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You probably play this mind game, perhaps routinely. Take an event or situation from somewhere and transplant it to another place. Then mentally compare the likely outcome there with the actual outcome. President Donald Trump’s desperate maneuvers to evade Joe Biden’s electoral victory certainly call for this game. And if you played it, you probably came up with some heartbreaking scenarios.
Put it in Nigeria, and you may have the post-election chaos of 1965 that eventually led to civil war. Put it in Kenya and you get the bloodshed that happened there in 2007/2008. Put it in most emerging democracies and what you get is the rigged re-election of an incumbent and the usual confusion that follows.
In the US, a peaceful transition is already underway. Trump has finally relented, even as he refuses to budge. After initially forbidding his staff from interacting with Biden in any way, he relented and allowed the transition to begin, even when, paradoxically, he swore he hadn’t relented. On January 20, Biden will be sworn in, albeit with less fanfare than usual. But that will not be the result of Trump’s attempted subversion, but the realities of a growing pandemic.
While Trump’s valiant attempt to stay in office failed, his maneuvers shed a lot of light on why headlines in our part of the world easily entrenched themselves. Those leaders are probably expressing solidarity with Trump, at least in the privacy of their thoughts. Certainly, they are ruining the day when the values and institutions of democracy are so established in their countries that such maneuvers will similarly fail.
In fact, the difference between the likely outcome in our mental game and reality in the US recalls an issue that has divided political scientists for the past half century. On the one hand, there are those who theorize that the strengthening of democratic institutions – such as the legislature, the judiciary, the press and civil society – is the main means of consolidating democracy. Let’s call this the structural perspective.
On the other side are those who insist that there can be no democracy without democrats. In other words, democracy cannot be consolidated in places where people lack democratic values such as a commitment to fair play, reciprocity, compromise, and the rule of law. Let’s call this the perspective of values.
One is tempted to say that what just happened in America vindicates the structuralists. But then a closer examination shows that the values argument may have played an even more fundamental role.
Throughout his tenure, Trump has made it clear that he is not well disposed towards the niceties of democracy. It vilified all its institutions: the press, the judiciary and even the legislature. He also made clear his envy of autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
It is no wonder then that during the campaigns, journalists repeatedly asked Trump if he would admit an electoral defeat. It is a question that would otherwise be out of place in a country where refusal to compromise has rarely occurred in centuries of democracy, and certainly not in our lifetime. Yet time and again Trump confirmed the unlikely premise of the question by replying, “It depends. We will see.”
When the election results then turned decisively in Biden’s favor, there were no surprises that Trump did everything he could to reverse it. First, he repeated an accusation he had made even before the first ballots were cast: that the election was rigged against him. He then summoned his followers to protest in his support. And thousands turned out in Washington to do exactly that.
He then filed a flood of lawsuits to challenge the decisive state results Biden won. He claimed that fraudulent voting and that mail ballots and extended counting were illegal. Trump wanted the courts to invalidate the accommodations that states made to address the pandemic requirement. He knew full well that mail-in ballots greatly favored Biden because Democrats, eager to defeat him, seized the first opportunity to vote. While ballots were read automatically on computers, ballots sent by mail had to be processed manually.
Unfortunately for Trump, the justices were able to see through the political machinations. Then, in state after state, judges ruled against him, often with a harsh reprimand for attempting to subvert the electoral process. One of the harshest rulings was that of a Pennsylvania federal judge, known for leaning toward Trump’s Republican Party ideology.
“This court has been presented with tense legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, without presenting in the operative complaint and without supporting evidence,” Judge Matthew Brann ruled on one of Trump’s cases. “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all voters in its sixth most populous state. Our people, laws and institutions demand more ”.
Trump’s next move was to directly pressure state officials to cast unfavorable ballots. In one case, one of his allies, a powerful Republican senator representing South Carolina, called the top election official in another state, Georgia, to pressure him to discard those ballots. Although he was a fellow Republican, the Georgia official rejected the senator and made the matter public. For him, the sanctity of the democratic process prevailed over loyalty to the party.
And then Trump’s ultimate and most dangerous move was attempting to manipulate ballots at the college level. As readers of this column are likely to know, presidents of the United States are not directly elected by popular vote. Rather, each state is assigned a number of “Electoral College” votes in rough proportion to its population. And in most cases, the winner of that state gets all the votes from the Electoral College. The president is formally elected when states send delegates to the Electoral College to cast allotted votes.
This is usually a formality, but Trump tried to manipulate it. His plan was to persuade Republican-controlled state legislators in the states he lost to send delegates who would vote for him against the rule. To press the case, he invited those Michigan lawmakers to the White House. Although two accepted the invitation, they returned to Michigan promising to remain faithful to the will of the electorate.
You must have noticed both structural and stock elements in this process. The structuralists would aim at the independence of the states, their electoral units and the judiciary. They would also note the transparency factor in the voting and counting processes, realities that make unfounded accusations difficult to sustain, even by a determined president.
But then, value theorists would note that all this would be meaningless without people committed to the principles of democracy. Republican judges, legislators and election officials stood firm against their party’s candidate.
Obviously, structures and values must work together to have a lasting and healthy democracy. Trump’s maneuvers did not scare anyone because there are enough of both factors in the United States.
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