{"id":115802,"date":"2024-10-05T17:05:52","date_gmt":"2024-10-05T15:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=115802"},"modified":"2024-10-01T06:47:22","modified_gmt":"2024-10-01T04:47:22","slug":"19-05-100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=115802","title":{"rendered":"There has been a stealth revolution in American voting laws and practices since 2016."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>There has been a stealth revolution in American voting laws and practices since 2016.<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Armin Rosen<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Illustration: Justin Metz<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Democracy, unlike other forms of government, has to win the people\u2019s trust in order to survive. Representative government will prove brittle, hypocritical, and unattractive unless the popular will translates into some observable impact on how society is governed. The system must prove to the citizens that voting is a real and meaningful exercise of political agency, superior to more coercive or chaotic alternatives.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

In 2021, I covered<\/a> the national parliamentary elections in Somaliland, an unrecognized breakaway republic that seceded from Somalia in 1991 at the beginning of that country\u2019s endless civil war. Rival nondemocracies surround Somaliland, a poor and isolated place whose politics are heavily clan-based. Overly enterprising journalists, as well as advocates of reunification with Somalia, are vulnerable to harassment and worse. There is little for a parachuting writer to do in Hargeisa, the dusty, exhaust-choked desert capital, beyond working, sitting in traffic jams, or drinking coffee.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

But the country has achieved something astonishing: Even with an ambiguous diplomatic status that mostly blocks its access to the global economy, Somaliland is the only somewhat stable, free, and boring place for hundreds of miles in every direction. In the early 1990s, with much of the rest of the region at war, the Somalilanders founded a political system that clan leaders, former rebels, and the average citizen could all accept, and that no outside forces have ever successfully captured or manipulated.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

By the early 2020s, the political system, and the country in general, were established enough to hold semiregular national elections without a looming threat of rapid internal collapse if the vote went poorly. Still, the organizers of that 2021 election grasped that a nationwide vote threatened to introduce a dangerous element of expectation that, if left unsatisfied, would inflame existing clan divisions and sink the internal credibility of Somaliland\u2019s democratic project. In contrast, a well-executed election could win the country years of additional social peace and put off any future slide into chaos or subjecthood.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

With these high stakes in mind, the electoral commission allowed for no early or absentee voting in 2021\u2014polls were open for 12 hours on one single day. The government also banned private vehicles in major cities during polling hours. This was officially done out of concern over terrorism, but it also conveniently prevented out-of-control outbreaks of partisan activism, and quashed fraud schemes that involved ferrying the same voters between multiple polling sites. Such a fraud would have been difficult to pull off even without the vehicle ban: In order to participate in the election, Somalilanders had to obtain an identification card from the electoral commission months in advance of the vote. The commission took each new voter\u2019s iris print.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

If the average American ever thinks about the Horn of Africa, they likely imagine it as one of those interchangeably poor and faraway places that is many decades behind advanced Western countries like our own. Yet in California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, it is now possible to vote in person without any form of identification. In Michigan, you can vote without a photo ID, as long as you sign an affidavit saying you don\u2019t have one. Unlike Somalilanders, most Americans no longer have to physically show up at a polling place to vote. Instead they have the choice of filling out and submitting their ballots beyond the observation of election officials, which means there is no assurance that the people in whose names ballots are cast actually signed\u2014or saw\u2014their ballots, voted free of duress or the promise of some benefit, or are even still alive.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

The new American voting system is practically calibrated to produce mistrust, and to create broad segments of public opinion that believe the whole thing is fake\u2014regardless of who wins.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

In the 2020 election, more than two-thirds of voters exercised their franchise by mail or before election day\u2014meaning that election day itself was a mass civic formality, rather than the deciding event of a long campaign. The same is likely to be true this year. At least 20 states<\/a> now open the voting more than three weeks before the campaign ends. Fifty days before an election, Pennsylvania begins holding \u201cin-person absentee\u201d voting, where a ballot can be filled out and submitted in a location that does not have poll watchers present or any of the privacy safeguards of a normal polling station. Thirty-six states, including every 2024 swing state in the presidential election, now either have all-mail elections in which a ballot is automatically sent to every registered voter, or no-excuse absentee voting in which any voter can ask to vote by mail for any reason. In a number of states, including Arizona, a voter only has to register as an absentee once in order to receive a ballot in the mail in every subsequent election. According to<\/a> the National Vote at Home Institute, the eight states with all-mail elections automatically send out at least 77 million ballots each cycle.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The \u201cstandards\u201d for the freeness and fairness of a given election are inevitably local. There are no globally accepted rules for how an election needs to work, or specific points of procedure that automatically legitimate the result. \u201cIn India, there are 600 million people voting, and often the election officials have to travel for days to get to a particular place where people are voting. What constitutes fairness in that?,\u201d wonders Carl Gershman, the longtime former director of the bipartisan National Endowment for Democracy, which continues to help monitor elections around the world. \u201cUltimately, a lot of that depends on the particular circumstances, and if the election is accepted as fair by people and if the electoral commission is really independent.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Perhaps Somalilanders will one day grow so confident in their democracy that they will have elections as enlightened as ours, with inconsistent ID checks, no requirement to prove residency or citizenship, and a nationwide phaseout of in-person voting in favor of absentee ballots which can either be mailed in or else simply dropped off at unmonitored collection boxes. But balloting in prosperous mature democracies often looks nothing like our emerging new system. It looks more like Somaliland.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

