Election rigging: Trump’s biggest lie

Discrediting the US electoral process is the key weapon in Donald Trump’s assault on democracy.  Trump will not stop insisting that this and the previous Presidential elections were rigged.  Win or lose, narrowly or not, on Tuesday 5 th November, he will persist.   He has been laying the foundations for his own authoritarian rule for years. The threat of election-linked violence is part of it.

In swing (marginal) states the harassment of state officials and electoral officers, from the declaration of Biden’s victory to the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol, has continued.  Radio 4’s PM programme on 25 th October featured an interview with Tammy Patrick, Chief Executive Officer for Programs at the National Association of Election Officials, and a recognised expert in election administration who served eleven years as a Federal Compliance officer for elections in Maricopa County, Arizona (population 4.2 million).  She revealed how severe pressure on officials has become. The offices of Electoral Commissions in Arizona, and other States, have been threatened by MAGA (Make America Great Again) extremists.  Now, electoral offices need guards, and some have even installed bullet-proof glass.  And after family members were followed, some electoral officers are driving  rental cars.  

After the 3 November 2020 election, 62 Republican lawsuits claiming widespread electoral fraud and irregularities were filed, without supporting evidence. Within the last two years an additional 165 lawsuits have been filed, mainly by Republicans and conservative organisations attempting to ease Trump into the White House.  The primary purpose of this unprecedented level of litigation is to sow doubt about the electoral process.

It is impossible to keep up with Trump’s lies about the elections, which include claims that illegal unregistered immigrants will be voting, postal votes will be stolen, and there will be widespread impersonation of registered voters.  The illegal immigrant voter accusation is part of Trump’s whipping up fears of uncontrolled immigration.  After extensive enquiries, Tammy Patrick reported that vigilant checking of signatures on postal votes made any chance of fraud “infinitesimal”, and described the incidence of voter impersonation in 2020 as zero.  

How to Rig an Election: Defending Democracy from the World’s Despots by Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas (second edition 2024, Yale University Press), whilst focusing on already existing autocracies and “counterfeit democracies”, casts light on Trump’s threat to democracy in the USA as well as the importance of Electoral Commissions and observers.  But elections can be, and are, rigged long before the main body of election observers are on the ground doing their observing.

Amongst the recent proliferation of electoral lawsuits, there are indications that attempts to manipulate and discredit the elections have partly shifted from the voting itself towards a focus on rigging before the ballot papers are even printed or digital voting systems set up: gerrymandering, voter suppression, disinformation, buying votes, intimidation of electoral officials.  Though both the US political Parties have been guilty of some of the above in the past, they are all major features of the Trump/Republican electoral playbook.

Gerrymandering goes back to 1812 and the Governor of Massachusetts, Eldridge Gerry.  He organised the State electoral map so that the bulk of his rival Federalist supporters were squeezed into a handful of electoral districts.  The ploy was noticed at the time.  Cheeseman and Klaas describe a cartoon in the Boston Gazette depicting one such newly formed district shaped as a salamander with a forked tongue, captioned “the Gerrymander”.  It stuck.  Gerry was not re-elected Governor but did end up as James Madison’s Vice-President, dying in 1814.

Both US political parties have been guilty of gerrymandering, though the liberal Brennan Center for Justice, a New York University Law School think-tank, estimate that Republicans currently benefit most,  gaining for them some 16 seats in the House of Representatives.  In Presidential elections, the biggest effect is found in three marginal states, Pennsylvania (19 electoral college votes), where at time of writing Harris is 0.1% ahead, Michigan(15)  where she is 2.93% ahead and North Carolina (16) where Trump is 1.74% ahead.  Massachusetts (9) is a good example of Democrat gerrymandering where, in 2020, Joe Biden  won a huge majority, 68.5%, against 28.6% for Trump, so gerrymandering did not alter the overall result.  Gerry might be smiling.

The second major form of rigging was, and is, voter suppression. The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) outlawed discriminatory voting practices in the southern states, notably literacy tests, inaugurating a period of enfranchisement of black voters and minority groups.  It also established a VRA formula for deciding which jurisdictions, states and localities needed to submit changes in voting laws to the Federal Justice Department for “pre-clearance”.  The 2013 Supreme Court judgement in Shelby County (Alabama) v Holder (Federal Attorney General), 5-4, did away — as outdated and correspondingly unconstitutional — with the VRA formula.   Dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described the judgement as “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet”.

In the following decade 23 states created new obstacles to voting, largely through varying ID rules creating stricter demands for voter identification. It was alleged that changes were intended to  counter voter impersonation — which was non-existent. Those who could not produce a passport or a driving licence, predominantly the poor, would be turned away at the polling facility.  It is estimated that in the marginal, northern State of Wisconsin 300,000 citizens lacked the required voter identification documents.  Trump won the State by 30,000 votes.  Nationally, voter suppression gave some advantage to the Republicans — the main reason for its implementation.

“Incentivising” voters by offering some form of reward – for the individual or the Party — or for registering to vote, is run-of-the-mill practice globally, but provided the voter believes their vote is secret, it is the least reliable rigging method.   It is also illegal.  Whether Elon Musk’s sweepstake, available only to registered voters in swing States who sign a petition “in favour of Free Speech and the Right to Bear Arms” might also be illegal is unclear.  A daily draw which rewards the winner with $1 million could be interpreted as appealing to Republican sentiment against the Democrats’ desire for gun control.  Philadelphia District Attorney, Larry Krassner, is suing Musk and his Political Action Committee, which funds Trump’s campaign on the grounds  of breaching election law.  Illegal or not, Musk’s intervention highlights, as Tammy Patrick said in her interview, that elections should be about “the Will of the People not the will of the billionaires”.

Trump’s election rigging gambit must be taken seriously.  It works.  The administration of the US 2020 Presidential elections was carried out with due auditing, caution and integrity.  The 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act makes it more difficult for Trump to reproduce the chaos around Presidential elections.    But an astonishing number of people believe his allegation that they are rigged.  The rigging that has taken place, was inherited, or planned, is not there to thwart Trump’s autocratic ambitions, but to fulfil them.   

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