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In the months leading up to Election Day in the United States, it was predicted that Donald Trump would not accept the results if he lost, question the legitimacy of voting by mail and try to declare a victory before all the votes were counted. So far, he’s done two out of three.
These predictions were made easier by taking Trump’s words at face value. Trump had falsely claimed that mail-in ballots would be intentionally sent to Democrats and not Republicans. He also spent months delegitimizing the vote-by-mail process, including trying to defund the United States Postal Service in an effort to derail Democrats, who were more likely to vote by mail.
Evan Vucci / AP
President Donald Trump speaks in the East Room of the White House in Washington.
At a White House press conference early in the morning on Nov. 4, Trump said he would go to the Supreme Court to stop the vote counting. Equally disturbing was his early false declaration of victory, and his incorrect claim to have won in states that had not yet been called up, such as Georgia and Pennsylvania.
The early declaration
While Trump’s maneuvers are rare in a liberal democracy, calling early elections is a hallmark of undemocratic regimes, and presidential regimes in particular. Like my own research, one of the notable trends in authoritarian regimes is that they have adopted democratic institutions in order to prolong their power while speaking lip-service to the international and national demand for “democracy.”
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International observers have made it more difficult for autocrats to commit outright fraud since the cold war ended. This has meant that autocrats have had to find ways to win elections without obviously stealing them or engaging in electoral malpractice rather than electoral fraud. In addition to the usual tricks of physically harming the opposition, controlling media narratives, and stacking election commissions with lackeys, authoritarian leaders are also rushing to declare victory in closed elections.
In the case of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was quick to declare himself the winner of the presidential elections in June 2018, even before all the votes were counted or the results ratified by the electoral commission. Erdogan represents one of the most obvious cases of aggrandizement of the executive and democratic backsliding, since the country has seen its civil liberties threatened and the judiciary politicized.
In 2013, when there was no full consensus that Venezuela was staunchly authoritarian, Hugo Chávez’s political heir, Nicolás Maduro, narrowly won the presidential election by less than two percentage points. Maduro was quick to declare victory, leaving the opposition in tears and demanding a recount. In 2018, Maduro “won” by a much larger margin, but again the opposition questioned the validity of the results.
Pedro Portal / AP
A pro-President Trump caravan travels through Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood.
Another example is Côte d’Ivoire, currently in the midst of a turbulent electoral cycle. An opposition boycott of the race led to the victory of the president, Alassane Ouattara, with 94% of the vote according to the provisional results announced on November 3.
In 2013, it was the former president of the Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, who controversially declared an early victory with 51% of the vote, despite previous results pointing to a 54% turnout for Ouattara, then rival. of the opposition. The discrepancy was due to the Gbagbo-backed Constitutional Council overturning the results in opposition strongholds. Violence ensued and eventually Gbagbo paid a price for this and was tried in the International Criminal Court, although he was later acquitted.
Mastering electoral manipulation
There have also been many cases of declared early electoral victories in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union. This is a region that has mastered electoral manipulation and the creation of false narratives about the level of support from presidential incumbents. In Belarus, for example, Alexander Lukashenko has tended to declare victory by a wide margin, but protests broke out in August in 2020, disputing the validity of the result.
The rulers of other places have also refused to accept the election results. In the case of the Gambia, leader Yahya Jammeh did not back down after narrowly losing the presidential election in December 2016 to Adama Barrow, citing “anomalies.” Jammeh then appealed to the country’s supreme court to have the results annulled and sent armed soldiers to take control of the electoral commission. Jammeh only surrendered after Nigeria, Senegal and Ghana deployed troops.
Some observers of American politics are bracing for the post-2020 election riots. Given that Trump gained an impressive early lead in some key states due to in-person voting being counted first, the election can be contested no matter who be the winner.
Part of the problem is Trump’s refusal to support the counting of all votes, something that is antithetical to democracy. Given that presidential elections are often emotional and highly important matters, the delegitimization of the counting process puts the United States at risk of greater instability in the coming weeks and of deeper questions about the strength of its democracy in the face of a leader who openly defies democratic norms. and processes.
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Natasha Lindstaedt is a professor in the Department of Government, at the University of Essex
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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