When I asked Larry Diamond, a Stanford sociologist and founding editor of the Journal of Democracy, which of the world\u2019s democratic systems was the highest-functioning, he offered Taiwan as a candidate. Taiwan has no absentee voting\u2014which, Diamond notes, probably disproportionately affects parties in favor of closer relations with mainland China, which has a large Taiwanese expat population. There is a strict ID check and no early voting. \u201cThe polls open at 8 a.m. People line up; they cast their votes in very simple ways, on paper ballots \u2026 they deposit them in a translucent box. At 4 p.m. the polls close; the electoral officials empty the ballot box and start counting the ballots.\u201d Officials then record the results of each vote on a white-board in front of monitors from the various political parties. \u201cBy 8 p.m. all of the results from the precincts have been conveyed and aggregated and the central election commission announces the results at 8:30. The loser steps out before the cameras at party headquarters and concedes defeat, then the winner comes out and makes an acceptance speech, and by 9:30 everybody\u2019s home in bed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

That\u2019s about the opposite of how America\u2019s most recent presidential election went.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In 2020, two ostensibly unpredictable and incredibly rare events caused most of the country to break with past experience, wisdom, and practice to create what is effectively a new voting system. Under the pressure of the COVID pandemic, and within the broader context of the supposed civic emergency of Donald Trump\u2019s potential reelection, states across the country rapidly shifted to wide-scale, mail-based voting\u2014changes that often turned out to be permanent once the pandemic ended and Trump was out of office. \u201cWe\u2019ve thrown in a lot of liberalization in our absentee system that it wasn\u2019t really built for,\u201d says John Fortier, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former director of the Bipartisan Policy Center.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The 2020 vote brought abrupt changes to an electoral system that was already losing credibility. As of 2023, 36% of Americans, including 9% of Democrats, thought<\/a> that Joe Biden\u2019s election was illegitimate, a slight increase from 2021. Between the 48% who once held<\/a> Vladimir Putin in some way responsible for Donald Trump\u2019s 2016 electoral victory, the 20% who believed<\/a> that Barack Obama lied about being an American citizen, the 28% who were not confident<\/a> that the 2004 election produced an accurate result\u2014perhaps because of concerns over alleged voting irregularities in Ohio, which led 32 Democratic members of Congress to oppose certification of George W. Bush\u2019s electoral college victory over John Kerry on Jan. 6, 2005\u2014and the nearly 40% who disagreed<\/a> with the Supreme Court\u2019s decision in Bush v. Gore<\/em>, it\u2019s possible a solid majority of 21st-century Americans have thought that the outcome of a recent presidential election was a lie.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Whatever happens in November, one-third to one-half of the country is likely to doubt the integrity of the vote. Whether these people are Democrats or Republicans, it will be foolhardy to dismiss them as disinformation-addled cranks. A democracy exists in the minds of its citizens, in the intangible shared belief that the political compact accurately reflects some measurable quantity of the popular will. But the new American voting system is practically calibrated to produce mistrust, and to create broad segments of public opinion that believe the whole thing is fake\u2014regardless of who wins.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

In 2005, a bipartisan commission led by Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker made various recommendations for improving America\u2019s elections. The still relatively recent 2000 presidential contest had ended in a minor constitutional crisis, with the Supreme Court handing the race to George W. Bush by ordering a stop to a recount of confusingly designed ballots in Florida. The 2000 mess revealed numerous flaws in the country\u2019s election administration, but the commission did not recommend scrapping the basic methods of voting that most Americans were used to. Nor did they suggest loosening restrictions on who could vote and how.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The report<\/a> called for a national voter registration database, as well as \u201ca uniform system of voter identification based on the \u2018REAL ID card.\u2019\u201d The dangers of absentee voting were of particular concern to Carter and Baker. \u201cAbsentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud,\u201d the report concluded, noting that \u201ccitizens who vote at home, at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation\u201d compared to in-person voters, and that \u201cvote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Mainstream media broadly echoed the conclusions of the Carter-Baker report, which continued to be common wisdom a decade later\u2014especially when it came to absentee balloting. \u201cVotes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth,\u201d The New York Times<\/em> reported<\/a> in a now-impossible straight news piece in 2012. \u201cThe flaws of absentee voting raise questions about the most elementary promises of democracy,\u201d the article continued, taking it for granted that these flaws were real and worth worrying about. Even the \u201cexperts\u201d were concerned: \u201cVoting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In a country with an accelerating, bipartisan record of distrust in its elections, it would make sense for political leaders and election authorities to revisit the core principles of sound election management. A fair sampling of these principles is helpfully preserved in reports from the Carter Center, the Atlanta-based election monitoring organization formed by the former president known for pursuing good works around the globe. Although it mostly works in foreign countries, the Carter Center has also observed a number of votes in the United States, specifically ones held by Native American communities electing new tribal chiefs. All of the voters in these elections were American citizens, people who judged the integrity of their own communal tally against general American notions of how the machinery of democracy is supposed to work.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

