What can we do starting right now to insure a fair election?
Largely because of the incredibly effective continuing assault on the legitimacy of our government and institutions, we have to take action quickly to insure we have a fair election that our citizens believe is honest and accurate.
It is amazing that the loudest and least truthful attacks on the democratic process and the institutions that manage it are coming from the very top of our own government. It’s a bit easier to believe when one understands that those attacks come from a president who is both shameless and one of most effective manipulators of media in society today. His effective use of television and social media to promote an alternative reality around any subject has allowed him to build a massive, nearly cult-like following. He has energized a largely disenfranchised segment of the population that is willing to follow his lead no matter what evidence surfaces elsewhere about the dangers of his false claims.
The situation is, unfortunately, made even more difficult when there are few trusted sources of information left, particularly in the minds of his followers.
So it falls on what remains of a responsible government and the oversights provided in our constitution to ensure that the upcoming election is conducted fairly and accurately. Which means we need to start taking steps right now.
President Trump has clearly been laying the groundwork to challenge this election’s validity as he is facing brutal polling data about his chances. It’s ironic that a sitting Republican president has decided the only way he can win reelection is to attack virtually all of the institutions of his own government, from national security to the post office, and advance an allegation that there will be widespread fraud in an election that HE is presiding over. The charge of potential fraud with all mailed ballots is particularly interesting when you consider that he is in charge of the Post Office and the only “precautions” he has taken against that problem are to install a new manager who is making widespread cuts and reducing the Post Office’s ability to support the demands of an election, particularly during a pandemic.
He has also figured out that his opponents vote differently than his supporters. Because of the pandemic that has a stranglehold on this country, and despite his claims to his own supporters that Covid-19 was at first a “hoax” and then “will disappear any time now,” Democrats don’t trust him. They will be voting on mail-in ballots in record numbers because they do believe there is an imminent threat of catching this horribly contagious Corvid-19 virus by visiting a crowded voting place with many people trying to vote in too few places. Republicans, it appears, will largely still plan to vote in person on election day.
So by continuing to claim that “mail-in-voting with be fraught with fraud” and “ripe for cheating” Trump winds up discrediting the votes for his competition, but not from his own supporters. Because his base will more likely vote in person, and mail-in votes are generally counted after the day-of-voting ballots, he is assuming that he will win the day-of-election balloting and all he has to do is challenge the rest of the votes as fraudulent to claim victory and litigate the election “to throw out the fraudulent votes”.
On top of that, one of Trump’s minions, Michael R. Caputo, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, attacked scientists, the news media and Democrats when he issued a video warning over Facebook last weekend that echoed many of the conspiracy theories about the election that Trump and their mutual friend Roger Stone have previously extolled.
According to The New York Times, “Mr. Caputo predicted that the president would win re-election in November, but that his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., would refuse to concede, leading to violence. “And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.”
“Over all, his tone was deeply ominous:” The Times reported. “He warned, again without evidence, that ‘there are hit squads being trained all over this country’ to mount armed opposition to a second term for Mr. Trump. ‘You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going,’ Mr. Caputo added.”
Acting in support of the president’s efforts to discredit the process, there is an additional, equally insidious effort on the part of certain foreign governments to influence the election results by creating massive disinformation campaigns on US social media, discouraging voters from going to the polls at all. Besides Russia, The U.S. government intelligence community has identified China and North Korea as having high degrees of interest in the outcome of our election and in weakening our stability as a democracy.
Because those attacks are meant to influence the behavior of our electorate prior to voting, we have to realize that the problem is larger than just conducting a free and fair election. But the solution to both problems involves similar actions.
We have to return some confidence and trust to the electorate, and convince everyone that at the very least, the voting process is secure. There is no better way to do that than to encourage total transparency. So how do we protect ourselves, in advance, from any attempt to delegitimize the actual vote count? Well, it’s not simple because the actual election process is run by the states, not the federal government.
Here are three steps that can be taken right now to deal with both the election and pre-election problems:
1) Congress, The Federal Election Commission (if it ever gets enough commissioners aboard to function) or the Justice Department could work with the states and authorize an extraordinary non-partisan effort to monitor the election process. It could include placing monitors inside post offices, polling places and the rooms where ballots are counted. There could be a special election monitor with oversight responsibilities. Perhaps it could be headed up by two former presidents, one from each party. They could create a special unit that will work with the states to spot-check vote counts as they are being counted, as a way to identify fraudulent activity. This has been done in other countries, often with US representatives present to assure the local electorate that the election process was fair.
2) The media could come also together to immediately support a coordinated watchdog process and imbed journalists in every aspect of the election, from poll watching to observing the counting process and the post office operations. Much like “pool” reporting from the White House or war zones or even for the gathering of election results in the past, this could be a pool effort — drawing journalists from many different media outlets — to monitor a national election in the weeks leading up to and after election day, with the results shared with all media. If we can get lawyers and others in to monitor the actual election process, why not have members of the media? It would open up the process to the public. Talk about transparency! There could be live video from post office processing spots, to polling places to counting rooms. The media representatives could spend the month prior to the election meeting with the people they will be observing to get a full understanding of the process in each state and county.
3) Similar combined efforts should be launched to monitor the flow of dis-information getting to our voters over social media. We should create extensive monitoring of the political messaging on social media, including misinformation designed to discourage participation in the election process. Again, in order to regain some trust in the results of these efforts, these efforts would need strong independent leadership and broad financial support from all sides. The end result would be to highlight the dis-information in real-time, and explain to the public how it was being used to driver behavior.
There are many other efforts in motion from each party to try to make this a successful election. We have never before faced the combination of the threat from within and massive external attacks on the electorate directly from foreign interests.
The result is an overwhelming challenge to trust in our institutions. We will have to rebuild that trust and there is no better time to start then now.
