Laying down a marker

Trump Rally
by Ted Eytan from Washington, DC, USA

Imagine a miracle. Someone with the power to do so takes every Trump supporter through the voting systems of American democracy. They examine every contested state, every urban precinct, every ballot, voting machine, line of code, signature and mailer envelope. All the millions who came to his rallies, sent in their money, or voted for the man and his enablers, get to see in detail how the voters recorded their choices, how the poll workers counted them, and how the tallies and the counts and recounts worked. 

Let us assume this examination would reveal exactly what the  Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council has said of the election as a whole. Let us assume it confirms what Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has told the world about the Georgia election and its associated recounts, and what the Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona government officials had to say. Assume our imaginary audit shows each Trump supporter why American state and federal courts have rejected thirty-eight lawsuits by the Trump campaign and layers aligned with him.

How many of the Trump supporters who have refused to accept the election results would change their minds? How many of the protestors chanting "stop the steal" would, if presented with irrefutable proof no corruption or tampering sufficient to tip the election results had taken place, change their minds, still their protests, and accept Joe Biden as their president?

Ballot Box, by Jami430

Some would. Human behaviour allows no absolutes, and among the millions of bitter end Trump supporters, some undoubtedly think they have evidence of fraud in the election. If they could see the whole truth of the election results, those people would accept them.

Listening to just a few interviews with Trump supporters, however, will disabuse anyone of any expectation all, or perhaps even a majority of the Trump supporters we see denying the election's validity will ever accept the results, whatever the evidence. The reasons seem to fall into three categories: a perceived existential need for a Trump victory, an inability to comprehend President-elect Biden's appeal, and a conviction perceived media unfairness somehow vitiates the election results. 

Interviews with the die-hard Trump supporters arriving in Washington before the last stand of Trump and his backers at the capitol on January 6 suggest the sentiments expressed in the article "The flight 93 election" have not dissipated much. Demonstrating the security and integrity of the election will not reconcile people to results they fear will lead to their extinction, or to people who cannot comprehend the choices voters made to elect Joe Biden.

Some Republican politicians who strove to overturn, or at least delay, the election results, appealed to the distrust of the recent election Trump voters had expressed, and claimed they only wanted further investigation. After three months of recounts and investigations in which Trump's advocates had wide access to the courts and the cooperation of multiple secretaries of state, it did not make a lot of sense to call for further investigation. After the events of the afternoon of January 6, it made even less sense. Any idea the extreme partisans of the "stop the steal" movement would yield to further investigation, when the most basic considerations of the rule of law did not restrain them, has, to put it mildly, little credibility.

Political dislocation can attract people with highly unrealistic views of the world, and certainly the nightmare visions of the so-called "Q-anon" movement attract people predisposed to grandiose explanations for the ordinary. Mr. Trump's misleading rhetoric and pathological refusal to accept either responsibility or defeat fits a world view oriented to fantasy all too well. All that said, it makes sense to look for the method in the madness. A path, however tenuous and convoluted, very frequently exists between the shadows we fear, and very real changes and challenges in our lives. 

Some protestors who screamed the election of Joe Biden was a fraud have done so because they identified with Donald Trump's wounded ego. Others perhaps have built a fantasy body politic and are now trying to live in it. The claims of fraud, however, have the potential to serve a different and sinister purpose: they lay down a marker against the Democratic Party's stated intention to renew the voting rights act. The violence on display at the American capitol, and levied earlier against a young man in Georgia who took a temporary job working on the election and had a mob threaten to hang him for treason, the harassment of officials high and low, including two United States senators; these have the potential to act as a brake on the push towards more fair and open voting in the United States.

At least some of the people who stormed the United States Capitol almost certainly know the portion of the American population with white privilege will inevitably dwindle from a majority to a plurality in twenty five years. Long before that, multi-racial coalitions built around policies genuinely acceptable to everyone, from the descendants of slaves to the most recent immigrant and refugee, will enjoy a decisive advantage in electoral politics throughout most of the United States. Plenty of conservatives regard this development with what appears, from their behaviour, as an existential dread. In this context, the specific form the violence marking the last year of the Trump presidency has taken makes a kind of sense.

I am an outsider, but I will take the liberty to point out an approach to dealing with senseless violence: act without fear and according to principle. Neither fail to do the right thing on account of threats, nor dismiss the concerns of those who resort to threats if these concerns have a valid argument supporting them. In this case, I would suggest perhaps a revitalized voting rights act could contain measures, in the form of standards and supports for election security, to prevent all forms of election tampering: both the form, all too common in the United States, consisting of preventing qualified voters from casting ballots, and the far less common forms of fraud: dead or nonexistent voters casting votes. Election security should never act as an excuse to block access to the ballot box for legitimate voters.