COVID and the resulting panic became an opportunity for partisan activists and lawyers to rapidly accelerate changes to American voting practices that were already high up on their agendas.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

The Carter Center\u2019s report<\/a> on a 2011 Cherokee election now serves as a record of what people of goodwill considered commonly accepted American democratic standards to be a little over a decade ago. For starters, Carter Center monitors considered any private collection of ballots, something that is now legal in several large and politically consequential states, to be inherently suspect. \u201cOften, candidates were collecting absentee ballots for voters and returning them to the CNEC [the tribal electoral commission] or the post office to facilitate the process for voters. Such actions are not desirable when ensuring that all ballots are properly handled, received, and counted during an election.\u201d The report notes that \u201cabsentee voting removes some of the safeguards that are inherent in controlled, in-person voting environments \u2026 the casting of absentee ballots occurs in a largely unregulated environment, outside of the oversight of the CNEC or poll workers. This increases the potential for manipulation.\u201d The 2011 Cherokee election monitored by the Carter Center had at least one huge safeguard compared to most of the rest of the country: All absentee ballots had to be notarized, something that only Missouri and Oklahoma still require.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Like Carter and Baker, the Carter Center monitors treated it as an obviously good idea that voters had to convincingly prove who they were in order to vote. \u201cThe election law of the Cherokee Nation requires that poll workers identify voters before they cast their ballot. Such a requirement is in accordance with internationally recognized best practice.\u201d If anything, the tribe wasn\u2019t strict enough in its identification practices, with the report noting there were cases where a poll worker didn\u2019t ask for an ID if they personally knew a given voter. \u201cTo ensure consistent application, it would be beneficial if the Tribal Council limited the variety of ways voters can identify themselves\u2014perhaps limiting it to tribal membership card and\/or driver\u2019s license, for instance.\u201d In Virginia and a number of other states, a copy of a utility bill or bank statement\u2014documents that any person can obtain\u2014now counts as a valid form of ID at the polls.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

