Americans knew Trump would lie about fraud. Now it
won’t work.
Because voters saw his claims coming, they can
see through his plan.
By Rosa Brooks
Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown and the author of
“Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City,” to be published in February.
November 4, 2020 at 5:04 p.m. CST
American
voters have chosen the next president, but because of the backlog of
still-uncounted ballots in key swing states, we may not know precisely who that
is for days, perhaps even longer. In normal times, this would be a source of
frustration, but hardly a crisis: Each state sets its own rules for when
and how to count mail-in ballots. But with President Trump seeking a second
term in the White House, these aren’t normal times.
In the
early hours of Wednesday, as analysis of mail-in ballots in swing states began
to suggest that Joe Biden could win, Trump moved quickly to cast doubt on any
outcome not in his favor. He promptly declared himself the winner and alleged
baselessly (as he has done countless times in recent months) that a Biden win
could only be the result of “fraud” or an effort to “steal” the election.
Ballots cast for Trump “started to magically disappear,” he claimed in another series of tweets (flagged by
Twitter as misleading): “Mail-In ballot dumps … are so devastating in their …
power of destruction.”
These
false claims from Trump about vote fraud and stolen elections are appalling but
not surprising. Back in June, I helped organize a series
of scenario-based exercises exploring potential disruptions to
a free, fair and peaceful election and transition. These exercises
involved scores of experts from both political
parties, and we looked at multiple election night scenarios, including a
decisive Biden win, a decisive Trump win, a narrow Biden win and a period of
extended uncertainty. In every exercise except the decisive Trump win, the team
playing the Trump campaign and their elected GOP allies sought to do precisely
what Trump is doing right now: make baseless claims about voter fraud, claim
that any votes cast for Biden are somehow illegitimate, claim that Democrats
are seeking to steal the election, and take both legal and extralegal action to
undermine ordinary Americans’ faith in the electoral outcome.
In most
of our simulation exercises, the nation moved rapidly after that toward chaos
and constitutional impasse.
But
such exercises aren’t road maps to the future. Instead, this kind of project is
designed to test assumptions, explore potential worst-case scenarios and
identify ways to ensure that those worst-case scenarios never come to pass.
Today, there is far less reason to fear a catastrophic political outcome than
there was in June, for the simple reason that the many efforts to ring warning
bells about Trump’s likely efforts to undermine the election results were
successful.
Americans
today are more sophisticated about voting and the vote-counting process than
they were six months ago: Most voters understand that getting the results fast
isn’t as important as getting them right. Many voters understand that in-person
votes favored Trump, partly because he advocated against voting by mail, and
that mail-in votes favored Biden — and that the order in which those are
counted can make the results appear to shift. Responsible media outlets have
also responded to Trump’s premature claims of victory with appropriate
skepticism, especially since Biden’s lead in the votes counted so far is solid
and growing. Americans of every race, sex, state and ideology turned out to
cast their votes in record numbers this year, despite the
coronavirus pandemic and other barriers to voting: A higher percentage of
voters cast ballots this year than in any
year since 1900, and Biden appears to have already garnered more votes, in absolute terms, than any other
presidential candidate in American history. With only a handful of states with
outstanding ballots remaining, Biden could pull off the extraordinarily
difficult feat of ousting an incumbent president.
It’s
too soon to say for sure, of course: Even though dedicated election officials
in multiple states are working around-the-clock to ensure a prompt, accurate
and complete vote tally, it’s entirely possible that vote counts (and,
possibly, recounts) will continue for days or even weeks, and what currently
appears to be a likely Biden victory will look different when every ballot has
been counted. This is as it should be. As Biden himself has emphasized: “It’s not my place or Donald
Trump’s place to declare who’s won this election. That’s the decision of the
American people.”
And
here, too, things have changed since our June election simulation exercises.
During our simulations, the participants playing GOP leaders rallied around
Trump, repeating and amplifying his false claims about fraud and stolen
elections. Today, things look quite different: Even close Trump allies are quietly — and
sometimes not so quietly — reminding the president that in our democracy, every
ballot should be counted. Trump-friendly Fox News also called key states for
Biden before other news organizations did.
“Taking
days to count legally cast votes is NOT fraud,” tweeted Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “You
have to let the process play itself out,’ urged former New Jersey governor Chris
Christie (R). Former Republican senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) called Trump’s fraud claims distressing
and “wrong.” Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) weighed in
with an implied rebuke of Trump’s premature
assertion of electoral victory: “Claiming you win the election is different
from finishing the counting.” Perhaps these Republican officials understand
what Trump himself does not: The Republican Party is bigger than Trump, and
there will be many more tight elections in the future. What goes around, comes
around; in the long term, the GOP can’t afford to become the party that opposes
a full and fair vote count. (And indeed, in Arizona, where Trump was trailing
Wednesday, it’s Republicans insisting that every vote should be counted.)
Trump
himself has infamously refused to commit to ensuring a peaceful
transfer of power in the event that he loses, and recent threats of violence from extremist
far-right nationalist groups made it clear to all Americans that the stakes in
this election are exceptionally high. Paradoxically, all this may have helped
reinforce the commitment of most ordinary Americans to ensuring that our voting
processes be allowed to proceed freely and fairly.
Trump’s false claims about
fraud and election theft now seem increasingly dangerous, desperate and doomed.
“They are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let
them do it,” the president tweeted early Wednesday.
Who
does Trump think is stealing the election? The voters?
There’s
a fundamental fact about democracy that Trump seems never to have understood:
Americans get to cast votes to choose their president — but the president
doesn’t get to choose which of those votes should count. And the “we” who will
“never” let the election be stolen? That’s “We, the People of the United States.” And we
know that no matter what Trump tweets, our Constitution says that we’re the
ones who get to have the final word.