The Convention is over. The electorate is energized. The grunt work of campaigning now kicks into high gear. Yet despite the polls moving steadily in the Harris-Walz favor, there’s an additional worry that now comes into focus.
Between Nov. 8, 2020 (Election Day) and Jan. 20, 2021 (Inauguration Day), the most notable — and most dangerous — event was undoubtedly the coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2021. For the first time in our nation’s history, a group of armed insurrectionists broke into our nation’s capitol and attempted to prevent the certification of a duly held election. But that was merely the culmination of a long string of election-related events intended to subvert a legal and secure election.
The promise of American democracy has been dependent on the ability for every citizen over the age of 18 to participate in how we are governed through the electoral process — in short, the right to vote and to have that vote counted. But the Republican party for years has worked systematically to deny millions of Americans that fundamental right. Republicans have used a variety of tactics to try to choose the voters who would be most favorable to Republicans:
Voter ID laws
Purging voter rolls
Restricting early voting
Restricting voting by mail
There have regularly been stealth efforts to misinform voters about when they can vote. For example, official looking flyers and emails have been circulated stating that Republicans should show up to vote on one day (Election Day) and Democrats should show up to vote on some date after the actual Election Day, thereby denying those unsuspecting Democrats their votes.
But take heart.
As visible and blatant as some of those voter suppression efforts have been, there have also been far less visible efforts to prevent Republican voter suppression efforts from denying the right to vote. Time magazine recently reported on such efforts that were happening right below the surface during the 2020 election cycle:
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
The judicial system also prevented the complete bulldozing of the electoral process by Trump and his cronies. Even the stodgy Brookings Institution acknowledged as much in the months following the 2020 election and subsequent multiple lawsuits challenging the election results.
USA Today provided the conventional assessment of those challenges: “Out of the 62 lawsuits filed challenging the presidential election, 61 have failed,” and “decisions have came [sic] from both Democratic-appointed and Republican-appointed judges.” (In fact, most of the judges were elected state judges.)
One victory out of 62 cases is about a 1.5% win rate. Looked at differently, as I do in this post, Trump performed slightly better. This post examines all judicial decisions in the cases, not just the cases’ ultimate outcomes. A case might produce an initial decision in a trial court, another set of votes on appeal to a multi-judge intermediate appellate court, and a final set of votes on appeal to the jurisdiction’s multi-judge supreme court—one case, but perhaps over 10 separate judicial votes. By that measure, 14% of judges’ individual decisions or votes—18% in state cases only—were favorable to Trump.
Other analyses of those lawsuits have described that 62nd case as only a “partial victory.” But however you slice it, the failures of those election challenges prove that the judiciary — so far — has maintained order.
It’s also worth stating that there’s a much clearer and wider awareness of the kinds of chicanery that the Republicans have perpetrated in the past and, consequently, there is much more vigilance to prevent or respond to such chicanery. The New York Times recently reported on some of the efforts that have been underway:
Ms. [Dana] Remus [of the legal group representing the Harris campaign] said in a statement that the legal team had been working “uninterrupted over the last four years, building strategic plans in key states, adding more talent and capacity, and preparing for all possible scenarios.”
“This year, like in 2020, we have the nation’s finest lawyers at the table, ready to work together tirelessly to ensure our election will be free, fair and secure — and to ensure that all eligible voters will be able to cast their ballots, knowing their votes will be counted,” Ms. Remus said.
I raise these examples because I hear an awful lot of fear being expressed about what the Trump campaign might do, but I don’t often hear about pro-active or pre-emptive efforts to prevent election interference.
Knowing that there are teams of people in D.C. and around the country working to keep our elections secure and fair should assuage some of the anxiety that we all are probably feeling. But that doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility of doing everything possible to create a voting victory with a margin wide enough to withstand even the most dastardly of challenges.
This is encouraging!