An all-mail system in which third parties are often in possession of someone else\u2019s ballots, or where ballot-collecting partisan operatives might frequently be present when ballots are being filled out, is tough to square with the Carter Center\u2019s guidelines, which haven\u2019t actually changed much since that Cherokee election. But U.S. elections aren\u2019t judged by former, commonsense standards for how to hold a credible vote. They\u2019re judged according to the standards of 2020, the nation\u2019s new baseline for sound democratic procedure.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In the last election cycle, which culminated in November of 2020, long-running partisan conflicts about \u201cvoter suppression\u201d (Democrats seeking to loosen voting rules) and \u201cballot security\u201d (Republicans seeking to maintain or tighten voting rules) were supercharged by two black swan-type events that happened to coincide with each other.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The first was the Democratic Party\u2019s decision to treat Donald Trump not as a despicable outcome of the country\u2019s normal democratic process but as a dictator-in-waiting who had stolen the presidency with help from the Kremlin and now wanted to end democracy. These claims succeeded in generating a permanent mentality of existential political warfare among the party faithful, who included most of the country\u2019s elite and institutional leaders. This emergency was in turn used to justify any number of extrademocratic theories and measures\u2014from the promulgation of hallucinatory conspiracies with the help of law enforcement and the intelligence community, to overt attempts to control and censor the news\u2014on the grounds that such excesses were needed to save democracy from itself.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The coincidence of a \u201cturning point\u201d election with the public health panic caused by COVID-19 created a situation in which \u201cexceptions\u201d to existing laws seemed normal and natural enough that a large part of the population welcomed<\/a> them, or at least treated them as the one-time cost of holding a national election during a plague year. Even Republicans tolerated these changes. The incumbent party was caught off guard by a well-organized and well-funded effort among Democratic lawyers and NGOs to overhaul voting procedures in key states. Donald Trump would later make a host of evidence-free claims about rigged voting machines and other plots by which the election was purportedly \u201cstolen.\u201d Democrats might have shifted the rules of the election in their favor, but they did it through legal means and without Trump and his campaign team mounting any real attempt to oppose them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The changes to voting laws that happened across the country in 2020 were not simply fear-driven or well-meaning responses to a global pandemic. Rather, COVID and the resulting panic became an opportunity for partisan activists and lawyers to rapidly accelerate<\/em> changes to American voting practices that were already high up on their agendas. In 2018 and 2019 alone Utah, New Jersey, New York, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Hawaii introduced<\/a> either full vote-by-mail or no-excuse absentee voting.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Even before this, in a sweeping move toward increasing the federal government\u2019s control over elections, the outgoing Obama administration declared in January of 2017 that election systems were \u201ccritical national infrastructure,\u201d joining a list that included banking and sewage systems and giving the Department of Homeland Security broad new oversight responsibilities. For reasons that remain unclear, the Trump administration didn\u2019t reverse<\/a> the decision, though it could have.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Not that long ago, Americans were used to voting in a physical space where no partisan activism of any kind was legally permitted, maybe an elementary school lunchroom or a library. A voter would receive a single ballot from an election official which they would fill out in a private booth before personally hand delivering that ballot to a second election official. Even before the pandemic, a constellation of nonprofit groups had been pushing for the rapid phaseout of that paradigm, with the result<\/a> that 75% of Americans now live in states where voting in person is optional.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The target of these efforts was the American democratic system as it was formerly organized. \u201cDemocracy is a design problem,\u201d goes the sinister catchphrase of the Center for Civic Design\u2014an ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofit founded in 2013 by an Obama administration alumnus and funded by multiple left-of-center donors that advocates for voting by mail and advises election officials on procedure and voter outreach. Before the 2020 election, The Voter Participation Center convened focus groups to strategize about how to grow the mail-in vote and sent out 15 million targeted ballot applications in swing states. The organization\u2019s CEO, Tom Lopach, is the longtime former director of the Committee for a Democratic Majority and a former national finance chair for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The National Vote at Home Institute, whose board includes Oregon\u2019s former Democratic secretary of state, an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Maryland governor, a former top-20 donor to Hillary Clinton\u2019s super PAC, and the director of legislative affairs for a U.S. Postal Service letter carriers union, is another barely disguised partisan actor seeking to radically \u201creform\u201d the American voting system. The institute conducts tax-exempt, nationwide advocacy for a full shift away from voting in person on election day. Amber McReynolds, director of the institute since 2018, reportedly consulted with election officials in Georgia and Michigan prior to the 2020 vote. President Joe Biden nominated McReynolds to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors in 2021, and the Senate confirmed her nomination in a largely party-line vote.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In 2020, these groups treated the COVID pandemic as a historic chance to affect what a 2021 Time<\/em> magazine article<\/a> called \u201cpractically a revolution in how people vote.\u201d California, the District of Columbia, Nevada, and Vermont switched to all-mail voting in 2020; Virginia implemented no-excuse absentee voting, while Maryland started mailing absentee ballot applications to all voters. States expanded the time after election day when an absentee ballot could arrive by mail and still be counted\u2014from three to 17 days in California, from zero to three days in Massachusetts, and from zero to seven days in Nevada. Meanwhile, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio all introduced the use of unsupervised public drop boxes for absentee ballots\u2014in Pennsylvania\u2019s case, the change was the result of a state Supreme Court decision rather than an act of the legislature. Nevada legalized third-party absentee ballot collection, while a number of other states relaxed their existing rules.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

