the courts) and then protected the president, half of Congress, and the courts from the popular will.

• The president was not elected directly by the citizens. Rather, voters chose from a slate of the propertied who became the Electoral College, which then chose the president. Today the Electoral College is only an administrative formality, and its members are essentially bound by the results of the state vote.  At the founding, however, the usually-elite electors were not committed to the popular vote and could protect against the majority by electing whomever they chose.
• Further, the senators were chosen by state legislatures, again buffering the Senate from the populace. Since 1913, senators have been elected by direct vote, removing that buffer.In addition, only one-third of the senators were elected every two years for six-year terms, which meant that only one-third of the Senate at any time would be influenced by populist, hot-button issues. The practical effect was to insulate the Senate from the will of the majority.

• The third branch of government, the federal judiciary (including the Supreme Court), was appointed by the president and approved by the Senate, with the result that this selection of jurists was also protected from the will of the propertyless.

Of the three branches of government, then, the Constitution provided that only half of one branch (the House) was chosen directly by the citizenry. Why create this voting imbalance? Because those who wrote the Constitution believed firmly that only the elite could make decisions wise enough to maintain “democracy.”  They took it for granted that the country needed to be firmly controlled by a small group selected by the elite.

Today, we can view the writers of the Constitution with a little less reverence than they are usually accorded. They obviously did not intend a government of the people, by the people, or for the people. Indeed, the Constitution seems designed more to protect the country from the people who wanted “too much democracy.”

What can we learn from the Federalist Papers and the thinking of the founders that is relevant for our times?  Perhaps the most important lesson is that they believed that government had to be buffered by the Constitution from takeover by the popular will.

In the age of Trump, we are confronted with precisely the problems the framers set up to protect us from. Too many of the people are susceptible to demagoguery. Although it  is certainly not definite, many of these people are apparently from among those with less formal education.

In addition, because of the Electoral College, George W Bush and Donald Trump were elected by a minority vote of the country,

President Trump was elected according to the rules of the Constitution, that is, by “the people,” but he is incapable of running the government safely and has damaged our democracy beyond anything we could have imagined even five years ago. As the Founding Fathers feared and predicted:

• The public is susceptible to manipulation.
• Demagogues can come to power.
• In a democracy, politicians who do not believe in democracy can be elected.   

I am firm believer that we must hang on to democracy but my confidence is shaken. There are no easy answers to today’s threats. I’m reminded of the quote attributed to Winston Churchill

Democracy is the worst form of government … except for all the others.

So the question becomes: Can we tweak our democracy to survive?

In future posts I want to explore further how, in the modern era, democracy has become so damaged and look into the question of whether it is even capable of governing our country.

Our Constitution: Undemocratic Democracy: Part 1

Over the next few months, I’d like to offer a set of posts on the historical threats to American democracy. (This is only Part I of the first essay in the series about the Constitution and its dangers.)
These threats are not new but today pose a special urgency. Some of these are embedded in the Constitution; others in our history; still others have important historical antecedents. We need to take them into account if we are to deal with the threats to our current form of government.

The writers of our Constitution would have had no trouble understanding our current political moment and how we got here.  In fact, they were already worried specifically about the political chaos that could arise within a democracy from populism, demagoguery, wealth inequalities and widespread political ignorance. They feared that if political power were taken out of the hands of the elites (the merchants and wealthy land owners) and put into the hands of the populace:

• the government would redistribute wealth to further equality;
• the elite would lose power and wealth;
• the “people” (many without formal education) would not be able to make wise decisions; 
• the economy would disintegrate and the country would devolve into economic chaos, anarchy and war.  

So the Founders quite consciously wrote into the Constitution provisions to keep power out of the hands of the majority.  Over the years since the founding, however, many of those provisions have been weakened or even overturned.  The United States is today much more democratic than the founders ever intended. They would probably be appalled but unsurprised by what has arisen.

The Federalist Papers

We can find help in understanding the thinking behind the Constitution in the Federalist Papers—a series of 85 essays written by several signers of the Constitution in order to convince the states to ratify it. In Federalist paper 10, for instance, James Madison writes of his concern that a democracy would allow an unpropertied majority to redistribute the wealth of the elites (to which Madison belonged).

Recognizing that the country's wealthiest property owners formed a minority and that the country's unpropertied classes formed a majority, Madison feared that the unpropertied classes would come together to form a majority faction that gained control of the government. … [to] use their majority power to implement a variety of measures that redistributed wealth. (Federalist 10)

While Madison did not specifically name the political party (which did not then exist) as a faction, his arguments against factions might help us understand today’s political polarization, anyway.

What structures did the Framers impose to protect us from “too much democracy”?
Voter Suppression:

The most obvious protective structure, of course, was the Constitution's suppression of voter rights.  The continuation of slavery, enshrined in the Constitution, wrote off about twenty percent of the population, hardly considering slaves to be people, much less eligible to vote.  In addition, because there was no agreement on nation-wide voting standards, the Constitution gave the states the power to regulate their own voting laws, some of which discriminated on the basis of religion. It wasn’t until 1828 that “Maryland becomes the last state to remove religious restrictions when it passes legislation enfranchising Jews.” For the most part, however, only white, land-owning men were allowed to vote.  When George Washington was elected, only six percent of the American population could vote.

Disproportionate power of less populous states
In addition, because of the politics of the constitutional convention, the representatives from the smaller states were worried that their state would be outvoted by the larger states if Congress were completely apportioned according to population.  As a result the Constitution guarantees every state two senators regardless of the number of voters. The less populous states—which are today mostly agricultural and religiously conservative—have disproportionate power in the Senate: The voter in Alaska (the least populous state), for instance, has 53 times the influence on Senate votes as the voter in California (the most populous state).  This too is a variety of “voter suppression”.

In the interest of brevity, I’ll end this first part of the post here. Next time,I will look at the constitutional structure of government (the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch) and its impact upon democracy.