The threat to elections heats up

Over the past few days, President Trump has returned to one of his central animating issues: purported threats to the security of American elections. He has repeatedly claimed that elections at the local, state and federal level are suspect, exclusively reserving those accusations for elections in which his allies have lost and reserving nearly all of his energy for elections that he himself didn’t win.

The most obvious example is the 2020 presidential race. Trump lost that contest, unquestionably. We know this in part because the results were unambiguous and relatively quick to be finalized. But we know it primarily because Donald Trump and everyone into his outer orbit spent an enormous amount of money and time and energy trying to prove that he didn’t lose, without success. There were movies about how the election was stolen, and there were books and there were conferences and there were probably more social media posts than exist atoms in the Washington Monument, but at no point did anything emerge that suggested that even questions about the election were legitimate, much less anything showing that the election wasn’t.

Yet Trump has recently returned to this idea that he was the true victor in the 2020 election, even as he’s outlining steps that would make future elections — including those in 2026 and 2028 — less free and less open.

After an FBI gambling bust that swept up some prominent names in the NBA, Trump suggested on social media that the cheating involved in that case could hardly compare to what he falsely described as “Democrats cheating on Elections.”

“The 2020 Presidential Election, being Rigged and Stolen, is a far bigger SCANDAL,” he wrote, also targeting mail-in voting like that used in California’s elections. The upcoming referendum that would allow the state to redraw congressional lines — thereby adding Democratic seats — was “totally dishonest,” according to the president, with “Millions of Ballots being ‘shipped.’ “

He presumably means that at-home voters are being sent ballots, which is legal, legitimate and has not been demonstrably tainted by significant fraud. But he knows that many of those voters are Democrats and so, as he did in the months before the 2020 contest, he’s arguing that those votes should be considered suspect from the outset.

It was announced last week that the Justice Department would monitor polling places during upcoming elections in California and New Jersey, an announcement that is doubly nonsensical. First, monitoring polling places won’t do much to catch anyone sending in an illegal ballot through the mail (not that any significant number of such people exist). Second, there’s no rampant in-person fraud to detect, meaning that observers will see nothing at all — or, more alarmingly, generate false alarms about legitimate voters that have the effect of scaring people away from casting a ballot.

The GOP has been smacked for similar behavior in the past. After an effort to police voting in the early 1980s (in New Jersey, in fact), the Republican Party was blocked from poll watching activity until 2016. But that restriction lapsed and the party tasked supporters with watching polls when Trump was on the ballot, including when he lost.

The chilling effect that could result from the efforts this year could be particularly robust. After all, this is a moment in which officers from across the government, including the FBI and Justice Department, are snatching up dozens of people every day. They’ve been cleared by the Supreme Court to target people based on ethnic appearance, and they are. They’ve also detained scores of U.S. citizens. Imagine the effect of plunking a few guys in face masks and FBI vests outside a polling place in a heavily non-White part of Newark or Los Angeles.

In another social media post — which begins with the claim that he had won “THREE Elections, BY A LOT” — Trump suggests that he’s seeing “the best Polling Numbers that I have ever received.” Yet, he complains, “Radical Left Losers are taking fake ads, not showing REAL Polls, but rather saying that I’m Polling at low levels. … These ads should not be allowed to run because they are FAKE!”

Conservatives once successfully convinced the Supreme Court that political ads from outside parties were protected speech. This proved a boon to the party and to Trump. But ads critical of Trump are obviously not the sort of thing to which he extends any grace. Maybe the administration won’t be able to block critical ads, but we can assume — given the trajectory of this year — that he’ll be able to intimidate TV stations and networks into pulling them down in order to avoid spurious lawsuits and public attacks.

Perhaps the most important point here is that Trump wants to ban ads that are telling people the truth. It is not the case that he’s seeing “the best Polling Numbers he has ever received.” His current numbers are, in fact, pretty unexceptional.

In other words, the predicates for his demands are false. It’s not true that he has great polling numbers that are lied about. It’s not true that there is rampant fraud — or even modest fraud! — that’s negatively affecting his and his party’s chances. These are simply pretexts, reasons offered for the administration potentially attacking advertisers and already intimidating voters. As with the troops on the streets of D.C., the administration action is its own reason; the ex post facto rationale is window-dressing meant to excuse the action. It’s analogous to Trump’s response to 2020, in fact. He already had his conclusion and he and his allies worked awfully hard to find any evidence for it.

Here, the actual point is obviously to put his thumb on the electoral scales. He doesn’t care about winning a free and fair election. He just cares about winning an election. So he invents reasons that he can push the elections in the way he wants them to go.

Everything downstream from a lie is illegitimate. And in the critically important realm of voting and elections, Americans should be clear-eyed about what’s happening.

Image: Section of a propaganda poster released in Asia in the 1950s. (National Archives)