On election night in 2020, the stealth voting revolution produced a rollout of results that was unlike anything Americans had ever seen before. When voters went to bed, Donald Trump led in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. Five days later, it was clear Joe Biden had prevailed, thanks to a 44,000-vote margin in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. For the first time in American history, one candidate\u2019s lead in multiple states disappeared over the course of a nearly weeklong vote count, producing an inevitable sense of vertigo and anger among the losers.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Additional novel events proliferated within the vacuum of this unprecedented reversal. There are scant chain of custody records<\/a> for over 18,000 absentee ballots deposited in 37 drop boxes in Georgia\u2019s Fulton County, the Atlanta jurisdiction largely responsible for Biden\u2019s 11,000-vote victory in the state. Video evidence emerged that on election night, vote tabulation at Atlanta\u2019s State Farm Arena continued hours after county officials said it had ended, meaning that ballots were being counted out of the view of observers from either presidential campaign. Georgia went from rejecting 13,600 absentee ballots during the 2016 election, or 6.2% of the 213,000 returned, to 3,152 out of 1.3 million cast in 2020, suggesting that new, covertly introduced standards were now being applied. There are more and less innocent explanations for all of this\u2014for instance after the 2016 vote, Georgia introduced a \u201cballot curing\u201d process to allow voters to correct absentee ballots that were undated, failed the signature match, or were submitted outside of a required secrecy envelope, thus lowering the rejection rate. But it is also possible that the state\u2019s more populous counties greatly relaxed their rules for which ballots they would accept, with partisan election officials making these critical decisions.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In parts of Pennsylvania, it was impossible for the losing side to know how judgment calls about counting or not counting ballots were made, or by whom: Election officials barred Republican observers from the convention center where absentee ballots were processed on election night in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro accused pro-Trump activists of \u201cvoter intimidation\u201d for publishing videos of individuals delivering large numbers of completed absentee ballots to drop boxes in the city, an activity that remains illegal under state law (in Pennsylvania it is permitted to mail someone else\u2019s ballot, but not to deposit someone else\u2019s ballot in a drop box). The state then broke with its usual procedure by counting absentee ballots whose outer envelope lacked a handwritten date. Over the five days after election day, Trump\u2019s 70,000-vote lead became an 80,000-vote defeat.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Some of these events were strange enough to merit the attention of sober and serious people, at least temporarily: For instance, the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that undated absentee ballots would not be counted in that year\u2019s election. But much of the time, anyone who points out the various oddities of the 2020 election is now accused of election denial, or a total divorce from reality.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Donald Trump destroyed any real opportunity for a dispassionate look at the 2020 vote, and it is revealing how unserious even the Trump campaign was in handling the overall issue of election doubt in 2020. The incumbent made an increasingly cartoonish Rudy Giuliani the face of his postelection fight, frequently spoke and acted in ways that undermined his own lawyers\u2019 efforts in Pennsylvania and Georgia, spread conspiracy theories about hacked voting machines, and then convinced a hard core of his followers that it was possible to stop the certification of the Electoral College on Jan. 6, 2021, leading to a riot at the U.S. Capitol. Trump himself discredited even the most reasonable questions about the administration of the winnable election he\u2019d blown.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Trump likely wanted to obscure the factual record out of shame at having legitimately lost under 2020 rules, however ad hoc or unfair those rules might have been. Trump\u2019s inability to counter the voting revolution, or to optimize around it, was a failure of gamesmanship born from his own strategic choices. Many of Trump\u2019s most egregious postelection actions make sense only as reflexive psychological reactions to this failure. Trump behaved as if he had been cheated, and he also behaved as if he knew he had actually lost.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

In 2023, the Carter Center released an updated edition of its over 300-page manual<\/a> of electoral best practices. \u201cState practice sources discourage proxy voting but emphasize that if allowed, it must be strictly regulated to protect secrecy of the vote,\u201d says the manual, which also warns against \u201cfamily and group voting,\u201d a phenomenon that third-party ballot collection enables and arguably encourages. Meanwhile, \u201cresources should be provided for the conduct of an electoral process that is free from interference from any other electoral stakeholders.\u201d In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg alone spent an estimated $350 million to fund public election administration in conjunction with the Democratic Party\u2019s targeting of key states where it hoped to increase the anti-Trump vote. During the 2022 cycle, the Zuckerberg-supported Center for Technology and Civic Life sent another $80 million to county and municipal election offices.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

What is striking about the manual is how vastly its guidelines differ from what Americans are now being told to accept as normal. For example, in states including California, Nevada, and New York, it is now legal to possess an unlimited number of absentee ballots without having to explain why you have them or how you got them. Collecting absentee ballots on other people\u2019s behalf\u2014a practice that critics refer to as \u201cballot harvesting\u201d\u2014is now broadly permitted, even in states where, before COVID, it was defined as a serious crime.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Relatively few of the 2020 voting reforms\u2014ostensibly instituted because of COVID\u2014were reversed when the pandemic emergency ended. Developments like the Pennsylvania ruling to throw out undated absentee ballots in the 2022 election, or Nevada\u2019s reduction of the number of days late an absentee ballot could be from seven to four, proved exceptional. In many places, the rules governing absentee voting actually loosened even more after 2020. America\u2019s voting revolution is accelerating.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

Trump\u2019s inability to counter the voting revolution, or to optimize around it, was a failure of gamesmanship born from his own strategic choices.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Among the \u201cpolicy victories\u201d the National Vote at Home Institute lists in its 2023 annual report are the end of a witness requirement for absentee ballots in Virginia, a no-excuse early mail-in voting law in New York \u201cmodeled after a 2019 Pennsylvania law,\u201d progress on a constitutional right to no-excuse absentee voting in Connecticut, and the introduction of a single sign-up for lifetime no-excuse mail-in voting in New Mexico and Maine. In August, The Washington Free Beacon reported<\/a> that a nonprofit called VoteER, founded by a former adviser to Kamala Harris, was instructing doctors on how to assist their patients at Pennsylvania psychiatric hospitals and other in-patient facilities in voting by mail\u2014which is both a potential abuse of the doctor-patient relationship and a sign of how lax voting norms have become in the country\u2019s most critical swing state.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Whenever a state attempts to revert to its pre-COVID rules it is usually met with a lawsuit, the courts being a comparatively friendly venue for election reformers in places where the state House or governor\u2019s mansion are more resistant to major procedural changes. In June, for example, the Wisconsin state Supreme Court overturned the legislature\u2019s ban on ballot drop boxes. In late August, Pennsylvania\u2019s Commonwealth Court ruled<\/a> that the statutory requirement to reject undated absentee ballots violated the state\u2019s constitutional obligation to hold \u201cfree and equal\u201d elections, a decision applauded by Josh Shapiro, now the state\u2019s Democratic governor. Most often, the courts\u2019 rationale is that safeguards like asking for ID or stricter procedures for the submission and counting of absentee ballots are forms of discrimination that \u201cimpact\u201d minority groups in ways that qualify as \u201cvoter suppression.\u201d The courts represent the most important and least predictable check on various efforts to reverse the 2020 voting reforms\u2014in a close election, it is anyone\u2019s guess whether a court will defer to a state\u2019s decision to toss absentee ballots that arrive a day late, or force them to count those votes anyway. Election litigation is a major 21st-century American growth industry, with the \u201cafter game\u201d becoming an accepted, even slightly banal aspect of major political campaigns.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The Trump campaign has reportedly made \u201celection integrity\u201d a focus of its 2024 strategy. But much like any other aspect of a political campaign, there is no way of knowing whether a candidate\u2019s preparations for dealing with alleged voting irregularities are actually effective until after the vote happens. Charges of \u201cvoter suppression\u201d and \u201cdiscrimination,\u201d whether made in a legal context or not, are among the most common weapons that the voting revolutionaries use against those who desire a return to the pre-COVID status quo. Opponents of Georgia\u2019s 2021 election reform law, which President Joe Biden likened to a return to Jim Crow, whipped up enough outrage to get that year\u2019s Major League Baseball All-Star game pulled from Atlanta. The next year\u2019s elections had the highest midterm turnout in the state\u2019s history, despite the partial restoration of pre-COVID voting rules. The Georgia experience indicated that there is no inherent tension between ballot access and ballot control. Almost no one decided not to vote, or found themselves disenfranchised, once they were required to present a photo ID to obtain an absentee ballot.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The real-life effect of the Georgia law poses the question of why the post-COVID changes became the new baseline for election management, especially given the pervasive doubts about the 2020 results among a stubbornly high percentage of voters. A Center for Election Innovation and Research survey<\/a> found that 83% of 2020 voters in Georgia \u201cwere confident their individual votes would be counted as they intended,\u201d a result that CEIR took as highly positive. But that means 17% of voters weren\u2019t sure if their votes really meant anything, in a state where both Senate elections and the presidential tally were decided by under 2.5 percentage points.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Then there is the issue of how and when election results are announced. \u201cThe results of the count should be published in a timely manner,\u201d the Carter Center manual states. A delayed announcement of results is still considered strong circumstantial evidence of a tainted process\u2014one of the early signs of fraud in Venezuela\u2019s recent presidential election was the national electoral commission\u2019s failure to post station-by-station results within two days of the vote. Yet it took four days after election day to determine control of the U.S. Senate in the 2022 midterms, and eight days to determine control of the House. In Pennsylvania in 2020, a 70,000-vote election-night lead for one presidential candidate disappeared when hundreds of thousands of votes for his opponent were recorded over the next five days\u2014which is the kind of event that would not inspire confidence in an election held in Venezuela or anyplace else.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

There may be entirely reasonable explanations for the late arrival of several hundred thousand votes for the eventual winning candidate, as well as for how some of those ballot counts reportedly wound up on flash drives. Explanations have proved elusive though, and those who sought to investigate these issues have often been tagged as \u201celection deniers\u201d and chased out of polite society. Lawyers who took on postelection cases for the Trump campaign in 2020 are still facing ethics complaints and even disbarment thanks to developments like the 65 Project, a Democratic strategist-led attempt to sanction lawyers who worked on behalf of the Republican candidate. Meanwhile, the office of the Pennsylvania secretary of state has already cautioned the public that it won\u2019t have results ready this coming election night, while 15 other states, including California, Nevada, and Ohio, will count absentee ballots that arrive more than three days after election day.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The U.S. has also drifted away from the Carter Center manual\u2019s standards for determining who is actually casting a ballot. \u201c[T]he fulfillment of universal suffrage is partially dependent on the success of the voter registration process and suggest that a voter list may be reliably established through a variety of acceptable methods,\u201d the document notes, \u201cincluding periodic list, continuous list, or civil registry, in order to ensure that the data remains current.\u201d There are multiple states, including Nevada and Pennsylvania, where lawyers representing the Republican and Democratic parties are now battling<\/a> over whether to meaningfully update the voter rolls in the first place\u2014something that would not be a matter of heated partisan legal conflict in a well-functioning democratic system. In August, Virginia removed<\/a> 80,000 dead voters and 6,000 noncitizens from its voter rolls, raising questions of what those numbers are like in states that are either legally prohibited from culling their rosters or uninterested in doing so. Around that same time, Texas removed<\/a> 1.1 million ineligible voters from its rolls, including 6,500 noncitizens.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Since entering office, the Biden administration has acted as if the 2020 voting revolution and its further enshrinement in state laws didn\u2019t go far enough in expanding what they define as \u201cballot access.\u201d The administration doubled the size of the enforcement division at the Justice Department\u2019s Office of Civil Rights dedicated<\/a> to \u201cprotecting voting rights.\u201d In a speech this past March, Attorney General Merrick Garland said<\/a> his Justice Department was \u201cchallenging efforts by states and jurisdictions to implement discriminatory, burdensome and unnecessary restrictions on access to the ballot, including those related to mail-in voting, the use of drop boxes, and voter ID requirements,\u201d announcing the administration\u2019s intention to use the powerful federal legal apparatus in support of the voting revolution.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In March of 2021, Biden issued an executive order directing all federal agencies to develop individual plans for how they can \u201cpromote voter registration and voter participation,\u201d including through \u201cdistributing voter registration and vote-by-mail ballot application forms.\u201d The order was strikingly similar to a strategy document published by a left-wing advocacy organization called Demos, whose former president and legal director were each tapped for administration jobs.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Right-wing activists, as well as the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee, have had notably mixed success<\/a> in obtaining the various agency plans, though there are signs the order is being used to mobilize the government around registering voters in Democratic-leaning constituencies. The Department of Education issued<\/a> a \u201cDear Colleague Letter to remind institutions of higher education of the federal requirements regarding voting that are tied to participation in federal student aid programs; and clarifying when Federal Work Study dollars could be used for nonpartisan civic engagement work.\u201d Evidence has yet to emerge of any federal agency balancing the Department of Education effort by targeting the unregistered in Republican-leaning constituencies, like evangelical Christians or men who buy ammo at rural Walmarts.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Walter Olson, an election law scholar and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, emphasizes that there are almost no recent, provable cases where gaps in American polling practice were wide enough to change the outcome of an election. \u201cI fully believe that rates of voter fraud are very low and have not decided elections of much significance for years,\u201d he told me. But this didn\u2019t mean that unease toward the state of elections is unwarranted.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cOne of the reasons suspicions fester is that we can\u2019t get answers out of many of our states for not just a day or two but often longer than that,\u201d Olson said of the lengthening vote counts. The building of a credible mail-based system is undermined by \u201csupport for litigation to prevent states from doing state-of-the-art voter roll maintenance. If you\u2019re one of these states trying to make mail-in voting work, also having to put so much energy into defending litigation is not the way anyone would have thought they could get good results.\u201d The speed of recent changes in voting laws and procedures is itself a rational reason for concern. \u201cI do worry that particularly in states that did not have ballot harvesting and developed it in the last cycle,\u201d Olson concluded, \u201cthat we don\u2019t really know where it\u2019s heading.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

There are still several entirely plausible nightmare scenarios for this coming November, and they don\u2019t necessarily involve any active, provable fraud. The election could come down to a protracted courtroom face-off over absentee ballots with one or more things \u201cwrong\u201d with them. The campaigns\u2019 lawyers would then squabble over the postelection status of ballots that arrived later than state law allowed, didn\u2019t have a secrecy envelope, didn\u2019t have a postmark, weren\u2019t dated by hand, or were signed illegibly, setting up a potential replay of the 2000 Florida debacle over ballot chads.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

If an absentee ballot is mailed outside of its secrecy envelope, does this mean that a voter had been uncareful, or does it mean their vote had somehow been tampered with? Could a signature be unreadable because it\u2019s been forged, or for some other valid reason? The election could hinge on these sorts of judgment calls and the legal battles that come in their wake. \u201cIt\u2019s easier to vote in the United States today than it has been at any time in history,\u201d says Derek Muller, an election law scholar at Notre Dame. Some incredibly difficult and divisive postelection scenarios are nevertheless possible. \u201cIf you\u2019re challenging signature matches you can\u2019t say abstractly how many ballots should not have been counted,\u201d Muller notes. \u201cThe reaction would be: Can you identify those that aren\u2019t actually from the voter? If you\u2019re dealing with a 93-year-old with Parkinson\u2019s who signs with an X but it\u2019s still his ballot, is there anything fraudulent about that?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In a close vote, the inherent uncertainty of a heavily absentee-based voting system could feed an ugly, dangerous reaction, convincing a campaign and its supporters that election theft is underway. \u201cThe more you have an atmosphere in which major figures with huge megaphones preach that elections are rigged and that we haven\u2019t had an honest election in years, the more their followers are more likely to take desperate measures,\u201d says Olson.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The new American electoral system is rife with ambiguities, novelties, and opportunities for consequential error. It is also vulnerable to deliberate abuse. You can be prosecuted for lying about being a U.S. citizen on a voting application, noncitizen registrants are often detected through cross-checks with other government databases, and there is little evidence of decisive noncitizen voting in any U.S. election. But there are also tens of millions of noncitizens in the country currently, some 7.5 million of whom have arrived since the last presidential election. A majority of them crossed the U.S. border illegally. If a mere hundred thousand of them aren\u2019t terribly worried about law enforcement and don\u2019t feel a strong inner aversion to lying\u2014or if a helpful NGO filled out a voter registration form in their name\u2014they could shift the entire American political landscape in a close-enough election. The ongoing legal challenge to Arizona\u2019s requirement of a proof of citizenship to register to vote makes it appear as if influential political actors want it to be difficult to prevent such a scenario.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

With the excesses of the post-2020 electoral regime now solidified in law and deepening in much of the country, it is unsurprising that Americans are now looking ahead to a tainted or disputed election. Months before the vote, it is already possible to get a sense of the \u201cdesperate measures\u201d contemplated by doom-minded partisans.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was as desperate as measures get, a violent bum-rush to stop the certification of the electoral college. But influential Democrats are thinking even bigger than that, openly discussing the possibility of much more severe violence if the election goes the wrong way in November. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be up to us on Jan. 6, 2025, to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he\u2019s disqualified,\u201d Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, one of the Democratic Party\u2019s leading intellectuals, mused during a February panel discussion<\/a>. Earlier that month, the Supreme Court overturned Colorado\u2019s exclusion of Trump from its ballot. The state had barred Trump over his alleged ineligibility for the presidency under the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. If Trump came out ahead in the November vote, the people would then have to step in to correct the court\u2019s failure: \u201cAnd then we need bodyguards for everybody and civil war conditions all because nine [Supreme Court] justices\u2014not all of them, but these justices who have not many cases to look at every year, not much work to do, have a huge staff, great protection\u2014simply do not want to do their job and interpret what the great 14th Amendment means.\u201d In one of his few interviews since bowing out of the presidential race, Joe Biden suggested there might not be a peaceful transfer of power if Trump lost, appearing to suggest that believers in a stolen election would turn violent or attempt to restore Trump to office through certifying fake vote totals. \u201cIf Trump wins, no, I\u2019m not confident [of a peaceful transfer] at all,\u201d the president originally said before correcting himself.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The Democrats\u2019 claim of an active Trumpian threat to democracy, a hot-burning civic emergency with existential stakes for the country, hasn\u2019t lessened since 2020. Last month, the former Clinton administration official and political consultant David Rothkopf reported<\/a> on a recent Washington, D.C., simulation of a second Trump term organized by the Democracy Futures Project, an exercise that \u201cincluded former senior officials from the Trump, Obama, Bush, and Clinton administrations; former senators, congresspeople, retired generals, and senior state and local officials from both parties.\u201d In each domestic war game, Trump eviscerated American democracy\u2014as the game\u2019s participants understood it\u2014because his opponents weren\u2019t willing to go far enough to stop him. \u201cMost Americans reject autocracy. But Democrats, independents, and Republicans who respect the Constitution are neither organized to combat a ruthless Trumpian power play nor inclined by temperament to fight fire with fire,\u201d Rothkopf warned in The New Republic<\/em>. \u201cIn the simulations, Team Trump routinely went scorched-earth, while the pro-democracy opposition issued press releases, organized peace concerts, and fretted about the need for consensus and inclusivity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

For Rothkopf and his high-profile yet anonymous table-top gamers\u2014who likely enjoy a lot more leverage over American institutions than a defeated Donald Trump would\u2014Trump is a threat that calls for something beyond the usual methods of organizing and political persuasion. By summoning the specter of an iron-fisted dictator, a figure markedly different from the bumbler who was barely able to control his own administration, portions of the Democratic Party, including Biden himself, seem to be entertaining scenarios in which they would have to resort to extreme means to preserve the \u201cintegrity\u201d of a democratic process whose rules they have radically altered.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

There is a whiff of fatalism to all this, as if the rival party and its followers are so eager to burn the country down that they can\u2019t possibly be convinced to trust the electoral process. Returning American voting laws to what they were even a decade ago and bringing them a little more in line with the Somalilands and Taiwans of the world seems a better way toward repairing what has become a gaping breach than openly fantasizing about a future civil war. But this is apparently impossible now.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em>
\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.
\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:
\n<\/em>webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There has been a stealth revolution in American voting laws and practices since 2016. Armin Rosen Illustration: Justin Metz Democracy, unlike other forms of government, has to win the people\u2019s trust in order to survive. Representative government will prove brittle, hypocritical, and unattractive unless the popular will translates into some observable impact on how society […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115802"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=115802"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116140,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115802\/revisions\/116140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=115802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=115802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=115802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}